Midnight Mary Has Visitors

Shivering slightly in the cool October evening, Amy Durbin lifted a lit lantern to her wide-eyed face, approached a tombstone in Evergreen Cemetery, and began to tell the story that had been hanging over her all week: The death of ​“Midnight” Mary Hart, who perished Oct. 15, 1872 — at exactly 12 a.m.

“Mary Hart was just going about her business when she collapsed,” Durbin began. A few members of the 15-person crowd drew in closer, holding hands, and crouched by the tomb, lit by only a torch. ​“She never regained consciousness, and so everyone assumed she was dead.”

But after a quick burial, the New Haven lore has it, Hart’s aunt had a dream that her sweet niece was speaking to her from the coffin, still alive, and begging to be released. When the body was exhumed, the dream proved prophetic: the family found ​“Mary’s bloody nails broken and a petrified look on her face.”

Around Durbin, whispers of ​“oh nooo” abounded as dusk yielded to dark. Cemetery director Dale Fiore leaned forward on the stone, as if the story still weighed on him heavily after years of hearing it.

Director of Education and Visitor Experience for the New Haven Museum, Durbin told that ghastly tale — and several others of New Haven’s historical figures and damned spirits alike — at a weekend tour of Evergreen Cemetery. While the spiel has been perfected in time for Halloweeny jitters, Durbin is hoping to make the tour a monthly attraction, with the majority of tours during daylight hours and a few led by lantern after nightfall. Evergreen will make the second historical cemetery on her tour list, as the museum already has groups at Grove Street. 

Why those sites? At the base of it, Durbin said as she motioned for attendees to come closer to the grave of New Haven legends like Oliver Winchester, Wilbur Cross, and the Sargent family, she loves museum education and living history. As an educator, she wants to pull people in.

But there’s also this: How can we understand the city’s present if we don’t explore its millions of past breaths? 

Cemeteries are sprawling, monumental museums of people, for which there is no precise analogue. To be grudgingly reminded that the human body is a machine (and to oil it), one exercises. To explore our inner machinery, to grapple with mortality, we can visit the Museum of Morbid Anatomy, the Mütter Museum, the Musée Dupuytren. To understand what the Winchester Rifle did or how Wilbur Cross looked on film in 1938, one can go to the New Haven Museum. But it’s the cemetery, where family members often rest side by side, where viewers can see what epitaphs form pictures of those people, from their first steps to their last. 

Standing among the graves, Durbin brought those steps to life. Did anyone remember how great New Haven’s breweries once were? she asked by Phillip Fresenius tomb. What about the sturdy, time-tested pies — and frisbee-like pie plates — of H. H. Olds, whose grave is marked by a carved bouquet of wheat where aspiring bakers can still make rubbings? How about Charles Hooker, who treated the Amistad captives but was only remembered in medical textbooks as using one of the first stethoscopes? Elm-scented histories sprung from her animated hands.

She added to those one piece of serious advice: Don’t stay until midnight. 

For an episode of WNHH Radio’s ​“K Pasa” dedicated to the history, folklore and future of the cemetery, click on or download the audio above.