These days, much of the history of the Americas before Europeans arrived has been lost or forgotten. This is a shame because the great civilizations of Central America hold stories as epic and intriguing as those of Ancient Greece and Rome. Take the cities of Tikal and Calakmul, which spent four centuries locked in a titanic struggle with twists and turns straight out of Game of Thrones.

10The Rise Of Tikal

The classic Mayan civilization stretched from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, and northern Honduras. This was difficult terrain, prone to drought and soil erosion. Yet here the Maya built one of the great civilizations of ancient America, mastering writing and mathematics. (They arguably invented zero before anyone else).

Unlike the Aztecs or Toltecs, the Maya were never united in one empire. Instead, they formed a squabbling network of city-states, not unlike ancient Greece. Warfare was limited and somewhat ceremonial. Trade was extensive.

The cities of Calakmul and Tikal grew particularly wealthy. Both dominated large areas of fertile territory and had access to chert mines. They traded in jade, obsidian, feathers, and other tropical luxuries, and their priests and merchants grew rich on the profits. During the reign of King Chak Tok Ich’aak, Tikal surpassed Calakmul and reached new heights of splendor and prestige.

Yet Chak Tok Ich’aak’s success was also at the root of his downfall. Even as Tikal’s palaces and monuments rose more splendid than ever before, the city’s wealth attracted attention from far beyond the Mayan lands. In the distant highlands of central Mexico, powers vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded Tikal with envious eyes and slowly drew up plans against it.

9The Invasion

Over 1,000 kilometers (600 mi) from Tikal in the Valley of Mexico near what is now Mexico City, an immense and mysterious city rises. We still don’t know who built it or how to read their language. We don’t even know its real name. The Aztecs, who wandered awed through the ruins a millennium later, dubbed it Teotihuacan, “the place where men become gods.”

It’s understandable that the Aztecs were impressed because Teotihuacan was huge. Its population was well over 100,000, making it easily the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time. Its monuments were gargantuan: The Pyramid of the Sun is one of the largest ever built, and the Pyramid of the Moon is only slightly smaller. The Street of the Dead runs for 2.5 kilometers (1.5 mi) between the main temples. Its warriors roamed far and wide, distinguished by their unusual shell goggles and the obsidian mirrors strapped to their backs.

Immigrants from all over Central America flocked to Teotihuacan, turning it into a melting pot of different cultures and languages. From atop the pyramids, a priestly class occasionally carried out human sacrifices. The city’s political structure remains subject to debate, but by the AD 370s, it seems to have been under the control of a powerful figure known as Spearthrower Owl. In 378, he watched as his army marched out of Teotihuacan and headed east for Tikal.

8‘Fire Is Born’

Spearthrower Owl didn’t accompany the army himself. Instead, it was commanded by a general the Maya called Siyaj K’ak’ (“Fire Is Born”). They also dubbed him “Ochk’in Kaloomte” (“Lord of the West”), reflecting his origins in Teotihuacan. Mayan cities quailed as his army passed, and at least four of them seem to have recorded the event in murals depicting elaborately costumed and heavily armed Teotihuacano warriors. They easily stand out compared to the Maya, who are depicted in simple breechcloths and headdresses.

In January 378, Siyaj K’ak’ appeared in Waka’, a town just west of Tikal. Exactly eight days later on January 14 (8.17.1.4.12 on the Mayan calendar), he arrived in Tikal. In their helmets and goggles, the warlike Teotihuacanos must have been a fearsome sight and Chak Tok Ich’aak was apparently unable to mount any meaningful resistance. Siyaj K’ak’ forced his way into the palace that very same day, and King Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water” of the Mayan afterlife. We can assume that he was either quietly murdered or encouraged to commit suicide.

Siyaj K’ak’ presumably had the dead king’s family murdered as well. (They certainly disappear from the historical record immediately afterward). His soldiers also broke or damaged all of Tikal’s preconquest monuments and inscriptions. A year after the invasion, Spearthrower Owl’s son came down from Teotihuacan and was crowned the new king of Tikal.

7Building An Empire

While Spearthrower Owl’s son sat on the throne, Siyaj K’ak’ continued to expand his new empire. Shortly after the conquest of Tikal, the city of Uaxactun seems to have been overrun and made part of the Tikal kingdom. Stelae in the city depict heavily armed Teotihuacan warriors, and historians believe these show Siyaj K’ak’ conquering the city. Archaeologists found five murdered noble women and children buried beneath one of the stelae—the slaughtered family of Uaxactun’s last king.

In 393, Siyaj K’ak’ marched into Rio Azul, a city in what is now Guatemala. Clearly, the Maya remained no match for his goggled warriors. An altar depicts the sacrifice of eight members of the city’s old ruling class, and Rio Azul became subject to Tikal. This was a huge victory since Rio Azul lay on the River Hondo, a crucial trade route to the Caribbean coast. The city’s conquest secured this route and allowed Tikal to suck trade away from rival cities like Calakmul.

At some point, Siyak K’ak’ also seems to have installed a new ruling family in the famed Mayan city of Palenque. As a new Mayan calendar cycle approached (the year 9.0.0.0.0 was in 435 AD), it seemed that Teotihuacano-Tikal was poised to dominate the entire Mayan world.

6Tikal Consolidates Power

Spearthrower Owl’s son died in AD 411, and Siyaj K’ak’ presumably passed away a few years earlier. The new king of Tikal was Spearthrower Owl’s grandson, Siyaj Chan K’awiil II, who tried to consolidate the new kingdom by appealing to his Mayan subjects. His monuments and murals depict him in Mayan dress and emphasize his Mayan mother. Even his name was taken from an earlier Mayan ruler of Tikal rather than his Teotihuacano ancestors.

But that doesn’t mean he tried to hide his central Mexican roots. While Siyaj Chan K’awiil had himself depicted in Mayan costume, he kept Spearthrower Owl’s glyph on his crown. In several monuments, Siyaj Chan K’awiil sits in Mayan dress while the spirit of his father looks on wearing full Teotihuacan military gear. This must have been an effective propaganda campaign: “I’m one of you,” the monuments declared, “but remember the power I have behind me.”

Meanwhile, “New Tikal” continued to expand. In 426, Siyaj Chan K’awiil raised a warrior known as K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ to the rank of king and sent him to seize the city of Copan in what is now Honduras. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ also conquered the city of Quirigua, giving the Tikal-Copan entity control of the entire Motagua Valley. Under Siyaj Chan K’awiil’s immediate successors, Tikal continued to expand and consolidate its dominant position. And it seemed the other Mayan cities could only look on in fear and jealousy.

5The Star War

Today, the temples of Calakmul rise like icebergs out of the immense jungles of Campeche. But in its heyday, the city ruled one of the largest and most powerful Mayan kingdoms. It was the home of the Kaan dynasty, a particularly long-lasting and resourceful family of priest-kings who had relocated to Calakmul after their ancient power base at El Mirador went into decline.

After the Teotihuacanos arrived, the Kaan watched helplessly as they were eclipsed by the rising power of Tikal. (The conquest of Rio Azul was a clear attempt to cut Calakmul out of the rich Caribbean trade routes). But as time passed, the Maya began to master central Mexican weapons like the spear-thrower and Tikal’s warriors began to lose their mystique.

But Tikal remained too large and powerful for Calakmul to challenge head-on. So a Kaan ruler known as Sky Witness decided to outflank it instead. Doubtless appealing to Mayan solidarity and jealousy of the Teotihuacanos, Sky Witness constructed a delicate alliance of Mayan cities surrounding Tikal. The noose was complete by 556 when Tikal’s most powerful vassal, the huge city of Caracol, betrayed it to join the alliance. Between Calakmul in the north and Caracol in the south, Tikal was caught in a pincer.

