Episode 62: The Stymwood Cemetery

In this episode we take a trip to Eliot to investigate the Stymwood Cemetery. This small family plot has a unique history and an old custom, that if the dead men buried there aren't buried face down, then they may come back to haunt those that didn't properly bury them. Lucas and Chris look into this urban legend and ponder what could make dead men walk again.

Content Warning: cemeteries, sudden death, deceased parents, reanimated dead, alcohol, cancer, murder

Host: Chris Estes
Writer: Chris Estes
Senior Investigator: Lucas Knight
Sound Design: Chris Estes

Transcript

Malevolent Maine

Episode 62: The Stymwood Cemetery

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

LUCAS: An underground black market that deals exclusively in paranormal paraphernalia. A flooded town with one final dark secret. And the spirits of children long since departed. These are the stories coming your way in the coming weeks.

Hi everyone, it’s Lucas. As always thanks for listening and sharing our show with your friends and families. If you’d like to support us even more, consider joining our Malevolent Mob at Patreon. For a small monthly fee you have access to all of our side stories, the Black Tarot, Cardinal Sins, Witch’s Mark, and Crash Course, plus all of our Malevolent Morsels - deleted and extended scenes. That adds up to hours of extra content. And now you can purchase individual episodes or collections for a one-time payment. Thanks for all your support and keep listening.

The stairs creak softly as your bare foot comes down on the cold wood. You’re trying to be quiet, but there’s something wrong; you can feel it. The air is cold. Too cold. As you slowly descend you begin to see the kitchen through the dingy orange light over the stove. There’s something else, too. Someone else. But he couldn’t be here. It’s not possible. And yet, there he is sitting there

This is Malevolent Maine.

Lie still, MMers, today’s story brings us to the town of Eliot at the southern tip of the state. But before we get that we have to address something that happened in our last episode.

Towards the end of Episode 61 our recorded message was… well, interrupted by an unknown voice. This voice claimed to be Brother Magus, the enigmatic head of the secret society known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of the Cardinal Court. We, and in particular Lucas, have been on the trail of this figure ever since we first encountered the HBCC three years ago. 

We will be completely honest, we have no idea how Brother Magus was able to interfere with our show. We went back and listened to the audio file we uploaded to our podcast host. The uploaded file didn’t contain Magus’s message. Neither did the original sound files we recorded or Megan’s session in the booth. Not to get too technical, but there shouldn’t be a way for that message to get out. We’ve talked with several IT people, some podcast people, and even some cyber security people. All of them agree that what Magus did should be impossible. 

We don’t know how he accessed and corrupted our broadcast. We’ll monitor this and if it happens again we will continue to release the clean audio for our listeners as we value you and your dedication to us. We apologize for this inconvenience, and we’re just as concerned as you are. More to come on this, we’re sure.

Back to today’s story, however. According to the earliest reports, the town of Eliot was settled in 1623 as a harbor and lumber port, before being established as part of nearby Kittery. It separated in 1660, but didn’t become a fully incorporated town until the 1800s. Today it’s well known as a quaint coastal town with a rich historical background.

A part of that history includes the Stymwood Cemetery. The private burial ground is located in a small section of a five acre plot of land currently owned by Brenda Howard. It was Howard herself, 66 and recently retired after years of working as an elementary school music teacher, who reached out to us about the graveyard on her property that she claims is haunted.

“My father was Bernie Lynch,” she told us in an email exchange we had with her a few months back. His father was Irving Lynch, and so on and so forth all the way back to Robert P Lynch, who came here from Boston. This land has always been in our family, and all of the firstborn male Lynches are buried here...well, except for my dad.”

Bernie Lynch passed away in 2003, and at his request he was cremated. Brenda has his ashes on the mantle above her woodstove. According to Brenda and supported by genelogical records, he is in fact the only firstborn male Lynch not buried in the Stymwood Cemetery.

