The Great Cemetery Hunt

When I was in college, my overly morose friends and I would make frequent trips to the cemeteries in southern Indiana to wander the soundless rows and contemplate our inevitable demise. We would pack a picnic and a few trinkets that would act as awards for the person with the strangest name, the person who lived the longest, the person with the most spouses, and the monument with the biggest ego.

Though my wardrobe has gotten decidedly brighter, I still make regular visits to graveyards without any food or trinkets (though I do still look for the noteworthy deceased). My mother taught me the appreciation for cemeteries, dragging my brothers and me out to tiny family resting places, raking through long grass and woods to find disheveled clusters of headstones. As soon as I arrived in Maine, my mother insisted that we go to South Berwick to have a look at the Old Fields cemetery.



One of the notables buried there is Mehitable Goodwin, a captive of a local Native American tribe. There is a terrible tale found in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana about the death of Mehitable's five month old infant on the journey, whose body was hanged by the forked bough of a tree so that "she might have the comfort of seeing it again if ever they came that way." She was bounced around to several groups through battle and trade, settling with one tribe in Canada for five years before being returned to her husband and home.

The cemetery is beautiful, the graves strewn about over a rolling hill that cuts down to the Leighs Mill Pond. Most of the headstones are so old that they are made of slate instead of granite and many of them actually have the death's head symbol on them which would have definitely won some kind of an award back in my goth days.