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Abel Blood - Pine Hill Cemetery

Nov 4th, 1999 | By Fiona Broome | Category: Nashua and vicinity

row of 18th century headstones
“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. We’ve researched his personal history and found no obvious reason for him to haunt the cemetery. In the history books, there are no references that suggest the occult connections mentioned in local legends. His genealogy and the town’s history suggest that he was a very Christian man and lived a good, law-abiding life.It’s possible that he haunts the cemetery… but, in our experience and from our research, it’s unlikely.However, according to local legends, Mr. Blood’s headstone changes after dark. The finger on the stone that points heavenward during the daylight hours, moves. When the ghosts walk at night, the finger on the stone points towards the ground.

In fact, one of our Hollow Hill investigators led us to this cemetery, to see it in the daylight. He had been there once before, late one Halloween night, and he’d seen the famous headstone.

His response in the daylight was amazement, because he’d believed that Abel’s finger always pointed downward.

abel blood headstone normal abel blood stone digitally altered
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 old 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.

The photo below was taken at dusk. It 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. Our photographer’s report from 11 Oct 1999:

The photo was taken at 6:30 pm. It was dusk and the sun had just set, behind me, but it was still light enough not to need a flash camera.

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, or 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.

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