Abel Blood’s Pointing Hand: Pine Hill Cemetery, New Hampshire

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 26, 2026 · How we verify

Pine Hill Cemetery is a small New Hampshire burial ground with an outsized reputation, better known to teenagers and ghost hunters by the nickname “Blood Cemetery.” The name has an entirely mundane origin, and yet almost everything told about the place after dark grows out of it. The land was originally donated for community burials, an ordinary act of small town generosity, and the graves it holds are the graves of local families. What has accumulated on top of that plain record is a body of folklore dense enough that the cemetery is now visited far more often for its stories than for its history.

Where the Name “Blood Cemetery” Actually Comes From

The nickname is not a reference to violence. It comes from the Blood family, and specifically from Abel Blood, who is buried here alongside his wife, Betsy. That is the documented part. Local lore has since attached a darker reading to the family’s deaths, suggesting the Bloods came to a tragic end, and that suggestion is what keeps the reputation alive. It should be treated as legend rather than record: the storytelling around the family has outgrown anything that can be confirmed on the ground.

Time has done the rest of the work. Weather has worn away many of the headstones, and with the inscriptions went the names, dates and relationships they once carried. A cemetery full of illegible markers invites people to fill in the blanks, and here they have.

The Pointing Hand on Abel Blood’s Marker

The single most repeated claim about the site concerns Abel Blood’s gravestone. The carving includes a hand with a finger raised, a common enough Victorian funerary motif meaning the soul has gone upward. According to the legend, the finger points to the sky by day and turns to point at the ground once the sun sets.

This is worth stating plainly: a carving in stone does not move. What the story most likely records is how differently a shallow relief reads under a flashlight held low, when shadow reverses the apparent direction of a raised hand. That explanation has not dented the legend’s popularity, and the marker remains the thing most visitors come to find.

Abel Blood and the Figures Among the Graves

Abel Blood himself is the cemetery’s most frequently named apparition. Accounts describe him walking the grounds as though searching, variously for his house or for Betsy. No account of this rises above the level of anecdote, and the details shift from teller to teller in the way stories do when they are passed along rather than recorded.

Beyond the apparition, the reported phenomena at Pine Hill are the familiar catalogue of a rural graveyard at night: unexplained tapping sounds, abrupt cold spots, and brief glimpses of figures standing over the graves that resolve into nothing when looked at directly. These are reported experiences, not documented events, and a dark cemetery with uneven ground and old trees is a place where the eye and ear are easily fooled.

The Road Beside the Cemetery

The folklore does not stop at the stone wall. The road running past Pine Hill carries its own layer of legend, said locally to be the site of a family murder whose story has since been folded into the cemetery’s. The best known road tale involves a phantom child who appears at dusk and seems to be asking passing drivers for help, then vanishes as they slow to approach. Roadside vanishing figures are one of the oldest and most widely distributed ghost stories in America, which does not mean nobody saw anything, only that the shape of the tale is older than this particular stretch of road.

Visiting Pine Hill Cemetery

This is a working burial ground with local families interred in it, not an attraction. Visit in daylight, park legally, stay off the stones and read whatever hours or restrictions are posted at the entrance, because small New England cemeteries with reputations like this one are frequently closed at dusk precisely because of nighttime visitors. Do not touch or rub Abel Blood’s marker: the inscriptions here are already being lost to weather without help. The historical interest of the place, a donated burial ground slowly being erased by two centuries of rain, is genuinely worth an hour of daylight, and it survives only as long as people treat it carefully.

See Pine Hill Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• Funeral for Edward Everett Brown
• The Life and Times of Fred Wesley Wentworth: The Architect Who Shaped Paterson, NJ and Its People
• DURELL, Daniel Meserve (House (official))
• Congress (official)
• Facilities, Grounds and Cemeteries (Nh (official))
• Wikipedia: Pine Hill Cemetery (Dover, New Hampshire)

Address: Nartoff Road

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