Forest Park Cemetary, New York

What Was That?
Is the creep factor of Forest Park Cemetery about active spooks or overactive imaginations?

In late summer 2002, an amateur photographer was driving down Pinewoods Avenue in Brunswick when he saw a black iron gateway anchored by granite columns.


Assuming it was the entrance to an old estate or cemetery, he pulled over and walked around the spiked fence in search of statuary to take pictures of.
Making his way in was slow going: The deserted grounds were choked by tree branches and dense bramble.
At every step, thorny vines wrapped around his legs with unnatural tenacity.

What appeared to be an ornate mausoleum lay just ahead, so he pushed onward.
The tomb was in ruins, however, with rusted iron arches where the roof used to be.
And the interior was marred by the talismans of satanic teen rituals: an upside-down cross painted on a wall, beer cans and candle stubs strewn among broken slabs of marble. Despite the warm weather, the air within was cold and still.





Behind the tomb he spotted a seraphim statue, but the angel’s neck ended in a jagged stump—she had been decapitated.
The delicate carving of her flowing gown and feathered wings only made the beheading more disturbing.
He began to feel that someone was watching him. And then he heard something move in the underbrush, something big.

Decidedly creeped out, he made a hasty exit, with hands held in front of his face to avoid being gouged by twigs.
“The Blair Witch woods have nothing on this place,” he remembers thinking.
Little did the unwary shutterbug know that he had just paid a visit to notorious Forest Park Cemetery, considered to be one of the most haunted sites in the state and, if local folklore is to be believed, a gateway to hell.

It wasn’t always so. Forest Park, as the name implies, was intended to be a parklike “garden of remembrance,” complete with fountains, footpaths and a glass pavilion.


Construction began in 1897 and included the first above-ground receiving tomb in the country. Large enough to hold 122 corpses over the winter, the tomb had a domed skylight, a copper finial, and a $50,000 price tag.
A cemetery chapel was in the works, but it was not to be: Exorbitant costs halted construction in 1900.
A proposed trolley from Troy to Brunswick fell through, and plot sales faltered
In an era when visiting the dearly departed was a weekly activity, area residents preferred more convenient locales for their final resting places.







By 1913, Forest Park was bankrupt.
A second incorporation in the 1930s, by out-of-town investors, also went belly-up, and the site was abandoned.
For many years a solitary old man tended to the barely hallowed grounds, but after he died, nature took over with a vengeance.
What the photographer didn’t see, on account of wildly overgrown five-leaf ivy, was an even more demonic desecration. Behind the headless angel, another stone seraphim, this one demurely seated with a laurel wreath, also had her head hacked off—along with a forearm and other parts of her anatomy.
The wreath seems to hover eerily before her, held by a disembodied hand.
The story goes that the first angel was beheaded by a crazed visitor who was convinced that she was watching his every move, and that the vandalism of the second angel was meant to outdo the depravity of the first.

With the advent of the automobile, the secluded cemetery became a popular parking spot, and rumors began to spread of a headless angel that bled at the neck.
An influx of thrill seekers and ghost hunters followed, and reports were circulated of other paranormal events, such as a large, dark apparition hanging about the tomb and leaping away with superhuman agility at the approach of the living.
A child’s screams were heard in broad daylight.
By the 1970s, the Troy Public Library was regularly getting requests for a copy of a Life magazine article titled “The 10 Scariest Places in America,” with Forest Park Cemetery listed at No. 3. Generations of local college students graduated with bravura tales of having spent the night in the presence of the Bleeding Headless Angel.

A popular radio host organized a nighttime ghost tour for 65 listeners. And with the arrival of the Internet, the infamy of Forest Park caught on like Web-site wildfire.
But is any of it true? Well, like most urban legends, it is and it isn’t.
“That poor angel is just leaking away down there,” says Sharon Zankel with cheerful sarcasm. Zankel, a board member of the Brunswick Historical Society and the town historian, is well acquainted with the cemetery’s reputation.
In fact, she receives calls about it all year long, and from as far away as California.

There isn’t a spooky rumor she hasn’t heard, and she has debriefed many a caller who was 100-percent certain of the frightening thing they’d witnessed in the cemetery. “People see what they want to see,” she explains.
But isn’t it possible that where there’s smoke, there’s fire?
A longtime resident of a nearby neighborhood, Zankel has conducted her own investigations, and deftly deflects all inquiries. For starters, that Life magazine article, to her knowledge, does not exist.
And according to a biologist Zankel met on the grounds, the “blood” on the angels is produced by a kind of moss that in humid weather will turn red if it’s rubbed—a fact that was authenticated by a botanist.
From a patch of lichen, it seems, a fright tale was born.

But what about the leaping apparition, another persistent phenomenon?
“I’ve seen deer in there,” Zankel offers helpfully. Fair enough. But what about the screaming child? “Have you ever heard a wild turkey?” she asks in reply, and relates how on her very first foray into the cemetery, she and a cleanup crew of three friends were stopped in their tracks by a bloodcurdling shriek, followed by what sounded like a galloping horse heading straight for them. The specter, they realized with some embarrassment, was a startled turkey taking flight.

Alrighty then. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. . . .

“It’s gloomy, but not scary,” Zankel insists, and indeed, a recent visit confirmed that Forest Park is no longer the forbidding landscape it was a year ago.
Dead trees that once loomed ominously are now reduced to neat piles of firewood, the thorny underbrush is cleared out, and the evil graffiti has been scrubbed almost to invisibility. Toppled tombstones and dying poplars are the only remainders of its malevolent atmosphere.
And that otherworldly chill in the roofless tomb?
It’s just your imagination.
Or is it?

When informed that the watcher in the woods was undoubtedly a curious deer, the photographer vehemently disagrees. “That’s a creepy place,” he shoots back.
“I wouldn’t go in there after dark for anything.”

Original Story Credit Belongs To Ann Morrow,

MetroLand News Weekly, Albany, New York

Images Collected From Various Sites

A Personal Footnote:

Knowing that after one reads this article a sense

of curiousity about this place is normal....

I have been there, on a few occasions in my youth

and without question a feeling of evil surrounds

areas of this property.

On every visit, usually at night, I left abruptly

for whatever reason.. shadows, sounds or just

a feeling of being watched..

it's been years since I have been there...and I

doubt I would go back at night, but a friendly

warning to the adventurers... be prepared for

this, it's no joke.. even those who do not

perceive evil as easily as others do...feel this presence

especially inside the Vault ruin itself..

it's also private property... and probably patrolled

by Police on occasion..

Hope you enjoyed the 2 anchor stories re-published

by myself and Nicole... keep checking back for more...

we are always looking for quality stories.

GHOSTRIDER