Forest Hill Cemetery Update 8/30/20

We’ve decided to resurrect our blog here at the Singular Fortean Society, and there’s no better way to do that than by discussing one of our favorite places: Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery.

You can read all about our first trip to it in our feature article from 2016, but here’s an excerpt to provide a little history.

Forest Hill Cemetery is a real life horror movie premise. This ghostly graveyard sprawls over 100 acres, encompasses seven Native American effigy mounds, and has areas devoted to every major American conflict—including the section for confederate soldiers who died at Madison’s Camp Randall POW camp. Naturally, as one might expect, a cemetery with Civil War dead built on an Indian burial ground comes complete with its own rumors of supernatural suspense, and if you’re looking for a ghost of a good time on a pleasant fall afternoon in Wisconsin, you could do much worse. Of particular interest are the Civil War plots, and the granite boulder monument to the “Unknown Dead,” donated by Women’s Relief Corp No. 37 in 1891. Many reports of unsettling feelings and strange shadows originate around these sites. While my own visits to the historic burial site have yet to reveal any evidence of ethereal idlers, strange tales of the funerary grounds abound, and once you’ve seen Forest Hill, it’s easy to see why.

We decided to visit the cemetery again, now that pandemic restrictions and the weather allow it, and naturally we were not disappointed.

The purpose of this trip was to film a video for our Fortean Friends and Society Members, so if you’re interested in viewing that, then visit us over at our Patreon page and we should have it posted soon. We covered our favorite spots—like the Civil War plots and effigy mounds—and even conducted a Randonautica experiment that yielded some interesting results.

Ultimately, as always, we were left with the impression that if Forest Hill Cemetery is haunted, it isn’t by the restless dead. Instead, it carries the emotional weight of countless mourners having poured their sadness into the land’s psychic repository over the course of centuries. That’s what we think is haunting the cemetery; not the dead, but the living.

Keep It Weird,

Tobias & Emily

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

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