East Fork Cemetery – Contribution

10/21/2012: Thanks to Sumner Hobart for sharing the experience he and a friend had while checking out the legend of East Fork Cemetery (also known as Old Bethel Cemetery) in Clermont County. Sumner and his friend Ashton heard a woman yelling something at them and saw a white cloud forming at the cemetery’s gate as they quickly left the area.

Me and a few of my friends heard about the woman who haunts the East Fork Cemetery, how there is a faint and then strong smell of perfume and garlic, and the appearance of an old woman dressed in white. We, being stupid teenagers, decided we should check it out in hope of an adrenaline rush. Me and my friend Ashton, who had smelled perfume on a previous visit with some of his friends, were the first to set foot in the cemetery. We walked around the middle and looked at the various old, masonic gravestones. We were there for about two minutes when, in the distance, we saw a vehicle coming down the road. We hid behind the Methodist church until the vehicle had passed.

I leaned against the white wall of the church and began to feel uneasy. I put my hand on Ashton’s shoulder and told him, “We need to get out of here!” Just as I said that, we heard a woman’s voice yell at us coming from the woods/gravestones directly in front of us! Terrified, we sprinted back toward our car and left as fast as we could! As we drove off, I looked out of the back window and watched as a white, shapeless cloud became more and more visible behind the cemetery gate. We left so quickly I didn’t have time to see if the cloud formed the shape of that old woman. I don’t know what the voice yelled at us. All I know is it sounded like a woman’s voice and it was NOT happy that we were walking on her friends graves.

I went back to the cemetery the next day and found that in the direction the voice came from was the oldest portion of the cemetery. I also noticed that the cemetery was built on a hill and a few of the graves had been moved due to erosion of the earth. Maybe the erosion awoke one of the spirits. Maybe God sent an angel to guard these graves, many of which were soldiers of the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW1, and others. Or maybe it’s just some old woman who likes to scare gullible teenagers like us. I would love to learn more about the cemetery and church history. Perhaps that would answer some questions to the smells, yells, and appearances of an old woman.