HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
The Vermont 'grave with a window,' built by a doctor who feared being buried alive
Evergreen Cemetery, Town Hill Rd, New Haven, VT 05472
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public cemetery; visit during daylight and respect the grounds
Access
Limited Access
Grass cemetery on a low hillside off Town Hill Road; the grave mound is set back from the entrance
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1893 · Victorian fear of premature burial (taphephobia) · Unusual 19th-century burial engineering · New England roadside curiosity
Timothy Clark Smith was born in 1821 and studied at Middlebury College before pursuing a career in medicine. He worked variously as a teacher and a clerk, served abroad in the United States consular service, and practiced as a physician. Like many people of the nineteenth century, he carried a real fear of premature burial, a worry sharpened by an era when the line between deep unconsciousness and death could be hard for doctors to read.
When Smith died on February 25, 1893, he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery on Town Hill Road in New Haven, south of the village. His grave was built to address his fear directly. The coffin sits at the bottom of a chamber, and a cement tube roughly six feet long rises from above his face to a 14-inch square plate-glass window set flush with the surface of a low turf mound. Accounts of the burial also describe a bell placed within reach so that he could signal for help if he woke.
The arrangement was meant to let anyone passing check that no mistake had been made. More than a century later the window remains, though condensation and mineral buildup have clouded the glass until almost nothing can be seen through it. The grave has become a documented roadside curiosity, drawing visitors who come to read the story of a doctor who would not be talked out of his caution.
Sources
Most of the lore attached to the grave is really the story of the burial. Visitors repeat the central image, a sheet of glass set into the ground with a tube running down to Dr. Smith's face, and the detail of a bell left in the coffin so that he could raise an alarm if he were buried alive and woke in the dark. The design reflects a genuine nineteenth-century anxiety; patents for safety coffins fitted with bells, air tubes and signal flags were filed across Europe and America during the same decades.
The site reads as eerie chiefly because of what the window implies. People who hike up to the mound describe leaning over the small pane and finding only their own reflection and a film of mold, the view down the shaft long since lost. There are no widely documented apparition reports here. The grave endures as a place where a private fear was made permanent and public, and where the question it was built to answer, whether the man below was truly gone, can no longer be checked through the clouded glass.
Notable Entities
Walk the public grounds of Evergreen Cemetery to find the turf-covered mound and the small glass plate set at ground level. A cement tube runs down from the window to the doctor's coffin, the centerpiece of one of New England's stranger Victorian burials. The pane has fogged with age, so most visitors see little beyond the glass itself.
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