After years of strangling Tikal, Sky Witness decided to finish it. In 562, Calakmul and Caracol launched a “Star War.” This was basically the Mayan equivalent of total war: The aim was to completely crush the opposing state. Their combined armies overran Tikal, defaced its monuments, and ritually sacrificed its king. It was a huge victory. But things weren’t over yet.

4The Wrath Of Kaan

The Kaan were unimaginably ancient and power-hungry. From the great city of El Mirador, they had been at the forefront of the preclassic period of Mayan history, and now Calakmul looked set to dominate the classic period. After defeating Tikal in 562, they installed a puppet king and an onerous peace agreement. For the next century, no new monuments were permitted in Tikal and much of the city’s wealth was siphoned off to Calakmul.

Shortly afterward, the Kaan destroyed Rio Azul, cementing their control of the Rio Hondo trade. They also probably attacked Copan, whose monuments were destroyed or defaced during this period. The Kaan ruler Scroll Serpent lead a huge expedition to distant Palenque where he executed the king, a descendant of the ruler put in place by Siyaj K’ak’ all those years ago. No challenge to Sky Witness’s alliance was allowed. When the city of Naranjo tried to leave the alliance to attack Caracol, the Kaan ransacked it and tortured its king to death.

But Tikal’s size and resources meant it remained a potential threat, and the Kaan watched it like a hawk for any sign of defiance. In 629, Tikal tried to found a new city at Dos Pilas. In response, the Kaan invaded and forced the ruler of Dos Pilas (the king of Tikal’s own brother) to become a vassal of Calakmul instead. But they were never able to fully destroy Tikal, which remained a sleeping giant waiting to be awakened.

3Tikal Turns The Tide

In 682, a new king rose to the throne in Tikal. Jasaw Chan K’awiil was possessed by an iron determination to restore Tikal’s power. As a child, he had seen his father humiliated by Calakmul and Dos Pilas. But he also sensed that the Calakmul alliance was weakening. As soon as he took the throne, he began work on giant monuments and inscriptions, the first in Tikal for over a century.

Tikal’s situation was precarious: The city was still surrounded by the great ring of the Calakmul alliance, including El Peru in the west, Naranjo in the east, Dos Pilas and Caracol in the south, and Masaal and Calakmul in the north. Faced with this formidable league, Jasaw Chan K’awiil decided on a bold roll of the dice. Bypassing the smaller cities, he launched a surprise attack on Calakmul itself. In 695, his army “brought down the flint and shield” of Calakmul and won a dramatic victory.

Jasaw returned to Tikal covered in glory and held a great triumph on the anniversary of Spearthrower Owl’s death. A carving of the event from Tikal’s royal palace shows Jasaw bedecked in full Teotihuacan military gear, looming triumphantly over an imprisoned Kaan lord being prepared for sacrifice.

With Calakmul on the back foot, Tikal’s rulers set about dismantling the alliance that hemmed them in. Jasaw himself subdued Masaal in the north while his son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil, defeated El Peru and Naranjo in a single year-long campaign. Yik’in Chan K’awiil also launched another attack on Calakmul itself, capturing and sacrificing the Kaan ruler.

However, Dos Pilas in the south remained stubbornly defiant, defeating a Tikal invasion force in 705. That must have particularly hurt because Dos Pilas was still run by a distant branch of Tikal’s ruling family.

2A Tropical Cold War

With the alliance broken, Calakmul watched jealously as Tikal’s wealth and power grew. But neither city was ever able to completely destroy the other. This period of Mayan history has been compared to the Cold War, with the two superpowers warily watching each other and engaging in numerous skirmishes and proxy wars.

For example, Tikal had been allied with Copan since it was conquered by K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (see entry 6). K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ had also conquered the city of Quirigua and made it a vassal of Copan. But in 738, the Kaan encouraged Quirigua to revolt. With support from Calakmul, the Quiriguans seized and decapitated Copan’s king, severely weakening Tikal’s most important ally.

Such proxy wars became increasingly common as Tikal and Calakmul repeatedly invaded neighboring cities to put friendly rulers on the throne. Without confronting each other directly, their fortunes ebbed and flowed and the records of neighboring cities are full of nervous mentions of the two titans. Teotihuacan had long since declined, and Spearthrower Owl was forgotten in the Valley of Mexico. But in the Yucatan, his descendants fought on against the ancient snake glyph of the Kaan.

Warfare became increasingly common and frantic across the region. As Calakmul’s sphere of influence receded, Dos Pilas lost control of its vassals and the Petexbatun region descended into complete chaos. The people of Dos Pilas tore down their temples to build defensive walls while the ruling family (still distant relations of Tikal’s kings) fled to the fortress of Aguateca, guarded by a mighty ravine. At Punta de Chimino on Lake Petexbatun, the people built a formidable network of walls and moats. But the fighting was terrifyingly intense, and both Aguateca and Punta de Chimino were stormed and destroyed.

Meanwhile, both Calakmul and Tikal continued to grow. The city of Calakmul alone now housed more than 120,000, with larger numbers in its surrounding kingdom. But there were already signs of decline. As the centers struggled to hold on, things were falling apart.

1The Great Collapse

Beginning at the start of the ninth century AD, the classical Mayan civilization dramatically collapsed. The great cities of the lowlands lost most of their population or were abandoned entirely, to be swallowed up by the jungle. The great dynasties vanished, and monuments and temples fell into ruins. Mayan civilization continued in the north in trading towns like Chichen Itza, dominated by merchants rather than autocratic priest-kings. But the era of sprawling cities and huge building projects was over.

The reasons for this collapse remain one of the great mysteries of history. We now know that it coincided with a period of sustained drought, which almost certainly played a role. Probably the land could no longer sustain the huge population. Tikal, for example, built huge reservoirs to keep the city going through the four-month dry season. But years of low rainfall would have defeated even Mayan ingenuity. However, drought alone can’t explain the collapse—the cities of the north lasted far longer than those of the lowlands, even though the north was much drier.

Whatever the reason, the collapse finally ended the 400-year conflict between Tikal and Calakmul. Locked in their titanic struggle, the two cities probably never saw it coming. The war almost certainly sapped the Mayan ability to respond to the catastrophe facing them. Calakmul was one of the first cities to go, losing all cohesion by about AD 810. Tikal held on for another 50 years, but eventually, it was abandoned, too. The sons of Spearthrower Owl and the Kaan dynasty disappeared from history.

After the collapse, a small population hung on in Calakmul and occasionally erected crude monuments in imitation of their ancestors. But the writing inscribed on them was nonsensical. They no longer remembered how to write.

When the Fox sisters claimed that they could talk to spirits by rapping noises, the hoax set off a national craze for ghosts, psychics, and seances. From 1848 onward, numerous Americans came to believe in Spiritualism, a movement which advocated that the spirits of the dead could interact with the living.

The craze produced a countless number of frauds and hoaxes. But in spite of its dubious scientific credentials, Spiritualism lasted well into the 1920s. Contained here are just 10 of the weirder stories that swept the United States during the fad’s heyday.

10 The Farmer And The Spirit-Machine

Jonathan Koons, a farmer who lived in rural Ohio, was originally skeptical of Spiritualism. By 1852, Koons had changed his mind and began to declare that he and his nine children—including a baby not even a year old—were all mediums. The farmer decided to construct a log house and, after receiving messages from spirits, was told to make and store a “spirit-machine” in the building.

Created with copper and zinc, Koons’s device could allegedly summon spirits to play the guitar, drums, and other instruments kept in the log house. The spirits were all too happy to perform and sing at night in the dark room, and their show attracted neighbors and visitors from as far away as New York.

According to messages left in the room, which were composed in a script strongly similar to Koons’s handwriting, these invisible musicians were ancient creatures who preceded Adam and Eve.