LUCAS: Which brings us to the name. No one really knows where the name Stymwood came from. It does not appear to be a family name nor is there any connection to a known person or place that we could discover. Johnathan Lynch, the son of the earliest landowner, seemingly named it that when his father passed and he had the cemetery built. The origin of the name appears to follow the common naming convention of combining a location - the wooded land on the property with a family name, Stym, but again, historical records don’t seem to support this theory. It appears, perplexingly enough, that this is a completely made up word or name.

Small family burial plots aren’t that uncommon in Maine or all of New England. As settlers established first homes, and then larger communities, the need for a place to lay loved ones to rest became a growing concern. Often a corner of the property was dedicated to these personal cemeteries. These days, they are mostly overgrown and rarely, if ever used. As the old stones that were used to mark the passing of beloved ancestors begin to crumble and deteriorate, there is a serious concern that these monuments to history may soon disappear altogether.

And as far as Brenda Howard is concerned, this can’t come soon enough for the Stymwood Cemetery.

You see, Stymwood has a unique tradition - all of the coffins are buried upside down, with their lid pressed into the ground and their bottoms facing up to the sky.

This odd custom goes all the way back to the cemetery’s earliest inhabitant - Robert P Lynch. Brenda said the story of her ancestor’s death and subsequent burials is a well known local legend. To this day, she says, people come out to the Stymwood to see the burial grounds.

The cemetery itself sits near the site of the old family homestead which burned down in 1901. A second home was built farther away, across the property, but this was eventually demolished and replaced with a more modern, larger third one in 1950. This third home, where Brenda currently lives, has been remodeled and updated over the years, so while it looks like an older home, it definitely has a more modern feel to it.

By driving a short way down the dirt road past Brenda’s home, visitors can get to the narrow dirt driveway that leads to the cemetery. Brenda has even cleared out a space for five or six cars to park. She says Stymwood has become something of a tourist spot, at least for those trying to get close to the cemetery’s unique story.

The legend goes that Robert P Lynch fell from a ladder one day in 1781 while working to repair the roof of his home. He hit his head on a stone and slipped into a coma. He lingered there, caught between life and death for three days, before finally succumbing to his injuries. He was buried on a Saturday in a plot dug by his own son just a few yards from where he fell. 

Two days later, returning from a visit with friends in town, Lynch’s son and his wife found Robert P Lynch sitting on the front porch of the home, dressed in the same clothes he had been buried in. 

At first, Robert Junior and his bride thought they had made a terrible mistake, but sure enough Robert was still dead. He was sitting in his rocker on the porch, but he was just as lifeless as when they had put him in the ground. 

They buried Lynch again, and sure enough two days later he was back. This time propped up on the covered well, looking as if he had been out for a walk in his Sunday finest and decided to take a quick rest before continuing on.

Brenda couldn’t tell us how the younger Lynch responded or what he thought was happening with his father’s body, but he buried his father a third time. This time burying the simple wooden coffin upside down by mistake.

The elder Lynch didn’t return after that. 

LUCAS: Perhaps the family believed someone was playing a cruel trick on them. Maybe they thought wild animals had somehow dug up the body and dragged it back. People will believe all kinds of outlandish things if it means they don’t have to face supernatural truths. According to the old family story, though, this strange incident was largely forgotten. That is until Robert W. Lynch, the son who had buried his father not once but thrice, died unexpectedly of typhoid. He was promptly buried in the family plot next to his father. He was discovered two days later sitting on a hay bale. His widow, perhaps remembering the ordeal with her father in law, quietly had her late husband reburied, this time with his coffin face down.

Since that time every male member of the Lynch family, tracing a direct line from Robert P Lynch down to Brenda’s grandfather, Irving, has been buried coffin facedown in the Stymwood Cemetery. And according to Brenda, at least, none of the Lynches have come back.

Which is the perfect ending to an unsettling, but mostly harmless local legend. It’s just the kind of thing old timers will tell on cold winter nights or around cups of coffee at the town diner on stormy, gray October mornings. It’s the sort of thing that makes teens dare each other to go out to the Stymwood Cemetery at midnight and take a chip of stone from one of the graves or say the name of one of the long-dead Lynches three times and wait for a reply. 

