I never cared about cemetery ghost stories until someone started leaving fresh dahlias on my father’s grave every week. They were his own dahlias, from the garden he planted, at a house our family had already sold. My town has its share of haunted graveyard stories. I never thought my family would end up in one.
My father died in March of 2021. He was seventy-three. He’d been a mail sorter for the post office in Bangor, Maine, for thirty-eight years, and he was quiet in the way a lot of men his age are quiet. The one thing he talked about was his dahlias.
He grew them in the side yard of our house in Brewer, across the river. Dozens of them. Every fall he dug up the tubers, wrapped them in newspaper, and stored them in the basement, and every spring he planted them again. His favorite was a variety called Café au Lait. Huge, pale, creamy pink flowers as big as a dinner plate. He’d give them to the neighbors in big armfuls. He never gave them to my mother, which she joked about, and which I never thought about until later.
After he died, my mother moved into an apartment near my sister. We sold the house that June to a young couple with a baby. They said they’d try to keep up the garden. I left them a note about the dahlia tubers in the basement.
Fresh Flowers on Sundays
My father is buried in an old cemetery in Brewer, on a hill above the river. It’s a pretty place. Big maple trees, some stones from the 1700s, a little iron fence around the oldest section.
I started visiting him on Sundays after church. I’m not religious, really, but my mother asked me to go to church with her, and the cemetery was on the way back. I’d stand there for ten minutes and tell him about the Red Sox.
In August of that year, there were flowers on his grave.
Dahlias. Café au Lait. Three of them, in the little bronze vase that’s built into the base of the headstone. Fresh. Water in the vase.
I asked my sister. I asked my mother. Nobody had brought them. My mother said maybe one of the neighbors from the old street. She said he gave half of Brewer dahlias over the years.
The next Sunday, there were fresh ones. Three again. The old ones were gone.
And the Sunday after that.
The flowers in the vase were always perfect. Not a brown petal. Cut maybe a day before. I knew enough about dahlias from my father to know they don’t last long once they’re cut.
The Woman in the Green Coat
In September, I asked the caretaker. He’s an older man named Lucien who has mowed that cemetery for twenty-five years. He keeps a little shed at the bottom of the hill.
He knew exactly who I meant. He said there was a woman who came every Thursday evening, right around dusk. He said she wore a long green coat even in summer. He said she always went to my father’s grave first, and then walked up to the old section.
I asked him how old she was. He thought about it. He said, “Hard to say. Young, I’d have guessed. But she dresses old.”
So on a Thursday in late September, I left work early and sat in my car at the bottom of the cemetery hill at 6:30 p.m.
At about 6:50, with the sun going down behind the trees, I saw her. I hadn’t seen her come in. She was just there, walking up the gravel path between the stones. A long dark green coat, buttoned up. Dark hair pinned back. Something pale in her arms.
She stopped at my father’s grave and knelt down. She took the old flowers out of the vase and put new ones in. She stayed there for a minute with her hand on top of the headstone.
Then she stood up and walked up the hill toward the iron fence. Toward the old section.
I got out of the car and followed her. Not fast. I don’t know what I would have said to her. Thank you, maybe. Who are you, maybe.
The air on the hill smelled like cut grass and cold dirt. My shoes were loud on the gravel. Hers didn’t make any sound at all. I noticed that, and I told myself it was because she was walking on the grass.
She went through the gate in the iron fence and turned behind a big maple. When I came around the maple, she was gone.
The Grave in the Old Section
Where she’d been standing there was a small, plain granite stone, newer than the old ones around it. In the little vase at its base there were three Café au Lait dahlias. Fresh.
The name on the stone was Ellen Marsh. Born 1950. Died 1972.
I’d never heard the name in my life.
I asked my mother that weekend. I asked it carefully. She was quiet for a long time, and then she told me.
She said that before she met my father, he’d been engaged to a girl named Ellen. They were twenty-two. Ellen was killed in a car accident on Route 1A in the spring of 1972, two months before the wedding. She said my father never talked about it. Not once in forty-seven years of marriage. My mother only knew because his sister told her.
She said Ellen’s family buried her in the old section of the Brewer cemetery because her grandparents were there. She said, “Your father must have known exactly where she was. He went to that cemetery for every funeral in town and never once walked up the hill.”
I asked her if Ellen liked dahlias.
My mother laughed, a sad little laugh. She said Ellen was the one who gave my father his first dahlia tubers. As an engagement present. She said that’s why he never gave them to her.
What the Cemetery Ghost Stories Never Told Me
I drove over to the old house the next day. I knocked on the door and asked the young couple if the dahlias had come up that summer.
The husband laughed and said yes, they’d come up like crazy. Then he said something strange. He said they kept getting cut. Every Wednesday night, three flowers would be gone from the Café au Lait plants by the side fence. Cut clean with something sharp. He said he’d assumed it was a neighbor kid, and he didn’t mind, because there were so many.
Every Wednesday night. And every Thursday at dusk, a woman in a green coat brings three of them to the cemetery. One for my father. And then she walks up the hill, and leaves three for herself.
I didn’t tell the young couple any of that. I just asked if they’d let me take a few tubers when they dug them up in the fall. They said sure.
I planted them this spring at my own house. They came up big. Café au Lait, pale and huge.
Last Wednesday night, three of them were gone.
I’m not going to stop her. I’ve decided that much. I just go up the hill to the old section now, too, on my Sundays, and I check that her water is fresh.
I think my father would want somebody to.
For more ghost stories for adults about the people we lose, read the haunted elevator story about a closed floor, a haunted house story about a rotary phone in Galena, or the new house horror story about a third garage remote.
Share your cemetery ghost stories
Have you ever found something on a loved one’s grave that nobody in the family left there? Share your cemetery ghost stories, or any graveyard ghost stories from your own town, in the comments below.
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