After the success of their spirit-machine, Koons and his children took to the road to show off their psychic gifts. Perhaps they were hopeless without their machine (or the darkness of their log cabin), but the Koonses ended up being exposed as frauds when a disembodied hand during a seance proved to be one of the children’s hands.^[1]

9 The Possession And Arrest Of Mary Jane

In 1846, a servant girl named Mary Jane apparently suffered from being possessed by not one but two spirits. The first spirit was a good girl; the other was an unsavory sailor who said words that no 19th-century lady was thought to have known.

This sharp-tongued spirit delighted in torturing poor Mary Jane, knocking her knees and wrists out of joint and laughing and joking about her pain. The girl’s master, a surgeon named Dr. Larkin, had no idea how to treat her. Eventually, an enemy of Dr. Larkin, the pastor Reverend Horace James, convinced the authorities in Dedham, Massachusetts, to arrest Mary Jane for the crime of necromancy.^[2]

Amazingly, James was allowed to serve as both a witness and a judge. Dr. Larkin was accused of sorcery, and Mary Jane was convicted and imprisoned for two months.

The aftermath of Mary Jane’s story is murky, but while Dr. Larkin was disgraced, he continued to believe in spirits. After his wife’s death, in fact, Dr. Larkin maintained that her spirit protected him from train accidents and other misfortunes.

8 The Cup And Spoon Healer

The Southern preacher Jesse Babcock Ferguson was a popular lecturer on Spiritualism. Conveniently, his teenage daughter, Virginia, happened to be a medium. Although Ferguson testified that Virginia was a child “certainly deficient in what is usually called talent,” he reported that his incredibly average daughter was capable of healing through the spirit of an Indian doctor.

Virginia’s penchant for healing appeared suddenly one day when a slave boy hurt his arm and shoulder. Somehow or another, Virginia came under the influence of the spirit.

She touched the boy’s injuries and, using a cup and spoon, concocted a dark liquid that she gave to the boy and everybody else at the house who, in Ferguson’s words, was “invalid.” Everyone drank this liquid repeatedly over the next two weeks, and it worked so well that only one of the test subjects was still sick.

The teenager repeated her cup and spoon trick again for her sick mother. After fetching the two necessary tools, Virginia made another liquid out of thin air. The medicine cured her mother easily, and Virginia subsequently showed herself willing to heal anybody who complained of being sick.^[3]

7 Thomas Paine’s Spirit

For all the obscure ancient and foreign souls said to have communicated with spiritualists, the spirits of such famous American icons as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine also liked to keep busy. Countless messages were credited to their spirits, with one reverend named Charles Hammond going so far as to publish a book that he insisted was written posthumously by Paine.

The author of the influential pamphlet Common Sense, Paine was an unabashed deist in his own day. He was such a critic of Christianity that the Quakers in his town wouldn’t bury him after he died.

Four decades later in the early 1850s, Charles Hammond declared that Paine communicated with him through automatic writing. The result of their correspondence, Light from the Spirit World, narrates Paine’s supposed adventures in Heaven.

Along his journey across the seven circles of Heaven, Paine sees the spirits of his wife and mother and takes William Penn as his mentor. At the end of the book, the skeptical Paine learns that Spiritualism is the one and only truth and that both skeptics and hard-core Christians will doubt his message. Of course, Penn was right and Light from the Spirit World was critically panned.^[4]

6 The Spirit Painters

In 1894, Chicago mediums Elizabeth and May Bangs offered a new service for their patrons: spirit painting. The sisters would contact the spirit of a customer’s deceased loved one and then have a portrait magically painted in the spirit’s likeness. Despite being repeatedly debunked, the sisters’ painting scheme was convincing enough to last for decades.

One satisfied banker named John Payne left an account of the sisters’ process, which he saw with two other witnesses. The sisters were able to paint a picture of his father, a man who’d died 14 years earlier.

Payne described the session as taking place in the daytime with the sisters placing the canvas on a frame near a window. Each sister held a side of the frame, and there weren’t any brushes or other supplies in their vicinity.

While the sisters closed their eyes, an image slowly appeared on the canvas over the course of an hour. The picture materialized all at once, evolving from a shadow to a complete piece. Payne claimed that the sisters never saw a photograph of his father and praised their work as “the best picture of my father we ever had.”^[5]

5 The Hieroglyphic Turnips

Among the spiritualists, spirits were generally thought to be a benevolent force. Not every interaction was positive, however, as the Connecticut minister Dr. Austin Phelps and his family could attest. Beginning in March 1850 and lasting for a year and a half, their house was sieged with poltergeist activity.

In addition to the usual tropes like mysterious rappings, flying furniture, and broken windows, the Phelpses were entertained by even stranger experiences. Turnips bearing hieroglyphs grew out of their carpet, a large potato materialized out of thin air, and the oldest son was flown into the air and had his pants ripped apart. Figures were also seen in the house, such as a group of 11 women kneeling and reading Bibles.

The house’s notoriety soon attracted Andrew Jackson Davis, a noted clairvoyant of the day. Davis credited the rappings in the house to electricity in the Phelpses’ oldest son and believed that spirits were responsible for the other shenanigans.^[6]

And the hieroglyphic turnips?

It turned out that those were naturally an attempt by a sophisticated flock of angels to establish contact with human beings.

4 The Lord Sisters

Annie and Jennie Lord were sisters from Maine who repeatedly emphasized their lack of musical talent. The sisters held that they were so sick and fragile that they couldn’t play any instruments. Fortunately, they were gifted mediums and could order spirits to play music instead.

For their spiritual concert, the Lords would gather instruments in a room and shut off the lights. One sister would act as the medium, sitting quietly in a chair, while the other would sit away from her.

When the show started, a symphony of different instruments could be heard in the dark room. Everything from guitars to drums to accordions were heard, all of them played rather well. Sometimes, only a single instrument was played. Other times, multiple instruments were used by the spirits.^[7]

Aside from holding these concerts, the Lord sisters also specialized in spirit communication. From one 1876 ad in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light, Jennie promised remote readers that she could contact their “spirit friends” so long as they sent her in the mail a dollar, three stamps, and a lock of hair.

3 The New Motor

John Murray Spear had a divine mission. After turning his back on organized religion, Spear got caught up in Spiritualism and started to receive messages from an elite team of spirits that he called the “Electrizers.” To help humanity, the Electrizers commanded Spear to build a special electric motor that could power the entire world with unlimited energy.

Spear dubbed the machine “The New Motor,” and it was supposed to be a living, humanlike mechanism that would be a messiah. In 1853, after nearly a year of building, Spear and his followers finished constructing the motor. To celebrate its conception, Spear organized a mock birth ritual with a female medium who served as a Mary figure.

It was said that the machine made slight movements, marking it as a success in Spear’s opinion. But the masses couldn’t appreciate Spear’s generous effort to save them. In a fit of rage, a mob destroyed the motor, an outcome that led Spear to note that humanity wasn’t ready for salvation.^[8]

2 Leonora Piper

Leonora Piper had her first brush with the spirit world when she was eight. Supposedly, she experienced a vision of her aunt’s death. By the 1880s, Piper had established herself as a trance medium.

When she fell into her trances, Piper became controlled by Phinuit, the spirit of a Frenchman who spoke in a crude male voice. Phinuit would say that he was a doctor, but unsurprisingly, nobody could verify that he ever existed.

In 1892, a new spirit took hold of Piper, claiming to be an American man named George Pellew. Piper’s impersonation of Pellew during her trances worked so well that it fooled the late man’s friends.

On the other hand, Pellew’s relatives weren’t so gullible. As skepticism mounted, Piper switched gears, saying that another spirit had displaced that of Pellew.

By 1911, Piper gave up the medium game altogether. She passed away many years later in 1950. During her long career, Piper was sometimes held up as proof that Spiritualism was legitimate.^[9]

For example, the Society for Psychical Research studied Piper for over two decades. Even William James, the “father of American psychology,” took an interest, although he ultimately wasn’t convinced by her abilities.