It’s the exact reason Brenda Howard put a little parking lot near the old graveyard. “People like to come see it,” she told us. “They like to think they have a small dose of spookiness or a hint of the supernatural. There’s no harm in that.”

It’s also the kind of story that is almost assuredly completely made up; a fun town yarn passed down from generation to generation, but no more than a campfire ghost story.

Except, there’s some fact to back this one up.

LUCAS: Maine’s oldest newspaper, The Falmouth Gazette, has an article from August of 1781. The paper mentions how one R. P. Lynch of Kittery’s grave had been desecrated by vandals. Nothing of value had been stolen from the deceased, but that his body had been positioned on his porch. The constable had been contacted but as of yet no cause or motive had been discovered.   

This may seem like the origin of the urban legend, the place where the fiction met actual facts, but we think there’s more to the story than just a creative interpretation of history.

William Lynch, the son of Robert W, grandson of the founder of the Eliott Lynches, went on to be a somewhat successful banker in Portland, before moving back to the family homestead. He became a great patron for higher education, investing quite a lot of money into Maine’s colleges. In fact, the Lynch Scholarship given every year to a student attending Armitage College to a student studying either the arts or finance is given every year in his honor and from a fund he left the college before his death.

It’s Armitage College where a collection of William Lynch’s correspondance is kept, and after some back and forth emails, a work study student was able to scan and send digital copies from their archives.

One of them contains a letter written in 1805, the year his father, the aforementioned Robert W Lynch died suddenly. The letter, written by a then thirteen year old William, is addressed to a cousin on his mother’s side who lived in or near Baltimore. It’s unclear whether the letter was ever sent, sent and returned, or found its way back to William by some other means. But the letter contains a particularly poignant detail about half way in.

In the letter, young William, explains to his cousin, Margaret, that his father has passed away. He laments not being able to even say a proper goodbye to his father who caught typhoid and progressed through its deadly stages very rapidly. But it’s when he describes the events of two days later that we paid particular attention.

The passage reads:

“Yesterday, Thursday, I woke as is my custom, before the dawn, to feed  the cows and livestock. I went to the barn and was shocked to discover Father sitting on a hay bale. He looked lively, save that his eyes were closed and his head was back at an awkward angle. He was dressed in the suit we had buried him in, but there was no trace of dirt anywhere about his body. I will admit to you, and you only, that I screamed with fright when I saw him. If I ever find the defilers who dared to disturb his rest, I will bring justice down on them.”

The letter goes on to explain how they reburied the body, coffin door down, per William’s mother’s demand. There is some more about how angered and upset he is, but then it quickly moves on to other matters.

Of course, none of this is absolute proof. It is entirely possible that these two stories, these two generations of Lyches were victims of some disturbing prank, but the small details, plus the fact that William’s letter has been sitting in obscurity until Lucas discovered while going through the cache of letters, notes, and ledgers we got from the university, seems to indicate at least some of the Lynch family legend is true.

Which brings us back to the present and Brenda Howard and her father, Bernie.

Brenda told us that the reason her father refused to be buried there is because he witnessed firsthand what the cemetery could do when his father, Irving, suddenly died. He was just nineteen when his father suffered a fatal heart attack in 1949.

Bernie Lynch was just a little too young to have joined the American efforts in World War II, but by nineteen, he was attempting to build his own life. When his father passed, he moved back to the family home to help care for his mother and take over the family land.

As was the custom, he buried his father in the Stymwood Cemetery during a small ceremony only attended by his mother, himself, and a local minister. By 1949, over two hundred years since the passing of the family patriarch and his… mysterious return, the facedown burying custom had passed into something of ancient family history.

Brenda told us that her father had never been much of a drinker, but one night, Brenda thinks it was either late 2002 or early 2003, before he got too sick, Bernie invited his daughter to come over. She was in her forties by then, still married, and not yet living in the home on Brixam Road. When she arrived her father was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a bottle of scotch between him and the empty seat, and two glasses. One was half full of the liquor, and the other he filled when his daughter sat down across from him.

