Columbia's 1730 Old Brick Burial Yard
111 Cherry Street, Columbia, PA 17512
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access during daylight hours. Columbia's Haunted Lantern Tour, which includes the cemetery, is ticketed seasonally in October.
Access
Limited Access
Sloping hillside cemetery with grass and dirt paths
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1730 · Oldest Burial Ground in Columbia PA · Susanna Wright Founding · 1863 Bridge Burners Buried · 680 Veterans Across Nine Wars
The cemetery at the heart of Mount Bethel began in 1730 as a private burial ground established by Susanna Wright, the daughter of John Wright, founder of the Susquehanna River crossing known as Wright's Ferry. Susanna Wright was a physician, poet, multilingual scholar, and silk-cultivation pioneer, one of the most accomplished women of colonial Pennsylvania. The original section of the cemetery, now called the Old Brick Burial Yard, holds the earliest graves on the site.
Over the following centuries the cemetery expanded down the slope toward Columbia's town center and accumulated more than 10,000 burials. The cemetery currently administers itself as a nonprofit and remains in active use.
Notable burials at Mount Bethel include Robert Barber, the first sheriff of Lancaster County; Lloyd Mifflin, the 19th-century sonneteer and landscape painter; and Dr. Frederick Kuhn, a Revolutionary War surgeon. The cemetery holds more than 680 American military veterans representing nine wars beginning with the Revolutionary War.
Four of the five men who burned the Columbia-Wrightsville covered bridge on June 28, 1863 are buried in scattered locations at Mount Bethel. The bridge burning was a critical Gettysburg-campaign engagement: Pennsylvania militia and Columbia townsmen ignited the longest covered bridge in the world to prevent Confederate Brigadier General John B. Gordon's advancing brigade from crossing the Susquehanna River into Lancaster County and the Philadelphia approaches. The Confederate column turned west and contributed to the Confederate concentration at Gettysburg three days later.
Mount Bethel hosts Columbia's Haunted Lantern Tour each October, a community-funded theatrical walking tour that interprets the cemetery's documented history alongside Columbia town folklore.
Sources
Mount Bethel Cemetery's paranormal tradition is shaped more by Columbia's annual Haunted Lantern Tour than by independent eyewitness accounts. The tour, founded by Columbia residents to fund cemetery preservation, has built a repertoire of theatrical vignettes drawn from real Columbia history — the Gettysburg-campaign bridge burners, individual Civil War widows, the long-running silk-cultivation experiments of Susanna Wright. The actors costume and station themselves at relevant graves.
Tour-night accounts include reports of figures observed just outside the lantern light, occasionally identified by audience members as not part of the cast. Tour leadership has discussed these accounts in regional newspaper interviews in archival, oral-history terms rather than promoting the cemetery as paranormally active.
Day-to-day paranormal reports at Mount Bethel are modest. The Old Brick Burial Yard section produces occasional accounts of cold spots and the sense of being watched, both common to old colonial-era cemeteries. The military section generates occasional reports of distant drumming on quiet evenings, attributed by visitors to the cemetery's Revolutionary-War and Civil-War occupants.
The cemetery does not host paranormal investigations outside the seasonal lantern tour. The Mount Bethel Cemetery Association and Columbia's Haunted Lantern Tour both emphasize historical preservation as their primary mission.
Notable Entities
Walk the oldest continuously used burial ground in Columbia, Pennsylvania, dating from 1730. The Old Brick Burial Yard was designated by Susanna Wright, daughter of Wright's Ferry founder John Wright. More than 10,000 burials include over 680 veterans from nine American wars.
A seasonal October walking tour through historic Columbia, including the cemetery, with costumed actors portraying historical figures including the four bridge-burners of June 28, 1863 whose action prevented Confederate troops from crossing the Susquehanna and rerouted them toward Gettysburg.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Lancaster, PA
Lancaster Cemetery is a 20-acre nonprofit Victorian-era cemetery established in 1846-1847 on East Lemon Street in Lancaster city. It is the burial place of Civil War Union Major General John Fulton Reynolds, killed at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, and of early-twentieth-century modernist painter Charles Demuth, who died at his Lancaster home on October 23, 1935. The cemetery's most famous monument, the six-foot-five-inch granite statue of Augusta Bitner, stands in the northeast corner.
Frederick, MD
Mount Olivet Cemetery was established in 1852 as Frederick's garden cemetery, replacing crowded church burial grounds in town. It is the burial place of Francis Scott Key (author of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'), Barbara Fritchie, Maryland's first governor Thomas Johnson, and 408 unknown Confederate soldiers reinterred from area battlefields. The Key monument was dedicated in 1898 and the Confederate monument in 1881.
Asheville, NC
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