1 The Spirit Photographer

If spirits could talk, paint, and play music, then it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that they could have their pictures taken. The practice of spirit photography was pioneered by William Mumler, a Boston engraver who made the first such picture in 1862.

At a time when numerous US families were grieving over relatives killed during the Civil War, Mumler’s claim that he could photograph the dead proved to be a profitable business.

Typically, Mumler’s pictures depicted a living person with the “spirit” of a loved one. By modern standards, the pictures are blatantly fake, yet they must have seemed incredible at the time.

When a woman named Emma Hardinge Britten had a spirit photograph done by Mumler, she failed to recognize the ghostly figure that had materialized behind her. As a huge Beethoven fan, Mumler was able to convince Britten that the spirit was Beethoven himself.

Mumler had his doubters, and while he eventually landed in legal trouble, he was never convicted of fraud. In fact, Mumler had many supporters. His photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln and the “spirit” of Abraham Lincoln remains one of the best-known alleged pictures of a ghost.^[10]

Tristan Shaw is an American writer who enjoys folklore, film, and history. You can follow him on Twitter.

“I would carry fire in one hand,” an early American preacher once told his congregation, “to burn all the Quakers in the world.”

He was one of the Puritans who had set sail for America in search of religious tolerance. They had cried for freedom of religion in England, but once they’d landed in America, all those ideas of tolerance had quickly started to fade.

The Puritans were already becoming every bit as cruel as the people they’d tried to escape. And no religion would suffer as horribly under their hands than the Quakers.

10 The First Quakers In America Were Stripped, Beaten, And Starved

From the second the first Quakers set foot in America in 1656, the Puritan settlers abused them. Their names were Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, and they were missionaries from England, sent to spread their ideas of spiritualism and nonviolence to the New World. It nearly got them killed.

Almost as soon as they arrived, the women were arrested purely for being Quakers. The official charge was that they held “dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions,” and they were to be stripped, beaten, and imprisoned.

The Puritans stripped them naked in the hopes that they’d find that the women were witches. If they found a witch’s teat, they believed, it would be justifiable to execute them, and so a group of women were sent to tear off the missionaries’ clothes and probe their bodies in search of an excuse to kill. At least, they were supposed to be women. Ann Austin would later insist that at least one of the people probing them was “a man in woman’s apparel.”^[1]

The Puritans couldn’t find anything that would give them an excuse to hang the Quakers, so they settled on throwing them in prison and starving them to death. The women weren’t even allowed bread. If it weren’t for a local named Nicholas Upsall taking pity on them, they undoubtedly would have died slow and horrible deaths.

Upsall bribed the guards to sneak them food and managed to keep Fisher and Austin alive. Still, the colony kept them in chains for five weeks before finally giving up and sending the women on a one-way trip to Barbados.

9 Puritans Fined Anyone Who Brought A Quaker To America

After Fisher and Austin left, the Puritans didn’t get any nicer to the Quakers. As far as they were concerned, the Quakers who were starting to visit America were a threat to their religion. They saw them, as one Puritan put it, as “instruments for propagating the kingdom of Satan,” and they weren’t going to put up with them.^[2]

A new law was introduced in New England making it a crime to bring any Quaker to the colony. Any ship docking at the colony with a Quaker on board would be fined £100 and forced to send the Quaker back at their own expense. If they didn’t comply, they would be thrown into prison until they changed their minds. The Quakers themselves were to be whipped with 20 stripes, thrown in jail, and forced to do hard labor until they were ready to be sent back to their homelands.

The Quakers’ books were considered such a threat that the colony wouldn’t even risk letting someone look at them. Any person living in New England who so much as spotted a Quaker book was required to immediately bring it to the magistrate to have it burned. And if they were ever caught defending a Quaker, they could be fined, imprisoned, or even banished.

None of that stopped the Quakers from sending missionaries to America, though. When no one would take them across the Atlantic Ocean, they simply built a boat of their own.

8 Women Were Stripped Naked And Beaten

Quaker women weren’t just beaten and imprisoned. The Puritans turned abusing Quakers into a weirdly sexual display. They would strip them naked down to the waist and parade them through the town, whipping their backs as they went.

One of the most brutal incidents happened to three women named Ann Coleman, Mary Tompkins, and Alice Ambrose. In the dead of winter, these women were stripped naked, tied to the back of a cart, and dragged through the streets while a man followed them, whipping their backs.

These women weren’t just paraded down one street—they were dragged through the main streets of 11 separate towns on a journey that stretched across 130 kilometers (80 mi).^[3] Each time they reached a new town, they’d have a local woman strip them bare and a constable beat them bloody.

It was horrible, but it was far from the only time it happened. Countless Quaker women were stripped and beaten by the Puritans, sometimes while their husbands were forced to march behind them and watch the women they loved being brutalized. And all in the name of Jesus Christ.

7 Quakers Caught In Massachusetts Had Their Ears Cut Off

Puritan laws only became harsher. From 1656 on, every male Quaker caught in Massachusetts was to have his right ear cut off. If they came back, they’d lose the other ear. And if they came back again, they would have their tongues bored through with a red-hot iron.

The first men to lose their ears were Christopher Holder and John Copeland. They had come to New England on the Woodhouse, the boat the Quakers built after New England’s governors made it a crime to transport them to the New World.

At first, the Puritans were a little squeamish about enforcing their laws. Holder and Copeland had already been kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony too many times to count, but they kept coming back no matter what happened to them.

The Puritans got fed up. On July 17, 1658, they dragged Holder and Copeland to prison and chopped off both men’s right ears.^[4] They were kept in prison, where they were brutally and repeatedly whipped on a set schedule for nine weeks straight. Then, finally, they were forcibly sent back to England.

If they returned, the Puritans promised, they would be executed on the spot.

6 Four Quakers Were Murdered For Their Beliefs

Holder and Copeland were never killed by the Puritans, though they did return. Both men were thrown in prison and promised a death sentence, but the Puritans, perhaps out of some lingering unwillingness to kill, ended up just kicking them out of the country again.

It was the last time they would ever show mercy to a Quaker. Five days later, a group of three Quakers showed up to protest the treatment Holder and Copeland had received—and soon became the first Quakers killed.

Two of them, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, were dragged out and hanged in front of a cheering crowd. But the third, Mary Dyer, was spared. Her son begged the governor not to kill her, promising she’d never come back if they let her go.

They made Dyer watch her friends die, but they let her return to England as long as she promised never to come back.^[5] Dyer’s faith, though, was too strong for her to stop preaching her religion. Within a year, she’d returned to Boston. The Puritans made good on their promise. She and the man she brought with her, William Leddra, became the next two people to be executed for being Quakers.

5 Dead Quakers’ Bodies Were Desecrated And Humiliated

Before Mary Dyer was killed, she had a stillborn child. It was a horrible experience. With the help of a few sympathetic locals, she quickly buried the dead child in a dignified grave outside Boston and then returned to await the day she would join the baby she’d lost.

When Governor John Winthrop found out, though, he used her tragedy to humiliate her in the most horrible way imaginable. Winthrop had Dyer’s baby pulled out of the grave and shown to the public. Her dead baby, he said, was “a monster,” and it was proof that Dyer was a witch.^[6]

Dyer’s body wasn’t treated any better. Under the orders of her executioners, she was left hanging from the gallows. One of her murderers, General Atherton, boasted, “She hangs like a flag for others to take example from.”

Nicholas Upsall, the man who saved Mary Fisher and Ann Austin from starvation, tried to get Dyer a decent burial. He wanted her buried in a respectable grave and wanted to build a fence around it to keep her body safe. His request, though, was denied. Dyer was buried without ceremony.

