Mount Nebo Cemetery

Mount Nebo Cemetery is the burial ground of a Black Baptist congregation in the pine woods of southern Clarke County, Alabama, near the fork where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers meet. Four of its concrete markers were made by Isaac "Ike" Nettles Sr. (1885-1957), a farmer and inventor from nearby Nettles' Quarters, and they carry human faces. They are always called death masks, and the name is wrong: Nettles had his subjects press their faces into a box of sand while they were alive, then cast the mould in concrete. The stone everyone photographs, raised over his wife Korean in 1933, carries the faces of their three daughters, who were not dead and are not buried there; the inscription reads only "mother". The Alabama Historical Commission had the four objects listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 24 February 2000, reference number 00000141. The cemetery reaches lists of haunted places on the strength of four anonymous comments and one line added to Wikipedia in 2023. Nothing in the documentary record mentions a ghost. The faces are stranger than the story told about them.

The cemetery sits at the southern tip of Clarke County, Alabama, near the fork where the Alabama and the Tombigbee meet, down a dirt road in commercial pine plantation. The crossroads community beside it, Carlton, was first called Hal's Lake, after a runaway slave who built a stockade by the water and eluded his captors in the canebrake for years; the Alabama Historical Commission took that from T. H. Ball's 1882 county history when it wrote up the site. The Mt. Nebo Baptist congregation, traditionally African American, formed in the last third of the nineteenth century, after the Civil War. The present white frame church went up shortly after 1900. Burials began with the church, but the earliest graves were unmarked or marked with materials that have not survived, and most of what stands today is concrete and dates from the 1950s on. Four of those concrete markers were made by one man. Isaac "Ike" Nettles Sr. was born in 1885 on eighty-five acres near Carlton known as Nettles' Quarters. He studied at Tuskegee Institute and, according to his family, could not finish a divinity degree for lack of money. He worked at the Mobile Pulley Works during the First World War and came home to farm, but kept building machines: a great-nephew called him a "brilliant recluse" and an inventor in the Mobile Register in 1997, and relatives at a 2016 gathering remembered a corn sheller rigged out of a bicycle, a car driven by weights that he built for his children, and a design for a rifle. One of them, Gaines Pezent of nearby Rockville, said Nettles warned him he would sue if he copied one of his contraptions, because it was patented. Doshia Dean, a relative from Jackson, remembered a tall building he would climb into, where he said he received his ideas. "I thought he was crazy," she told the room, laughing. The faces are almost always called death masks, and almost every source that calls them that also explains why the name is wrong. Nettles had his subjects press their faces into a box of sand while they were alive, and cast the mould in concrete; a relative told the writer Ed Williams, for a 1985 article the nomination leans on, that the mix included paper and wire. The 2016 historical marker at the edge of the cemetery puts it plainly: he "used concrete to make images of living people's faces for their tombstones." Three of the four are family. The largest was his mother, a life-size figure from the hips up; locals told the surveyors it originally held her own hair, and a later account says birds picked it out. Her name is spelled Selena in the nomination and Celina on a hand-lettered slab added at the foot of the ruin and dated 22 January 1983, which reads "Celina Nettles, Born in 1800s, Died January 1940." The nomination's own narrative section instead gives 1933, the year it says Nettles lost his mother and his wife within weeks of each other, and the 2016 marker follows 1933. The date is genuinely unsettled and the only object on the ground says 1940. The best-known stone is the one raised over Korean Nettles, sometimes written Cora, his wife, buried on 6 July 1933. It is a narrow headstone carrying three faces arranged off-centre, with pieces of clear glass set into the concrete around the top. The faces are not hers. They are their three daughters, Pauline, Marie and Clara, who were living when the moulds were taken, and the inscription simply says "mother." A fourth stone belongs to Angel Ezella Nettles, a relative — the University of South Alabama's outreach collection calls her his aunt, and the county paper spells her Estella — with her face, her name and her nickname "Sis Dollie" in raised letters. The last is the only one outside the family: Manul Burell, a local man who died in 1946 and who, having seen the others, asked Nettles for one of his own. His mask sits above a drawn shirt with a collar and buttons, and across the shirt front is written "He is at rest." The stone spells his surname with one r; the 2016 marker doubles it. Nettles left Clarke County for Cleveland and then Detroit, where he worked for the Ford Motor Company. He died in 1957. His family cannot agree where: Carlton, Detroit or Mobile, depending on who is asked. His son told the surveyors in 1999 that the man who made the only portrait gravestones in the county lies in an unmarked grave in this cemetery. The stones were put on a list of Clarke County's most endangered historic places in 1996. Blythe Semmer and Trina Binkley of the Alabama Historical Commission prepared the nomination, dated 24 August 1999, with photographs taken by Johnathan Farris on 3 February that year, and the four objects were entered on the National Register of Historic Places on 24 February 2000 as "Nettles, Isaac, Gravestones," reference number 00000141, under the county's multiple property submission. The nominated area is less than an acre: a triangle inside the cemetery, measured out from the southeast corner of the church.

The National Register nomination filed by the Alabama Historical Commission in 1999 places the site on the "E side Mt. Nebo Rd. (Co. 867), 0.5 mi S of Co. 19", in the vicinity of Carlton, Clarke County, Alabama, zip code 36545, with a UTM reference of zone 16, easting 417440, northing 3468140. The narrative description sets the cemetery "just west of the crossroads community of Carlton on County Road 19", reached down "a dirt road off the road to Hal's Lake", with the graves "east of the church building along the north side of Mt. Nebo Road", over a nominated area of less than one acre. Ownership is entered on the form as private, and the listed owner is the Mount Nebo Baptist Church, care of the Reverend King David Jackson at PO Box 24, Gainestown, Alabama 36540. The current function is recorded as "graves/burials", which is to say a congregation's burial ground still in use, where the markers surrounding the four Nettles stones are mostly plain concrete slabs that the surveyors dated "from the 1950s forward". A historical marker was placed at the edge of the ground in 2016, and the Clarke County Democrat wrote that it "heralds Isaac Nettles' life and his unusual tombstones". The concrete is failing, and the nomination states that "all of the Nettles stones are endangered by the effects of weather on concrete", recording of the Manul Burell marker that "the concrete at the top of Mr. Burell's head has been damaged by vandals, but the rest of the design is intact". On repair the Commission concluded that "the preservation of the stones is a difficult proposition because of their materials and the need to leave them intact in the cemetery", while the Clarke County Democrat reported in 2016 that a tombstone preservationist consulted about the markers judged that "they were art and anything that would be done to them would do more harm than good and alter them too greatly", and instead "suggested making many photos of the stones as a way to preserve them for prosperity". The same article prints a contact for the museum that gathers material on Nettles: "Anyone who has any information on Nettles may call Kerry Dunaway at the Clarke County Museum in Grove Hill, 251-275-8684", still on the newspaper's page when it was consulted on 9 September 2026. The nomination itself, together with the 1999 survey photographs, is free to read at NPGallery under reference number 00000141, while the University of South Alabama's JagWorks repository holds a photographic gallery of the stones alongside a filmed oral history of the site recorded with Kerry Dunaway.