Mater Dolorosa Cemetery

The more one researches ghost stories about graveyards, the more one realizes that very few of them are even remotely based on anything specific. Cemeteries are considered haunted because they contain dead people and therefore must have ghosts. Perfectly ordinary cemeteries acquire all sorts of strange associations with the occult and sorcery for no discernible reason.

Mater Dolorosa Cemetery (yes, the sign has a spelling error) sits in Cuyahoga Valley National Park outside of Peninsula, Ohio. If you want to locate the cemetery, it is in the woods just next to the Park’s Happy Days Visitors’ Center. John and Mary Ann Doud, local Irish immigrants, bequeathed their family plot to the Bishop of Cleveland, who turned it over to the Mother of Sorrows Catholic Church nearby. The cemetery has just over a dozen headstones, and is a pretty typical 19th century cemetery of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants and their children.

But somehow a legend has grown up that this cemetery belongs to a local satanic church in Peninsula (how the church became satanic is unclear) and that it is used in demonic rituals. Ghostly white figures walk the cemetery and scare away anyone who comes near. Google “Helltown” for any of the stories. They have little bearing to the reality, but that hardly seems to matter – these are urban legends.