Blood Cemetery in Hollis: The Pointing Hand of Abel Blood

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

Ask for Blood Cemetery in Hollis and most people will know exactly which patch of New Hampshire ground you mean, even though no sign anywhere on the property carries that name. The burial ground is properly called Pine Hill Cemetery, a small, wooded, six-acre plot in a quiet corner of Hollis, and the grisly nickname it carries has nothing to do with anything spilled there. It comes from a surname. Abel Blood was laid to rest here in 1867, and his family plot sits near the middle of the ground. That is the whole of it: a common New England family name, a central grave, and a couple of centuries of people finding the coincidence too good to leave alone.

Quick Facts About Pine Hill Cemetery

• Also known as: Blood Cemetery, after the Blood family interred there
• Where: Hollis, New Hampshire
• Size: roughly six acres
• Oldest markers: gravestones dating back to the 1700s
• Abel Blood: buried in 1867, plot near the centre of the cemetery
• Access: open to the public, patrolled by police and security, particularly around Halloween

Abel Blood, and How a Surname Became a Legend

There is a temptation, with a name like Blood, to assume the story starts with a massacre or a murder. It does not. The Bloods were a family, and Pine Hill was their parish burial ground along with everyone else’s in the neighbourhood. Around Abel’s stone are markers reaching back into the 1700s, the ordinary and unremarkable dead of a small New England farming town.

What lifted Abel Blood out of that crowd was partly the accident of his name, partly the prominence of his plot, and, less happily, the attention his grave has attracted from people who could not leave it alone. His marker has been vandalised. That is the concrete fact underneath most of the folklore, and it is worth stating plainly, because the standard version of the tale runs the other way round: local retelling has it that the desecration is what woke him, and that he has walked the cemetery ever since. There is no record supporting that causation. What there is, is a damaged historic stone and a legend that grew comfortably around the damage.

The Hand That Is Said to Turn After Dark

The single detail that keeps Blood Cemetery in Hollis circulating in New England ghost lore is the pointing finger. Visitors have long claimed that a hand associated with Abel Blood’s grave points upward in daylight, toward heaven in the conventional funerary sense, and that after dark the same hand is found pointing down.

No one has ever produced a mechanism for this, and no one has photographed the change happening. Treat it as what it is: the cemetery’s defining piece of folklore, repeated so often that it has become the reason many people drive out to Hollis in the first place. It is also a tidy example of how graveyard iconography feeds a ghost story. Carved hands pointing skyward were an entirely ordinary nineteenth-century motif. The idea that one might reverse itself at night is the sort of embellishment that attaches itself to any stone a town has decided is special.

What Visitors Say They Experience Among the Pine Hill Stones

Beyond the pointing hand, the reported activity at Pine Hill is the familiar cemetery inventory, and none of it is verified:

• An apparition identified by witnesses as Abel Blood, most often described near his own vandalised marker
• Orbs and unexplained shapes turning up in photographs
• Cold spots encountered on otherwise warm days
• