Ramsey Cemetery

This story has a datable first sentence, and it is thirty words long. The Shadowlands Haunted Places Index was an unmoderated, user-submitted list of American haunted sites. Its Illinois page is preserved in the Internet Archive. In the snapshot of 12 December 2001 there is no Effingham entry at all — the word appears zero times, against 58 occurrences of "cemetery" on the same page, so the search works. In the snapshot of 8 August 2002 the entry is there, filed under a nickname: "Effingham - Kazbar - Old cemetery that has haunted caves. A werewolf and a man in a black cloak with red eyes is said to be seen there. Many weird things have happened here." Some time between February and October 2003 the heading was quietly changed from "Kazbar" to "Ramsey Cemetery", with the text untouched. Everything printed about this place since descends from those thirty anonymous words, and each retelling has added something. The drift can be measured. The 2002 original says "black cloak" and "red eyes". The listing quoted by the Effingham Daily News in October 2008 says "red glowing eyes". Michael Kleen's 2009 write-up says "glowing red eyes" — and, transcribing the original, turns "cloak" into "coat". By 2020 the Ghost Research Society is describing "the black hooded figure with the red eyes". Nobody reported anything new in those eighteen years; adjectives simply accumulated. The same thing happened to the hedges, and to their author. Kleen's February 2009 newsletter says the Shadowlands "mislabeled" the place, gives the page number for the Lewis and Fisk quotation, and ends his backwoodsman theory with the sentence "But that, like most of the explanations for these tales, is highly speculative." When he reposted the piece on 13 November 2018, "mislabeled" had become "labeled", the page number was gone, and the sentence about speculation was gone with it. The warlock deserves its own paragraph, because it is the clearest case of all. Its only source in the world is Kleen's 2009 log, and this is what he actually wrote: "I seem to recall the story of a warlock associated with Ramsey Cemetery... but I've been unable to find any mention of the 'warlock's grave' since my initial discovery. The warlock had been hung, I remember reading, from an old oak tree outside of the cemetery... This story was quite possibly created and lost years ago somewhere in the rumor mills of the Internet." The oak is real — a big graffitied tree stands just outside the gate — but the hanging is a folklorist's admittedly unrecoverable memory of something he read online, flagged as such by the folklorist himself. And everyone who has actually gone looking has come back with nothing. Kleen, who had taken four and a half years to find the shelters, noted that he "certainly didn't see any evidence of a werewolf." Paul Schmidt, the caretaker, told the Effingham Daily News in 2008 after fifteen years in the job that he had never seen a ghost there. Two local investigators who worked the site several times in 2004 with cameras and night-vision video said: "we've never got anything ourselves." Lewis and Fisk could not substantiate the chapel suicide. On 17 June 2023 a Wikipedia editor deleted the article's whole ghostlore section in two edits, with the summary "trimmed unsourced". There is no commercial motive to fall back on here. Nobody sells a ticket to Ramsey Cemetery; there is no tour, no gift shop, no Halloween event, only a sexton's phone number on a board. What kept the story alive was not a till but an index: a free directory that granted the place an entry, after which everyone downstream cited the entry. What is genuinely there at night is more banal and more damaging — parties, carved rock, graffiti on the gate tree, and, according to the sexton, occult-looking symbols, objects hung in the branches and once a possum nailed to a trunk. One of the site's own witnesses, posting in 2018 about a cloaked figure walking towards him, offered the alternative himself: "I don't know if it was paranormal or just a groundskeeper."