Mount Auburn Cemetery

America's first landscaped cemetery, founded in 1831 and designated a National Historic Landmark. Final resting place of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Winslow Homer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Buckminster Fuller. Harvard students called the area "Sweet Auburn."

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts is the first rural or garden cemetery in the United States, a National Historic Landmark that marked a distinct break from Colonial-era burying grounds and church-affiliated graveyards when it was dedicated in 1831. Envisioned as both a tranquil resting place for the dead and a vibrant park for the living, the cemetery spreads across 175 acres of rolling hills, with tombs, graves, and monuments positioned along winding paths carved through lush, secluded forestry. It stands as an American interpretation of the romantic ideals found in Paris's Père Lachaise or London's Abney Park.

More than eighty thousand of New England's finest rest here. American landscape painter Winslow Homer lies in this soil, as does poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose stately mausoleum draws visitors. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, is buried here, along with actor Edwin Booth—brother of John Wilkes Booth. Charles Bulfinch, architect of the U.S. Capitol, Faneuil Hall, and Harvard's University Hall, rests beneath a giant ornate vase along Bellwort Path.

A memorial honors Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first official African-American regiments to fight in the Civil War. Shaw himself lies in a mass grave near Fort Wagner, South Carolina, where he fell leading his men into battle. Simpler tombstones mark the graves of Dorothea Dix, the social activist for the mentally ill, and Bernard Malamud, author of "The Natural."

Mount Auburn doesn't often top lists of Massachusetts' most haunted locations—its reputation leans toward peaceful contemplation rather than paranormal activity. Yet the sheer weight of history and grief concentrated in these grounds has produced its share of strange encounters. One visitor to the cemetery was startled by an old man who suddenly screamed "Stop walking, Mary! Stop walking!" before jumping into his car and speeding away. What peripatetic specter he called after remains a mystery.

The cemetery inspired dozens of garden cemeteries across America, including Lowell Cemetery, which developed more active ghost legends like the Lady in White and Witch Bonney. Perhaps the spirits of Mount Auburn are simply more refined than those in newer burial grounds—content to rest among the rolling hills, the contemplative paths, and the monuments to achievement that surround them.

Haunted or not, Mount Auburn remains one of the most beautiful and historic landscapes in America, where the living walk among the illustrious dead and the boundary between worlds feels paper-thin.