“There was a look in his eyes,” Brenda told us. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before. Like the life was already starting to fade away. For a minute his eyes, which were all bloodshot and tired, looked like they had been painted on, like those stones one of those ancient people used to put over the dead. Then he blinked and he was my dad again. Or, well, what was left of him.”

By then, unbeknownst to Brenda, the cancer that would later claim his life, was already eating away at his body. Brenda says she doesn’t know if her dad knew that then yet, but she suspects he probably did and was still trying to keep it from her. 

They filled the glasses and over a few hours of drinking and talking, Bernie Lynch told stories from his life. Some Brenda had heard a hundred times before, others were quite new. She heard stories from his childhood, a story about her mom burning a loaf of bread so bad it nearly burned down the house, and how the two of them, Bernie and Linda had sat on the kitchen floor first crying, then laughing, then crying again.

Brenda says it was close to the midnight, and the bottle was nearly empty, when her dad began to tell her the story of her grandfather and how he would be the last Lynch ever buried in the Stymwood.

Bernie never believed in the old custom. He told her that at nineteen he thought he knew everything about the world, and knew there was no way the dead men could dig themselves out of the grave and wander back home.

His mother had argued with him, but in the end, he called the whole thing foolish, and when he lowered his dad’s casket into the ground, the lid was facing up. Then they all went home, mourned their loved one with a traditional reception and did their best to move on with their lives.

Bernie said he didn’t think anything of it over the next few days, but two nights after the funeral, he woke up in the middle of the night, thirsty. Normally he would have used the upstairs bathroom to get a drink of water, but lately the sink had been acting up and making a lot of noise. He didn’t want to wake his mother, who had slept so poorly since his father’s death, so he tip-toed down the hall to the stairs that would lead to the kitchen.

Bernie told his daughter he was halfway down the stairs when he realized something was wrong. It was cold, much colder than it should be, and he said he was worried one of them had forgotten to close the door all the way. The other thing that bothered him was that he could hear sounds coming from downstairs.

At first they were faint, almost shuffling noises, like soft fabric dragged across the floor, but he thought he could almost make out some sort of pattern or rhythm.

He was nearly to the bottom of the stairs, when he could peer into the kitchen and see what was making the noise. He told his daughter he did everything in his power to stop from screaming. He clapped both hands over his mouth and squeezed hard, but even still a muffled cry leaked out.

There, in the middle of the kitchen, illuminated by the pale light over the stove, was his dead father.

As Bernie watched, Irving Lynch took another halting step towards the kitchen table, the same one where he would later tell his daughter the story. His movements were slow, but somehow jerky, Brenda told us her father said. His leg jerked up at an uncomfortable angle, then lurched forward. His body leaned in, one hip first then the other, until planting the full weight on the leg. Bernie said it looked like a parody of a man walking on wet leaves in his stocking feet or across sharp rocks. But his movement across the kitchen was slow, and the dead man stepped down with just the lightest touch; the whispering sounds Bernie had heard were his father’s black Oxford dress shoes touching down on the cracked linoleum. 

Bernie said he was frozen in place, three steps from the bottom. One hand stayed clapped over his mouth, but the other drifted down and closed around his neck. Unconsciously he squeezed, cutting off some of the air to his lungs, and keeping him from shrieking. He told Brenda that the only thing he could think of was not waking his mother. If Cheryl Lynch woke and saw her dead husband, he knew she would surely die of fright.

As Bernie watched, the dead men moved across the kitchen. One pale white hand reached out in that same spasmodic manner and gripped the back of the wooden kitchen chair, and with a light touch, he pulled it out. Then the dead man dropped into the chair. The body moved as if all of the muscles weren’t connected or as if several different people controlled different parts, like a team of puppeteers. When Irving Lynch sat down, his head flopped backward so it looked like he was staring up at the ceiling, and his mouth fell into a rictus grin. 