4 The Puritans Threatened Rhode Island For Harboring Quakers

Not everybody in America hated the Quakers. Most Native American tribes had a fairly good relationship with them. One Native American, after giving refuge to a Quaker on the run from the Puritans, famously remarked, “What a God have the English, who deal so with one another about their God?”

The greatest refuge for Quakers in the New World, though, was Rhode Island. It was the one place in America that refused to persecute them for their faith. As the Puritans chased more and more of them from their colonies, more and more Quakers found themselves hiding in the protection of Rhode Island—and that made the Puritans furious.

The Puritans of New England threatened the Colony of Rhode Island, telling them that they would cut off all communication and trade if they didn’t start torturing, exiling, and executing Quakers. Rhode Island, though, refused. Their governor, Benedict Arnold (not the Revolutionary War defector), sent a letter back that said, “We have no laws among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring [their views] by words.”^[7]

3 People Who Spoke Out In Their Defense Were Arrested

The Dutch colonies of New Netherlands weren’t as kind. Their governor, Peter Stuyvesant, didn’t do anything to protect the Quakers. Instead, he made it illegal to so much as allow a Quaker into one’s home. And when the people complained, he threw them in prison.

A group of citizens led by a man named Edward Hart drafted up a long letter protesting the persecution of the Quakers. Not a single person who signed the letter was a Quaker, but they couldn’t stand idly by while people were being killed. As far as they were concerned, the colony’s persecution was a violation of both Christ’s teachings and the colony’s charter.

“We are bound by the law to do good unto all men,” they wrote. “If any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them.”

Stuyvesant wasn’t impressed. Every person who signed the paper was arrested, and those who held a government job were fired on the spot.^[8] They were sent to prison and fed nothing but bread and water and told they wouldn’t be freed until they renounced their support for the Quakers.

Edward Hart was the only one who didn’t take back his words. Every other person involved recanted and promised to support religious persecution. Hart, instead, was kept in prison until they got worried he would die under their watch. Then he was banished from the colony.

2 Two Quaker Children Were Almost Sold Into Slavery

In 1659, the government of Salem tried to forcibly pull two children away from their parents, ship them off to Barbados, and sell them into slavery.^[9]

Their names were Daniel and Provided Southwick, and their parents had converted to the Quaker faith two years before. Their conversion wasn’t easy. The Southwicks were repeatedly beaten, imprisoned, and given massive fines, all in an effort to scare them into renouncing their faith.

Those fines added up, and soon, the Southwicks owed more money than they could possibly pay. The Puritans dealt with it by breaking down their doors and confiscating all the things they owned, but even after all their possessions were stolen, they still hadn’t paid their dues.

And so the governor came up with a new plan. The Southwicks would cover the rest of what they owed, he declared, by being forced to sell two of their children as slaves.

Fortunately, it never happened. Not a single captain in the country was willing to let them use his boat to sell two children into slavery. In the end, the Southwicks were simply banished from the colony. Their new fate, though, wasn’t much better. Shortly after being exiled from Salem, the parents died. The children were left to fend for themselves.

1 Europe Had To Intervene To Save The Quakers

Americans never stopped torturing Quakers—or, at least, not of their own free will. In the end, they were forced to leave them alone.

It started when a man in New Netherlands named John Bowne was arrested for inviting a Quaker into his house.^[10] It was hardly the first time it had happened; many had already been arrested or banished for the same crime. Bowne, though, stood his ground in a way nobody had before. He refused to pay his fine or even to stand before the court on trial, insisting instead that he stand trial in Holland. The governor had no choice. He had to let him go.

Bowne told the European court everything that was happening to the Quakers of America. The court was shocked and soon wrote the governor of New Netherlands, ordering him to put an end to the persecution of the Quakers.

That’s how it ended—not with anybody in America having a change of heart but with a European government forcing them to behave. In 1689, the English government would follow suit and ban the persecution of the Quakers, as well. Religious tolerance finally came to America—under the orders of European kings.

The role of the First Lady is a unique position. Each woman who has occupied the unofficial office has made it their own, taking on everything from hosting guests, holding press conferences, tackling social issues, or influencing leaders behind the scenes. But there may be some strange facts you haven’t heard about some of America’s most prominent women. Whether it’s joining an armed patrol during a Chinese rebellion, contacting spirits in the White House, or being accused of murdering the president, these are some of their most shocking stories.

10 Presidential Conspiracy Theories

10 Dolley Madison Had An Honorary Seat In Congress

Dolley Madison helped define what a first lady would be, hosting guests and addressing social problems. She campaigned for her husband, hosted events with single President Thomas Jefferon, raised funds for Lewis and Clark, and famously saved the famous portrait of George Washington from the White House when the British burned D.C. in the War of 1812. She was even the first citizen to send a message by telegraph.

In 1844, before women were even allowed to vote, Dolley Madison had a seat on the floor of the House of Representatives whenever she wanted. The former first lady enjoyed listening to the elected officials debate each other over the latest policy. Today only Members of Congress, their staff former members, and the President and Vice President are allowed on the House floor. Congress actually had the fourth first lady’s back a few other times as well. After the president died in 1836, the House paid her to publish books of James Madison’s papers. Then when she fell into poverty twelve years later, so much so that her former slave Paul Jennings was giving her money when he saw her, Congress paid her today’s equivalent of over $700,000 to buy more of the papers from her. When President Zachary Taylor gave her eulogy, he may have originated the term by referring to her as America’s “First Lady”. The alternate term of “Presidentresss” was also used by some, but it didn’t stick.^[1]

9 Lou Hoover Patrolled Her Home In China During The Boxer Rebellion

Lou Hoover was a horse-riding, roller-skating, architecture and nature buff fluent in five languages. She married her geology classmate and future president Herbert Hoover in 1899 and the newlyweds took off for China. Mrs. Hoover quickly learned Chinese, a language the couple would use when they wanted to communicate privately in front of guests at the White House. Then in 1900, the Boxer Rebellion began, a conflict in which many Chinese violently attacked foreigners because of tensions over increasing Western influence on the country.

Mrs. Hoover treated gunshot wounds, built barricades, and rode through the area on her bicycle with a pistol patrolling with Western troops. She would have to help out once again when her family was in London during the start of World War I, and she was asked by the U.S. Ambassador to organize aid for the displaced. She became a champion for Belgium while they were occupied. In the U.S., she helped organize the American Red Cross’ Canteen Escort Service to bring home wounded American soldiers. Later in her life, she helped with the founding of the Girl Scouts. During the Great Depression, which her husband struggled to control, she made regular radio broadcasts to the American people. It was a life full of outdoorsmanship and humanitarianism for the wife of one America’s least effective presidents.^[2]

8 Mary Todd Lincoln Held Seances In The White House

In the aftermath of the civil war, when 750,000 American lives were lost, there were many families across the country desperate to connect with the Great Beyond. There was a boom of “spiritualism”, or the idea that one can communicate with the dead, especially popular with the upper class. Mary Todd Lincoln had lost her mother, three of her children, and her husband, killed in front of her. But it was her son Willie’s death in 1862 that seemed to take the deepest toll on her. He was eleven when he died from typhoid fever, which sent both his parents into a deep despair and time of isolation and mourning. The demands of the civil war eventually drew out the President, who tied a black ribbon around his hat in remembrance of his son, which remained there until his own untimely demise.

Mrs. Lincoln began to visit with a group of mediums called the Lauries in order to try and reach him. She even hosted seances in the Red Room of the White House, with President Lincoln in attendance for several of them. She seemed to take deep comfort in them, writing to a relative, “Willie Lives. He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile that he always has had…. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me”. Mrs. Lincoln even visited a spiritual photographer who took a photo that supposedly showed the ghostly silhouette of the late president standing over her. Even today, there are rumors that the ghost of Willie, his brother Eddie, and their father still haunt the White House today.^[3]

7 Lucretia Garfield Nursed Her Husband Back to Health After An Assassination Attempt

The love story of Lucretia and James Garfield is not the smoothest or most romantic one in the history of U.S. presidents and first ladies. He wrote in his diaries that she bored him. She was deeply upset at his adultery, and distrusted his motives for marrying her, saying that she believed it was more out of duty than love. They were apart for the early part of the marriage as he traveled in the Union army and for the state legislature. But hardship would bring them closer.

