Midnight Mary's Grave (Evergreen Cemetery)

Mary E. Hart, a seamstress from the Winthrop Street neighborhood, collapsed suddenly at age 47 on October 15, 1872, and remained unconscious until she died at midnight. Local legend holds she was mistakenly buried alive by a family who believed her dead, and that when she was later exhumed, her nails showed she had tried to claw her way free. Her monument in Evergreen Cemetery bears a line often mistaken for a curse — "The people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away" — which is actually an abridged quotation from the Book of Job. Generations of visitors have made a tradition of visiting the grave at midnight, and local legend holds that anyone who does will themselves be dead within a year.