Slowly, the corpse’s head dropped down and Bernie was terrified to find his father’s eyes were open and seemingly staring right at him. The dead man’s head continued to drop until it fell to the end of its range of movement, then bobbed a few times. The eyes never blinked and never left the direction where Bernie stood paralyzed on the stairs.

“He just sat there, unmoving,” Brenda told us. “Dad said he had no idea how long he stood there, but granddad never moved.” Slowly, the stretched smile faded, and after another hour or more, his eyes drifted closed, slowly.

The rising sun was the only thing that got Bernie moving. He didn’t want his mother to wake and find out what had happened, so he mustered up whatever courage he had left, and descended the final few stairs. He was ready to bolt back up stairs if the dead man moved again, but the corpse sat there, still. He wasn’t lifelike, but he wasn’t fully dead either. He looked posed, like someone had placed a mannequin of his father in the middle of the kitchen to make some sort of horrid tableaux.

On feet he could no longer feel, Bernie crossed the kitchen and found himself standing before his father. The dead man never moved, and Bernie was positive he never breathed. Without saying a word, Bernie reached out and touched his father’s face.

The skin was waxy and cold. There was no trace of life in the elder Lynch, and it was clear the man was dead. Bernie knew he had to get his father out of the house, so he reached out to grab the man beneath his shoulders. The body was limp, total dead weight, and as quietly as he could, Bernie Lynch dragged his father’s corpse outside.

He laid his father down in the dirt of the driveway, then ran to the shed to get a shovel. By the time he got back, the dead man had sat up and was already several feet closer to the house, but when Bernie touched him again, there was no movement, no life. It was as if whatever curse had reanimated his body was drawn to put him back in the kitchen, and nothing was going to stop him. 

In those early morning hours, Bernie was able to drag his father’s body back to the Stymwood cemetery on the edge of their property. By the time he got there he was covered in sweat, aching from the heavy lifting, but he didn’t let that stop him. 

His father’s grave had been uncovered and the casket was still lying in the bottom of the hole. Bernie said the hole looked as neatly dug as it had before they had buried the dead man. Like a team of professionals had done it, perfectly rectangle, the dirt neatly piled to the side. He told his daughter over the rim of the whiskey glass, that if he hadn’t actually seen the dead man move on his own, he would have thought someone had dug up the grave and moved the body to play a trick on him. 

Getting Irving Lynch back into the casket wasn’t difficult. He dropped the body into the grave, arranged his limbs, then closed the casket lid. It was flipping it over that proved difficult. It was heavy and the hole wasn’t big enough. In the end, Bernie said, he dug more dirt out of the grave, widening it enough that he could spin the heavy coffin so the lid was facing downward into the earth. He said that every few minutes a thumping would come from inside the casket, and a few times the lid started to rise, before he slammed it shut again.

In the end, Bernie reburied his father, this time face down. He said after the first few shovelfuls the banging stopped. BY the time he was finished, his hands were raw and bleeding. His muscles screamed in pain, and he felt like he could sleep for a week. Nevertheless, he returned to the home, showered, cleaned the dirt from his clothes, and bandaged his hands. He said he never spoke a word of what he had seen or done to his mother, and she never asked, but he thought she might have known nonetheless. She had insisted Irving be buried lid down, and it had been he who had refused, after all.

Brenda said the story died there. There was a silence between her and her father for a few minutes. Then he looked up at her with bloodshot eyes. “That thing was my father,” he said to her. “But it wasn’t. I looked into its eyes, and they were nothing like my daddy’s. I don’t know what did it - what makes ‘em come back - but I looked into its eyes and I saw my own death. I saw your death. I saw the death of the whole world and every single thing in it. I looked into those eyes and I saw the end of all things.”

Brenda said her dad made her promise then and there not to bury him in the family burial ground. He said he needed to be cremated and that his ashes should be dumped into the ocean. He didn’t want there to be anything to come back. He didn’t want to do to his daughter what his father had done to him.

