New Bern's 1800 Burial Ground with the Coquina Weeping Arch
780 Queen St, New Bern, NC 28560
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access to municipal cemetery. Some New Bern ghost tours include the cemetery as a stop.
Access
Limited Access
Live-oak shaded grounds with sandy soil, original 19th-century markers, and the weeping coquina arch at the Queen Street entrance
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1800 · National Register of Historic Places · 1854 Weeping Arch · Caleb Bradham (Pepsi-Cola Inventor) Burial Site · Victorian Garden Cemetery
New Bern's Yellow Fever epidemic of 1798-99 filled the existing Christ Episcopal churchyard. In 1800, the church acquired five lots in the Dryborough neighborhood along Queen Street for additional burial space. As the city grew through the 19th century, this ground in turn approached capacity, and in 1853 Christ Episcopal transferred control of the cemetery to the City of New Bern.
The city moved quickly to transform what had been a simple municipal burying ground into a Victorian-era garden cemetery, then the height of mortuary fashion. The cemetery was renamed Cedar Grove. Live oaks were planted along the principal axes. New plots were laid out with the broader carriage drives and family-plot arrangements that the rural-cemetery movement, originating in the 1830s at Mount Auburn outside Boston, had popularized across the United States.
The crowning element of the redesign was the Weeping Arch — a triple-arched stone gateway facing Queen Street, completed in 1854 of locally quarried coquina from the New Bern area. Coquina is a soft sedimentary limestone of compressed shell fragments; its open pore structure absorbs and releases water with shifting humidity. Within months of the arch's completion, visitors began to notice small drops of water falling from the underside of the arches, particularly during funeral processions when the cemetery gates were open and the weather was humid.
Notable interments include Caleb Davis Bradham (1867-1934), the New Bern pharmacist who invented Pepsi-Cola in 1893 at his drugstore on Pollock and Middle Streets, along with multiple Confederate veterans, 19th-century North Carolina congressmen, and members of New Bern's antebellum and Reconstruction-era civic leadership. The cemetery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The mortuary statuary — angels, mourners, draped urns, and Victorian funerary symbolism — is among the most-cited collections in the state.
Sources
The Weeping Arch is the cemetery's defining folkloric feature. Soon after its 1854 completion, New Bern residents began to observe water droplets falling from the underside of the coquina arches, particularly during the warm and humid coastal summers. Funeral parties processing through the arch on their way to the burial ground reported the same phenomenon. Local tradition gradually developed the narrative that the arch was weeping in mourning for the dead, and that any visitor touched by a drop while passing through would be the next to die.
The underlying mechanism is well-understood by stone conservators: coquina's open pore structure absorbs ambient humidity and releases it as condensation. The cemetery's location near the Trent River and the surrounding Lowcountry humidity produce sustained conditions for the effect. New Bern public radio and historical society material acknowledge the geological explanation while noting that the folk tradition has remained durable across more than a century and a half.
Beyond the arch, the cemetery generates the usual range of Victorian-cemetery reports — apparitions among the statuary at dusk, cold spots near specific markers, the sense of being watched along the main carriage drive. The cemetery has appeared in regional television ghost programming, and it is a regular stop on multiple New Bern ghost-tour itineraries. None of these accounts has been formally documented by the city or by Christ Episcopal Church; they circulate primarily through tour-operator material and visitor testimony.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk under the 1854 Weeping Arch — a triple-arched gateway built of locally quarried coquina that drips water on visitors during humid weather, generating the folk tradition that a drop on a visitor marks the next to die. Notable burials include Caleb Bradham, the New Bern pharmacist who invented Pepsi-Cola, and multiple Confederate veterans and 19th-century congressmen.
Cedar Grove Cemetery is a regular stop on multiple New Bern ghost-tour itineraries. Guides cover the Weeping Arch folklore, the cemetery's Victorian statuary, and the city's documented Yellow Fever and Civil War history.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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