Union Cemetery and the White Lady

An 18th-century burial ground at a rural crossroads, and a story that has outgrown it.

Union Cemetery sits near Stepney Road in Easton, Connecticut, just off the junction of Routes 59 and 136. The site dates back to the 18th century, which is the solid fact underneath everything else here.

The legend is the White Lady. She is said to haunt Union Cemetery and also Stepney Cemetery over in Monroe, and she is described the way White Lady ghosts are described everywhere: in a diaphanous white nightgown, or a wedding dress. The demonologist Ed Warren claimed to have seen her, and to have video of her.

Ghost hunters rank it among the most haunted cemeteries in the United States, and locally it is called the most haunted place in Connecticut regardless of the season, a description the Daily Voice reported in 2011 while noting that a week of power outages had cancelled that year's Halloween.

The named sources are worth knowing, because they are the story. Lorraine Warren, who studied demonology and lived just down the road, said she and her late husband Ed visited many times to document activity, that they watched the figure weave in and out between the gravestones, and that they have her on camera, though who she is they do not know. Donna Kent, founder of the Cosmic Society of Paranormal Investigation, writes in Ghost Stories and Legends of Southwestern Connecticut that the White Lady glides between Union Cemetery and Stepney Cemetery down the road. Kent also says nobody has ever established who she was in life. Plenty of other people have posted cemetery videos to YouTube without catching anything.

Which is the honest summary: this is a small, old, rural New England burial ground whose reputation comes almost entirely from one recurring folklore figure and from the people who made a career of investigating her.

If you go, go in daylight and treat it as what it is. It is a working cemetery with 18th-century graves in it, in a quiet part of Easton, and the people buried there have relatives. The White Lady stories are worth knowing about. They are not a reason to turn up after dark with a torch.