In 1881 though, Mrs. Garfield was struck with severe malaria and almost died. President Garfield was overwhelmed with this, and took over more of the childcare and education of their children. When she recovered slightly, she decided to travel to the Jersey shore to hopefully heal in the fresh air. What they didn’t know was that an attempted assassin, Charles Guiteau, was waiting at the train station to kill the President when he took her to the train. But when he saw the frail state of the first lady, he held off, worried about how witnessing the murder would effect her. On July 2nd, Guiteau did shoot James Garfield, and Mrs. Garfield rushed back to Washington to care from him, only barely healed herself. The country took great comfort in the brave face that she showed, and her calm bravery when the President did die in September, with his wife by his side. After his passing, Congress tried to pay his male doctor double the salary of his female doctor, but Mrs. Garfield stepped in and ensured that both doctors received an equal payment of $1,000.^[4]

6 Florence Harding was Accused of Murder

The death of President Warren Harding came as a shock to the nation. He was only 58 years old, well-traveled, seemingly strong and healthy. It was halfway through his term, and he was a popular president. His wife Florence had always been working behind the scenes to support his career, since his start as newspaper editor. She even once told reporters, “I have only one real hobby—my husband.” But then, President Harding embarked on a speaking tour across the country called “The Voyage of Understanding”. On a visit to Alaska, President Harding became extremely tired and confused. He passed out several times on the way back to Washington. Three days later on August 2nd 1923, he died at a hotel in San Francisco while his wife was reading to him. She told doctors he had a convulsion and then passed.

It was originally proposed that he may have been poisoned from bad crab meat. Doctors then believed he had severe pneumonia, and eventually ruled it as a stroke. But Mrs. Harding started to act suspiciously, embalming him immediately, refusing an autopsy, and destroying a number of his papers. Mrs. Harding died only a year after her husband. After her death, retired FBI agent Gaston Means published a book in 1930 accusing her of murdering Harding to protect his legacy from scandals of affairs and bribery. Later it was revealed the book was mostly fabricated. It is now believed that the President died of a heart attack.^[5]

Top 10 Faux Pas Committed By US Presidents

5 Eleanor Roosevelt Forced Newspapers to Hire Female Reporters (And May Have Had An Affair With One)

Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the country’s most famous First Ladies, and has long been regarded as a women’s rights icon. One lesser known aspect of her activism is how she insisted that only female reporters would be allowed at her press conferences. This ensured that any newspaper who wanted access to her would have to have a woman on staff. Over her husband’s twelve year term, she hosted 348 conferences, first discussing household issues, and then later on expanding to deeper political issues and bringing in special guests. This included female members of President Roosevelt’s administration and foreign dignitaries like Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chinese president Chiang Kai-Shek.

One of the female journalists, Lorena Hickok, may have been closer than just a colleague to the First Lady, or closer than even a good friend. Hickok was assigned to cover Mrs. Roosevelt in 1932, and she eventually gave up her position to move into the White House in the room next door to the First Lady. The two exchanged thousands of letters, sometimes even two a day, with one quote from Hickok reading “I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth” and another from Roosevelt “I ache to hold you close. Your ring is of great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” The women remained close their entire lives.^[6]

4 Elizabeth Monroe saved Lafeyette’s Wife From Execution

Elizabeth Monroe married future President James Monroe when she was only seventeen in 1786. The couple first lived in Virginia, but traveled as the future president began his political career. In 1794, President Washington sent them to Paris during the French revolution, as James was appointed U.S. Minister to France. There they became well-liked. Mrs. Monroe took on European fashion and social customs, and earned herself the romantic nickname of la belle Americaine. The Monroes helped to build social networks for their young country in European circles and their elegant attitudes helped warm up foreign acceptance of the United States and its new form of democracy.

Marquis de Lafayette was an American hero, one of only eight people in history to be granted honorary citizenship of the United States. His work in the Revolutionary War was instrumental in ensuring victory against Britain. The Monroes would get the chance to help repay the favor during the heat of the conflict in France, when Lafayette’s wife Adrienne de Noiolles de Lafayette was being held in prison awaiting execution by guillotine. Mrs. Monroe insisted on visiting her in prison, and this “unofficial” intervention made it clear that the Americans would not be pleased if any harm were to come to her. After this visit, Adrienne was released.^[7]

3 Edith Bolling Wilson Ran The Country and Was Descended From Pocahontas

Edith Wilson was a unique first lady in more ways than one. For one, she was the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Pocahontas, making her one four-hundred-eightieth Native American. But she made sure people knew about that connection. Despite coming from one of the oldest English families in Virginia, the Bolling family had fallen into poverty after the Civil War freed their slaves. Throughout her youth, Edith was excluded from high society. Her key to notoriety before becoming first lady was by claiming this heritage. After widow Edith married widower Woodrow Wilson in 1915, this fact was an interesting conversation starter at events.

But Edith’s more important legacy was as the unofficial first woman president of the United States. From the moment she married the incumbent President, she got to work helping him as the US entered World War I. He gave her access to classified war documents and she sat in as an advisor in meetings. Then in 1919, President Wilson had a stroke that incapacitated him. The First Lady assured everyone that he simply needed rest. She took any memos or papers for him into his room to be “reviewed” and returned them with notes. She fired the Secretary of State who held a cabinet meeting without the president. She even sent the British ambassador packing after he refused to fire an aid who had made a vulgar joke about her. She carried on like this for seventeen months, although publicly she insisted she never made any presidential decisions.^[8]

2 Anna Harrison’s Packed Bags Never Made It

When young Anna Symmes met soldier William Henry Harrison on a visit to her sister in Kentucky, there was an instant connection. Anna’s father objected to their relationship because William was not skilled in any trade other than war, despite the fact that he had been a soldier himself, but the two married secretly in 1795. After seeing the happy couple, her father eventually changed his mind. She quickly had ten children and educated them on the Indiana frontier, despite her childhood upbringing being that of a coastal elite.

In 1840, William won the presidency, but Anna had to stay at home as she recovered from an illness. Their daughter-in-law, widow Jane Harrison, took on the First Lady hosting duties temporarily until Mrs. Harrison could make the long journey safely. But before Anna had even finished packing her bags, she received devastating news. In April of 1841, President Harrison died after a single month in office from pneumonia. Congress agreed to offer Mrs. Harrison a pension equivalent to the president’s salary, and she lived until the age of 88. President Harrison was the first U.S. President to die in office, and the one with the briefest term.^[9]

1 Mary Arthur McElroy was an Anti-Suffragette

Chester Arthur went into his sudden presidency after the assassination of President Garfield as a widower. His beloved wife Ellen died of pneumonia in 1880, and the grieving president would gaze at a stained glass window that he donated in her honor at a church he could see from the White House. The president’s younger sister, Mary Arthur McElroy, would come to D.C. during the “busy season” to act as the official hostess. Although President Arthur never officially granted her the title of First Lady, she was well-liked during her events.

