There’s something truly haunting about Cedar Hill Cemetery in Covington, VA

Covington Virginian, July 2, 1930.

With just a couple of weeks to go before Haunted Virginia Cemeteries is released, I find myself both counting down the days and diving even deeper into the stories that inspired it.

This project has never just been about ghost tales, though there are plenty of those to share. This research has been about honoring memory, tracing forgotten histories, and paying attention to the places where the veil between worlds feels just a little thinner.

On Wednesday morning, I’ll be leading a Meandering Among the Markers writing event in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. We’ll be walking, talking, and listening closely to the quiet echoes of the past. And later this week, a few friends and I are preparing for a séance. These are the ways I stay close to the material, and how I continue to be reminded that these stories don’t always stay on the page.


One site that continues to haunt me is Cedar Hill Cemetery in Covington, nestled in the Alleghany Highlands. With more than 10,000 burials stretching back to 1816, the cemetery is a striking landscape of stone and shadow. But it’s more than just historic. Cedar Hill pulses with the kind of eerie energy that makes even skeptics like me hesitate. Strange lights have been reported there for nearly a century. In a 1930 article from Covington Virginian, witnesses described blue flames flickering over a single plot, vanishing when anyone tried to get close. Others reported seeing them on the same night, describing them as ghostly, bluish will-o’-the-wisps. No source was ever found. No earthly explanation ever confirmed. And yet, they’re said to appear still.

Folklore has long warned us about blue fire. In European traditions, it’s often a sign of spirits or hidden treasure. Bram Stoker’s Dracula featured them, too, glowing mysteriously in the Carpathians. In Cedar Hill, they may just signal the presence of a soul that never found peace.

And then there’s the legend about the statue, a marble woman forever frozen mid-step, said to represent a young bride who died tragically on her wedding day. According to local legend, she fell down the church steps and broke her neck. Her grieving husband commissioned the statue in her image, but visitors claim she mourns still. Some even say the statue bleeds but only on Halloween. Journalists have gone out to witness it. None have succeeded. But the stories persist.

Nearby lies another grave, and another story, one that chills me every time I think about it. A young mother buried in 1848, was thought to have died of grief after losing her child. When the cemetery moved her grave decades later, workers discovered her remains face down, one hand raised near her head. It’s believed she had been in a coma, mistaken for dead, and awoke after burial. Her final moments must have been pure terror. Some say her spirit still lingers, her anguish imprinted in the ground itself.

Cedar Hill is not a place you simply visit. It’s a place that lingers with you. Those who walk among the graves at Cedar Hill don’t always leave unchanged. 

Sometimes, they carry a little of the place with them.