Ghosts! - The Spirits of the Dead in Blood Cemetery, Hollis, NH

"Blood Cemetery" is the local name for Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis, NH, referring to the ghost of Abel Blood, which supposedly haunts that graveyard.

Abel Blood was buried there in 1867; his wife Betsy is with him. At night, people say that his headstone changes. The finger, pointing heavenward during the daylight hours, points towards the ground.

In fact, a Hollow Hill investigator took a friend to the cemetery, to see it in the daylight. This friend had been there once before, with high school friends late one Halloween night. His response in the daylight was amazement, because he'd believed that Abel's finger always pointed downward.

This shows a simulation of
what happens at Abel Blood's headstone.
(Illustration only. NOT a real photo.)

Note: The finger on the headstone was actually chipped off years ago. If you visit the cemetery, the outline of where the finger was--and part of the base--remains. However, this is o-l-d vandalism. You can tell by the lichen on the chipped-off area.

To see a color photo (13K) of Abel Blood's headstone, click here.

A Hollow Hill photographer visited the cemetery twice on 11 Oct 1999, taking a few photos for this website, not to capture anomalies. She took 20 photos during the day and later at dusk, with a Kodak Advantix AF camera, using Fuji Advanced film, 200 ASA.

During the brightest sunlight, she also took a full roll of Kodak 400 ASA black-and-white film, using an Olympus AF-1 Twin camera. Both cameras are point-and-shoot, with flashes.

The photo below has a clear anomaly in it: an orb towards the upper left corner of the photo. (click on the photo to see a larger, 16K version)

You can more clearly see the orb in the color-altered photo (6K, with an arrow pointing to the orb) here, or in the Monet-like color-enhanced photo (12K) we created for fun, here.

The photo was taken at 6:30 pm on 11 Oct 99. It was dusk and the sun had just set, behind me. The cemetery is surrounded by farmland, currently an almost fully-harvested field of pumpkins. There was nothing in the area to reflect the scant remaining light of the day, to create a reflection or lens flare.

This photo shows the oldest gravestones in the cemetery, mostly from the late 18th century and early 19th. The photographer saw no orbs in real life, and only took the photos as an afterthought when something "felt odd" among those gravestones.

Click here to see other odd photos from that day
Or skip ahead to the next "orb" ghost photo from Blood Cemetery