Local Point of Interest:

Midnight Mary

 Is it true? The stories have been told. It's your choice to believe or not to believe.

From what scant historical accounts there are, Mary Hart led an unremarkable life. It was, however, her alleged unusual death and what happened afterward that has made her story memorable.

First off, let’s start with what is known to be fact: That in 1872, a woman by the name of Mary Hart died in New Haven and was thereafter interred in Evergreen Cemetery.

Her very real pink granite tombstone reads:

AT HIGH NOON
JUST FROM, AND ABOUT TO RENEW
HER DAILY WORK, IN HER FULL STRENGTH OF
BODY AND MIND
MARY E. HART
HAVING FALLEN PROSTRATE:
REMAINED UNCONSCIOUS, UNTIL SHE DIED AT MIDNIGHT,
OCTOBER 15, 1872
BORN DECEMBER 16, 1824

Oh, and then across the top, it says: THE PEOPLE SHALL BE TROUBLED AT MIDNIGHT AND PASS AWAY. The quote itself is not some ancient curse or the last words of some poor soul convicted of witchcraft. It is an abridged Biblical passage from Job, chapter 34, verse 20. The complete passage, in the King James original version goes, “In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at midnight, and pass away: and the mighty shall be taken away without hand.” The passage makes sense when one reads the rest of the marker.

There are three different stories surrounding the demise of Ms. Hart. The first  and most horrific  says her family found her apparently dead of a stroke at the stroke of midnight and quickly had her buried; her aunt, however, had a dream the next night in which she saw Mary still alive in her coffin and plead with the powers-that be to dig her up. After they finally capitulated, dug her up and opened her casket, they discovered a horrific sight: Mary was dead, but apparently hadn’t been quite that way when buried her fingernails were bloodied and the inside of her coffin was shredded as she had apparently tried to claw her way out. Being buried six feet under and leaving her to rot eventually made her all dead.

The next legend surrounding Mary is that following her possibly nasty demise, her restless spirit would wander the area around her former home on Winthrop Avenue (adjacent to Evergreen Cemetery), occasionally taking rides with unsuspecting good samaritans. A variation on the old “disappearing hitchhiker” tale, a woman fitting Mary’s description would bum a ride late at night and when the driver would return the next day to see if she got home alright, they would discover that the person they aided was in fact the spirit of the departed Mary.

The final story is also from the urban legend files; basically going along the lines of Mary having been a witch in life and her grave being cursed anyone who was there at midnight would meet a terrible end when the witch rose from the dead. Since New Haven is renowned as a college town, there was always a student or two who scoffed at the story and tried to stay the night in the cemetery, only to be found dead the next morning, a victim of the murderous spirit of Midnight Mary.

Of course, none of these stories can be confirmed (or denied). The good people of New Haven have always been happy to continue sharing the supernatural stories of Midnight Mary, the woman whose legacy features a cursed gravestone and a tale of great misfortune.