Lumber Barons and a Gangster: Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 9, 2026 · How we verify

Bangor became a city in 1834, and in the same year a group of its horticulturists bought a hill above the Penobscot River and turned it into a garden. That hill is Mount Hope Cemetery, the second oldest garden cemetery in the United States and, for most of the nineteenth century, the preferred resting place of the wealthiest people in eastern Maine. Lumber money built it, a vice president is buried in it, a Depression-era bank robber was dropped into a grave on its edge, and a Stephen King film crew shot a horror classic among its stones. The ghost stories are a separate matter from all of that, and they are worth keeping separate: they are anecdotal reports from visitors and tour-goers, not documented events.

Quick Facts on Mount Hope

• Designed: 1834, by architect Charles G. Bryant
• Built by: the Bangor Horticultural Society
• Model: Mount Auburn Cemetery of 1831 in Boston, Massachusetts
• Original purchase: July 1834, fifty acres of Lot 27 between State Street and the Penobscot River
• Today: more than 300 acres, still an active burial ground
• Listed: National Register of Historic Places, as a historic district, in 1974
• Hours: daily, sunrise to sunset

Fifty Acres of Lot 27

Bangor in the 1830s was a frontier boom-town running on timber, and like a good deal of its architecture and landscaping, its new cemetery was copied from Boston. Mount Auburn had opened in 1831 and had made the rural garden cemetery fashionable: winding drives, planted slopes, ponds, a burial ground that doubled as a park. Charles G. Bryant drew Bangor’s version in 1834, and the Bangor Horticultural Society built it soon after.

The land was bought in July 1834 and amounted to fifty acres of Lot 27, laid out along what was then called the County Road and later the Road to Orono. Today that is State Street. The parcel ran roughly 660 by 3,300 feet, with the long axis pointing north and south along the road and the Penobscot River on the far side. It did not take in the whole of the central hill. The boundary cut straight across the crest and met what would later become Mount Hope Avenue, which is why the oldest sections sit on a slope rather than a summit. About twelve acres were set aside for horticultural work; the rest was for burials.

The cemetery has grown more than sixfold since, and the result is a landscape that reads as public park as much as graveyard. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district in 1974.

Who Is Buried on the Hill

Mount Hope was where Bangor’s nineteenth and early twentieth century elite went. The roll of the dead includes a United States senator, ten U.S. congressmen, two U.S. ambassadors, four governors of Maine, eight Civil War generals, and a long line of lumber barons and the businessmen and politicians who orbited them.

The best known resident is Hannibal Hamlin (1809 to 1891), fifteenth Vice President of the United States under Abraham Lincoln and, before that, congressman, senator and the twenty-sixth governor of Maine. His second wife, Ellen Hamlin (1835 to 1925), Second Lady of the United States, is buried here too. So is Franklin Muzzy (1806 to 1873), thirty-second president of the Maine Senate, and Doris Pike White (1896 to 1987), who served as twenty-fourth President General of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Two actors are also interred at Mount Hope: Richard Golden and the silent film performer Ralph Sipperly (1890 to 1928).

And then there is Al Brady (1910 to 1937), the bank robber whose gang was cut down by FBI agents on a downtown Bangor street in 1937. He was buried at Mount Hope, and his grave has drawn curiosity seekers ever since.

Pet Sematary, Stephen King, and the Cemetery’s Second Life

Mary Lambert’s 1989 adaptation of Pet Sematary was filmed at Mount Hope, which gave the cemetery a national reputation it has never quite shaken. Stephen King lives in Bangor, and it is widely repeated locally that he took character surnames off these headstones for novels including Carrie. Treat that as lore rather than documented fact: it is the kind of story a city tells about its most famous writer, and it is not something the cemetery records can confirm.

What Visitors Say Happens Here

By daylight Mount Hope is one of the calmer places in Bangor, which makes the volume of ghost reports a little surprising. None of what follows is verified. All of it is anecdotal, gathered from visitors, tour-goers and paranormal groups.

• Apparitions and shadowy figures said to move between the gravestones, most often reported near dusk.
• Whispering voices, sometimes described by witnesses as children’s voices.
• Abrupt cold spots and the sense of being watched or followed along the drives.
• A persistent legend that Al Brady walks the grounds, attached to the violence of his death in the street downtown.

It is worth noting how much of the cemetery’s eerie reputation is downstream of the film rather than upstream of it. The Pet Sematary shoot and the King association gave Mount Hope a cinematic frame, and stories tend to collect around places that already look the part.

Walking Mount Hope Cemetery

The grounds are open daily from sunrise to sunset and are free to walk. The Bangor Historical Society runs themed walking tours that cover both the prominent burials and the forgotten ones, and in October it offers its “Darker Side of Mount Hope” tours, which lean into tragic deaths, unexplained ones, and the local legends.

Two practical points. First, this is a working cemetery with recent burials and families visiting, so the usual rules apply: stay on the paths and drives, keep your voice down, and do not touch or lean on monuments. Second, do not come after dark. The cemetery closes at sunset, and being there outside posted hours is trespassing, not ghost hunting.

Sources

• Mount Hope Cemetery
• NPGallery NRHP Archive Search (National Park Service)
• GeoHack – Mount Hope Cemetery (Bangor, Maine)
• Mount Hope Cemetery Corp & Crematory
• Find a Grave
• Wikipedia: Mount Hope Cemetery (Bangor, Maine)

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