However, when Mrs. McElroy returned to her family home in Albany, New York during the “off-season”, she acted as a member of the Albany Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage. In fact, Albany was a particular strong-hold for the anti-suffrage movement. The group first met in 1894, and again in 1915 and 1917. They sent A quote from one of their pamphlets read “There are still women enough left outside of the clique of female agitators, who believe that woman can always do her best work at home”, to which a suffragette publication responded “If a woman can always do her best work at home, why does the AntiSuffrage Association send Mrs. CranneI to conduct a political campaign hundreds of miles away from Albany?” Of course, the anti-suffrage movement ended in 1920, when the 19th amendment was passed giving American women the right to vote.^[10]

Top 10 Costly US Presidential Campaign Blunders

Cemeteries are spooky places. It doesn’t matter how old they are. There’s just something unsettling about the presence of dead bodies and ghostly gravestones. Of course, the United States is a young country, relatively speaking. Graveyards across Europe and Asia are often centuries older than those in America. Tales of the people buried on those sites are practically ancient. Stories about their rumored spirits have been handed down for generations.

While the U.S. doesn’t have quite as long of a history, it does boast its own ancient afterlife. And the burial grounds that go along with it are fascinating. Historians across America study old cemeteries to learn about the past. The stories they’ve unearthed are both unsettling and amazing. In this list, you’ll learn about ten of America’s oldest graveyards and the supposed spirits who stay within. These centuries-old cemeteries are seriously spooky!

10 NYC’s Old Gravesend Cemetery

New York City has a very long history. It’s also a modern-day travel destination and business hub. So you wouldn’t be wrong to think much of the historic Big Apple has been paved over and renovated. But not everything in NYC is moving forward. In fact, there are quite a few old cemeteries scattered across its boroughs. The city’s first Dutch settlers are buried in graveyards that date back to the 17th century.

The Old Gravesend Cemetery in Brooklyn is one of the oldest of those. The area around it was first established in 1643. The first mention of Old Gravesend itself was in a will dated 1658. So while the cemetery’s founding date isn’t precisely known, it likely came about in the 1640s. In total, there are 379 gravestones at the site. City officials have been working on renovating the stones. Upkeep is costly, but the history that comes with it is immeasurable.

The cemetery’s most famous resident is (probably) Lady Deborah Moody. She was the surrounding settlement’s founder and first settler. In fact, she was the first woman to establish a community of Dutch immigrants in all of New England. Well off during her life, Moody originally left Holland to settle in Massachusetts. But once there, she clashed with the Puritans. They didn’t like her belief in adult baptism. And her work to convert people was viewed as unseemly. So they cast her out, and she traveled down to New York.

At the time, the area was known as New Amsterdam and had a heavily Dutch population. Moody fit right in and settled in the Gravesend area of modern-day Brooklyn. But as well known as she was at the time, it’s unclear whether Moody is buried in the graveyard in her adopted home. It’s probable, but historians have no definitive proof of her burial there. Considering the age of the burial ground, it’s likely that the mystery will never be solved.^[1]

9 Boston’s Granary Burying Ground

Much like New York City, Boston’s bustle is forever moving forward. And much like New York City, Boston has its own incredible past. The Massachusetts city is full of old cemeteries, just like others up and down the Eastern Seaboard too. In Boston, one of the oldest is the Granary Burying Ground. That name was officially christened in 1737, but the cemetery site was around nearly a full century earlier. For over 200 years, until the 1880s, notable Bostonians were buried in the Granary Ground. In total, about 5,000 people were laid to rest on the site. Not all the grave markers have lasted the test of time, though. Today, officials estimate about 2,300 stones are still in order.

The disheveled history of those headstones took an interesting turn in the 1800s. In the middle of that century, Bostonians were frustrated with the disorder of the grounds. So, they set about a years-long project to rearrange and set right thousands of headstones. Some were moved and misplaced. Others were accidentally destroyed in the clean-up.

Today, the site is far more orderly. However, it’s unclear whether every headstone is actually in its original spot. Nevertheless, the Granary Burying Ground keeps on playing the hits. Paths inside the cemetery take scores of visitors on an incredible tour. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Crispus Attucks are all buried in the cemetery. American history truly rests in the Granary Burying Ground.^[2]

8 Texas’s Ernest Witte Site

New York and Boston hold historic cemeteries, but they aren’t the only ancient graveyards in America. In fact, there are far older burial grounds scattered elsewhere across the U.S. And the oldest of them all can be found in Texas, of all places! In the 1970s, historians found an ancient Brazos River burial ground. Today, it is known as the Ernest Witte Site.

Archaeological evidence suggests the area was first used as a cemetery nearly 5,000 years ago. Scientists believe the final burials there happened around AD 1500. Some of these fossils were buried with primitive stone tools. More recent burials came with the presence of shell jewelry, carved stone knives, and animal skulls. The site is now a treasure trove of archaeological information about life in pre-contact America.

The story behind the burial site’s name is its own fascinating tale. Ernest Witte was a young boy growing up in rural Texas in the 1930s. One day, in the middle of the Great Depression, Witte and his brother were rooting around an area near the Brazos River. Accidentally, they uncovered some fossils. Not knowing what they found, they kept digging. Slowly but surely, they uncovered more ancient artifacts. But here’s where it gets really crazy: The brothers never told anyone about it!

For decades, Ernest kept the site a secret. Finally, in 1974, he reached out to the Texas Archaeological Survey. Shocked scientists flocked to the site and began digging. They’ve since found the remains of roughly 250 people at the site. The historical value has been immense. But it was nearly lost to history forever!^[3]

7 West Virginia’s Grave Creek Mound

West Virginia boasts its own ancient burial site. Grave Creek Mound sits in the far north part of the state, close to the Ohio border. The nearby town of Moundsville is named for it. And if you haven’t already guessed by now, the burial site is one big mound. There’s more to it than that, though.

Archaeologists have determined the graves contained within date back to about 250 BC. They are the graves of members of the local Adena tribe. When the culture was thriving, the Adena buried their dead in these raised mounds. The sheer size of the Grave Creek Mound is stunning. Scientists believe tribe members moved nearly 57,000 tons of soil to create the hill. The Adena also built smaller mounds set near the large earthen dome. In those, they placed meaningful trinkets and mementos like jewelry and religious items. For centuries, the site was their solemn way to honor the dead.

Sadly, looters got to Grave Creek Mound before archaeologists did. While science has preserved many things from the dirt structure, many more have been lost to history. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, looters raided the smaller mounds. They took trinkets, sea shells, ivory beads, copper bracelets, and other things that had been left centuries before. Thankfully, some items remained. Plus, layers of burials within the mound itself gave archaeologists plenty to learn.

Today, historians have been able to piece together a lot about the Adena despite these setbacks. But much of the mound’s earthly items remain a mystery. Researchers wonder what they missed out on after decades of grave robberies.^[4]

6 New Orleans’ St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 may be the most memorable graveyard on this list. It’s a striking sight to see. Rows of above-ground tombs dot the tightly-packed cemetery. It is full of historic New Orleans flavor and mystery. Stories of haunted spirits and rumors of ghastly ghosts abound. The cemetery isn’t the oldest in New Orleans, but it’s close. It was first built way back in 1789. A series of fires and a brutal epidemic had just ravaged the Big Easy. City officials were worried existing cemeteries couldn’t hold all the dead. So, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 was created.

At first, the dead were actually buried underground. But in 1803, New Orleans levied a law ordering all new burials must be done above ground. Since its founding, the low-lying city has been subjected to waves of flooding. Having a bunch of human remains wash up was fast becoming a public health nightmare. And so the tradition of the raised tombs began.

Just like Old Gravesend in NYC, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has a notable soul inside. Marie Laveau was born in New Orleans in 1801 to a Creole mother. As an adult, she worked in town as a hairdresser. But she was far more famous in the region for her side gig as a voodoo priestess. People in New Orleans swore by the spells she cast and the mystical powers she supposedly held.