When he passed away, less than a year later, Brenda followed his instructions. She had her husband personally spread his ashes in Godfrey’s Cove, near York Harbor. Brenda and her husband don’t have any children of their own, and with Bernie being laid to rest in the ocean, Irving Lynch is the final Lynch male to be buried in Stymwood. There are no other cousins or distant relatives who carry the Lynch name. Brenda says God willing no one will ever be buried there again and whatever curse rests on the land can wither away and let the dead lie peacefully.

LUCAS: Hereditary curses aren’t an unknown thing. We’ve heard of dozens of cases where a curse is passed down from generation to generation. We’ve also seen plenty of stories about cursed plots of land. What’s interesting is that the cemetery doesn’t seem to have anything like that in its past. It’s not an old native burial ground or a spot where a witch was executed. It doesn’t appear to be anything other than a quiet corner of the Lynch family property.

When I looked deeper into the family patriarch, however, I found something. It may not be much, or anything at all really, but I did find it interesting. Robert P Lynch had an older stepbrother, Edwin Lynch. Both men were set to inherit their father’s estate when he passed away. They both traveled from Boston to Eliot, and interestingly enough, both men’s names appear on the original deed. Apparently the plan was to split the inheritance and establish a new family homestead here in Maine.

But Edwin disappeared soon after or perhaps even during the original trip to Eliot when they purchased the land. Robert P Lynch claimed his stepbrother went east instead of south back to Boston, and that he told him he was going to England. He wanted a fresh start and a new life, where no one would know him. He wanted to make a name for himself, apparently, free from his family’s history.

No one thought too much of it, and with Edwin gone, Robert P Lynch became the sole inheritor of his father’s estate, moved the family to Maine, and the rest is history.

But… what if Edwin didn’t leave? There’s no indication he ever bought a ticket on any ship to London. There are no records of him in England, at least none that seem like credible matches. What if…what if Robert killed his brother Edwin for the money?

To be clear there is nothing that indicates this to be true. No body for Edwin Lynch was ever found, and no one ever seemed to believe anything other than the story about leaving for England. Many records indicate that Edwin Lynch was incredibly impulsive and known to slip into flights of fancy. It is entirely possible that he did sail to England and there attempted to make a name for himself either under his real name or an assumed one. In fact, it seems like many people wholeheartedly believed that’s exactly what he did.

What is known, is that Edwin Lynch was never heard from again. Robert inherited a small fortune from his father, which set up his family nicely in the years to come. It’s also a little too coincidental that all of the firstborn Lynches are buried in the cemetery, and if not buried… let’s say, properly, have a habit of coming back. Could Robert P Lynch’s murder of his brother, in cold blood, be the cause of the curse?

LUCAS: I think it’s entirely possible. This may be a little storytelling on my part, but perhaps Robert grew unhappy with the thought of sharing the money with his older stepbrother. Maybe Edwin wanted to spend the money on something Robert thought foolish. Who knows. But maybe, just maybe, Robert shot his brother in the back somewhere out in the woods of Eliot. Maybe Edwin died face down in the dirt in the corner of the land that would one day become the family cemetery. And maybe the terrible manner of his death spoiled the ground and cursed it for generations to come.

Again, all of this is conjecture. And there’s no way of really proving this theory unless we exhumed all the bodies in Stymwood. And even then it may not prove conclusive. If Robert P Lynch buried his brother in a shallow grave, there may not be any remains left.

For now, the Stymwood Cemetery remains a unique if unsettling spot of interest. One Brenda Howard understands holds a certain popularity with some people. And she’s come to accept that.

“Knowing Dad isn’t there,” she told us. “And that all the other Lynches are buried face down…there’s nothing to worry about anymore, right? I’d just as soon be done with it. But that’s not my place. I’ll just sit back knowing dad’s at peace, and let nature do its job.”

Brenda says she’s okay with visitors coming and walking among the old graves, even with them leaving small tokens or trinkets. She, and we as well, warn any visitors to be careful not to disturb any of the graves however. All of the Lynch men buried there seem to be content to lie still…for now at least. With no more additions, it’s hard to say whether the curse will actually die with Irving Lynch…or if it will change and find a new means to return the dead men to the home where they once lived. 

Stay safe out there, Maine.