Keller's Chapel Cemetery

This small rural cemetery outside Jonesboro has accumulated dozens of legends over the decades. Its remote location and aging headstones create an atmosphere ripe for paranormal tales.

Keller's Chapel Cemetery spreads across a wooded tract along Keller's Chapel Road outside Jonesboro in Craighead County, northeastern Arkansas. The cemetery is one of the oldest continuous burial grounds in the region, with the earliest documented interment dating to approximately 1859 when J.W. Keller was buried on the family's land. The cemetery now contains over 1,200 memorial records spanning more than 160 years, with prominent family names including Keller, Wimpy, Findley, Wood, and Covington represented across multiple generations. Among the notable burials is William Murphy Loudermilk, who served as a private in the North Carolina Cavalry during the Civil War and was reportedly the last living veteran of the Confederate States Army from the region. A small chapel — the Keller's Chapel that gives the cemetery its name — stands on the property, a plain rural church building that has served the surrounding community since the nineteenth century.

The cemetery's haunted reputation is among the most elaborate and widely discussed in Arkansas, with dozens of legends attached to the site. The most emotionally resonant involves the Keller babies — nine infants from the Keller family who died in infancy or shortly after birth and are buried in the cemetery. The sound of babies crying has been heard by visitors after dark, a thin, persistent wailing that seems to come from the oldest section of the grounds where the smallest headstones are clustered. The crying carries across the cemetery on still nights, clear enough to be unmistakable yet impossible to locate — it shifts position, seeming to come from one direction and then another, as though the source were moving among the graves.

Ghostly lights are the cemetery's most frequently reported phenomenon. Orbs and unexplained illuminations follow visitors through the grounds at night, maintaining a consistent distance as though tracking their movement. Some witnesses have described the lights as perfect circles of fire — rings of luminosity that hover at ground level near specific graves before extinguishing. An elderly woman's apparition has been seen in the upstairs window of the chapel, visible as a figure in a rocking chair, rocking steadily in a building that has been locked and unoccupied at the time of the sighting.

The cemetery has generated a particular legend involving automobiles. Multiple independent accounts describe the same phenomenon: visitors who turn off their car engine at the cemetery gates find that it will not restart for several hours. One visitor reported that while struggling with a dead engine, a man appeared seemingly from nowhere and helped them get the car started. The man's hands were described as ice cold. When the visitor turned to thank him, the man had vanished — there was no one on the road in either direction, no house or structure nearby where someone could have appeared from or retreated to.

Other reported phenomena include a woman's scream heard from the back corner of the cemetery, loud enough to carry across the property; a chapel door that responds to knocking with an equal bang from inside, as though someone on the other side is answering; visitors in black clothing seen gathering in circles among the headstones on nights when no events are scheduled; and physical sensations including chest tightness and difficulty breathing near certain graves. The atmosphere of the cemetery after dark is described consistently across accounts as oppressive and watchful, a heaviness that settles over visitors and lifts only when they leave the grounds.

The cemetery's intense paranormal reputation has attracted both serious investigators and thrill-seekers over the years, and the resulting vandalism has led to restricted access. The property owners have limited paranormal investigations to protect the grounds and the headstones from damage. Keller's Chapel Cemetery remains one of the most legendarily haunted sites in northeastern Arkansas, its stories passed from generation to generation in Jonesboro and across Craighead County.