Before she died in 1881, Marie was a local legend. When she was buried in St. Louis Cemetery, locals still tried to seek favor from her spirit. For decades after, mourners came to the graveyard to visit her tomb. Once there, they would paint large Xs on the tomb door. The city made the practice illegal, but that didn’t stop the superstition. Even today, Laveau’s legend lives on.^[5]

5 Providence’s North Burial Ground

The North Burial Ground has been in Providence, Rhode Island, since about 1700. Long before America was a nation, settlers came to Rhode Island. On the north side of its historic urban center, planners set aside 45 acres for a cemetery. One of the first burials was that of a prominent settler named Samuel Whipple. Over the next few years, many more locals followed. Eventually, the North Burial Ground became the place to lay the city’s elite leaders and residents to rest.

Over the next century, Providence consolidated other burial grounds. Historically, well-to-do families buried their dead on their own plots of land. But as Providence grew, that custom became inefficient. So in 1785, the city’s elite residents exhumed the bodies of many of their ancestors and elders. All the remains were carefully carted away and re-buried in the North Burial Ground. In the decades after, many more prominent citizens were laid to rest in the cemetery. Since then, the graveyard has undergone many renovations. Further grave relocations have swept in too. In the 1980s, the city even (briefly) lost a headstone after a car accident ran aground in a corner of the cemetery.

Over the years, many high-profile people have been buried within. Veterans of both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War rest there. More recently, famous Americans like pioneering outdoorswoman Annie Smith Peck and early goth poet Sarah Helen Whitman are buried there too. And today, the North Burial Ground still accepts new burials. That is rare for a 300-year-old cemetery! But the site is still active. It takes in about 200 sets of remains every year. And every year, newly-deceased Providence residents add their own life stories to the hallowed ground.^[6]

4 Salem’s Charter Street Cemetery

Whenever one says “Salem,” the implication is clear: witchcraft. The Massachusetts town was famously the supposed center of witchcraft in the 17th century. But the city has ghost stories far older than that! In fact, Salem’s Charter Street Cemetery predates the witch trials by more than six decades. The burial ground, which is known to locals as Old Burying Point, was first mentioned in written documents in 1637. Historians now think the context of that reference indicates it was around long before that. So while its founding year is unclear, this analysis suggests Old Burying Point is the oldest European cemetery in America.

The oldest surviving headstone on site belongs to a woman named Doraty Cromwell. She died in Salem in 1673. That her gravestone has survived this long is a miracle. Early American memorials were usually made out of wood. Thus, most haven’t survived centuries of winter snow, spring rain, and summer sun. Before Cromwell, it’s impossible to know who else was laid to rest at Old Burying Point. Thankfully for genealogists, grave markers have long since switched to stone.

Historians do know one thing, though: Salem’s supposed witches were not buried at the Charter Street Cemetery. They were put on trial very close by in 1692. And Old Burying Point was already well-established as the city’s cemetery by then. But those found guilty of practicing witchcraft wouldn’t have been given a public burial in an esteemed location. It’s far more likely they were buried secretly by sympathetic family members. If no one stepped up, these accused witches were thrown into unmarked graves near their trial sites. For them, a well-regarded rest at Old Burying Point was never in the cards.^[7]

3 New Mexico’s San Esteban del Rey Mission Church

Decades before American colonists kicked off their anti-British rumblings back east, Spanish explorers were making their way through the southwest. In 1629, they founded the San Estévan del Rey Mission in what is now western New Mexico. Back then, the land belonged to the Acoma Pueblo people. The Spanish intended for the mission to bring Catholicism to the natives. Part of the Spaniards’ hopes centered on the afterlife: They wanted indigenous people to follow the church’s burial customs. For decades, the Spanish tried to attract the Acoma Pueblo to their lifestyle. The visitors had some success until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Then, for two decades, the natives took control of the mission and mostly shut down the Spanish incursion.

As for the cemetery on site, its creation is a story unto itself. The area sits on a mesa of bare rock with little topsoil. Opportunities for agriculture are sparse and limited. Even worse, in-ground burial is next to impossible. The Spanish solved this by forcing natives to carry tons of soil up the rocks to spread on top. Once the covered area was deep enough, it was packed down. Then, Spanish settlers could adequately bury their dead at the mission.

Today, the cemetery consists of five of these levels. Some reach 50 feet (15 meters) above what used to be the natural rocky ground. Different settlers and natives throughout history are buried there. The Acoma people got their way in the end too. Even though the mission is of Catholic origin, locals managed to sneak in a few of their traditions over the centuries.

Today, mission visitors can see sculpted faces inside the cemetery’s walls. These are guardians that carry native spirits safely into the afterlife. One section of the graveyard wall also has a large hole. There, spirits are said to freely leave the site to take on eternal existence after death.^[8]

2 NYC’s African Burial Ground

For nearly two centuries, New York City had a little-known cemetery meant for Black residents. Both enslaved and free Black people were buried there as early as the 1630s. The ground was active until about 1800. Then, the city stopped using it. Eventually, it was paved over and repurposed. For nearly 200 years, it was forgotten. Then, in 1991, construction began on a new officer tower along Broadway Avenue. As the ground underwent excavation, mass graves were found. Suddenly, the construction project became a critical preservation scene.

Archaeologists rushed in and supervised the work. Further excavations found the graveyard covered more than six acres of space. Shocked at the discovery, historians termed it the African Burial Ground. Notable Black people are thought to be buried there. That list likely includes Juan Rodrigues, the first free Black man in Manhattan, who arrived in the city in 1613.

Judging by the size of the area, historians estimate more than 15,000 people were laid to rest there. The remains include the first generations of slaves transported against their will to America. Today, it is the earliest known African cemetery in the United States. Thankfully, by 2003, all the excavated remains were placed in hand-carved coffins and properly reinterred.^[9]

1 Massachusetts’s Myles Standish Burial Ground

The Myles Standish Burial Ground calls itself the oldest “maintained” cemetery in the United States. As we’ve already seen with some dubious dates on this list, that may be up for debate. But there’s no question this cemetery is very old. It appears to have been first established as early as 1638. Its location in the Massachusetts city of Duxbury has historical meaning too. The area is close to where the Mayflower first made land from England early in the 17th century. So it should be no surprise to learn that many of the Mayflower’s notable pioneering passengers are buried there.

Other notable burials include he for whom the cemetery is named. Military commander Myles Standish was buried in it after he died near Duxbury in 1656. The man who played such a key role in protecting the Pilgrims during their early years in America is forever honored in the graveyard. In fact, his body has since been exhumed (twice!) to be honored with more significant memorials.

In addition to Standish, the site hosts many old Pilgrim grave markers. They include some fascinating examples of historic Puritan imagery. As a group, they were obsessed with mortality. And boy, do their gravestones show it. Gravestone designs of unsettling angels, smiling death’s heads, spooky skulls, and outlined coffins all confront modern visitors. Creepy!^[10]

+ Bonus: Cahokia

You didn’t think we forgot about Cahokia, did you? While grave mounds in West Virginia and New Mexico made this list, they don’t compare to the most iconic of all. Centuries ago, southern Illinois’s Cahokia was the largest settlement in America. The sprawling indigenous city had everything. At its peak from about 600 to 1350, more than 15,000 people lived there.

Cahokia had large residential neighborhoods, open spaces for events, large marketplaces, and even a permanent agricultural area. It also had a series of notable grave mounds. Today, historians believe the man-made hills were used for several purposes. Burying the dead was foremost among them, of course. But Cahokia residents also held religious ceremonies on the mounds and worshiped native gods from the top.

Today, the biggest of these hills is known as Mound 72. Archaeologists have been working on that site since the 1960s. Over the years, they have preserved the remains of more than 270 people. Some were interred in mass graves. Others were given more ornate burials. Those buried in the most shallow graves appear to show signs of violent death.

Interestingly, scientists believe those are also the most recent burials, dating to roughly 1300. Considering Cahokia was abandoned at some point in the 14th century, archaeologists think these burial mound findings point to a violent regional war that broke up the big city.^[11]