Pine Hill Cemetery (Blood Cemetery)

Local tradition holds that Pine Hill Cemetery, better known regionally as Blood Cemetery, supports two intertwined strands of folklore. The first concerns a small figure sometimes reported along Pine Hill Road outside the cemetery, said to flag down passing vehicles for help and to vanish when drivers pull over. The narrative is consistent with the wider American vanishing-hitchhiker family of road-legend tropes and has no documented historical event behind it. The Shadowlands entry that fed this revival entry attaches a more dramatic backstory of a home invasion and a fleeing child shot in the road, but no New Hampshire newspaper archive or town-history record accessed during research substantiates that account; it should be treated as folklore.

The second strand concerns the Abel Blood marker itself. The marker's carved hand pointed upward, an iconographically common nineteenth-century funerary symbol indicating the deceased's hoped-for direction. The folklore says the hand rotates downward after dark. The original marker was repeatedly vandalized and is no longer at the site; recent replacement markers have not reproduced the original carving in detail. Visitors have also reported intermittent camera and battery problems within the cemetery gates, an unexpected drop in temperature near the Blood plot, and the muted sound of footsteps along the inside of the perimeter wall.

The cemetery has been at the center of long-running tension between dark-tourism interest and the town's responsibility for an active burial ground. Hollis closes the cemetery at dusk, monitors the site around Halloween, and enforces no-trespassing rules. Visitors interested in the lore should come in daylight, treat the burial ground with respect, and not approach surviving family markers.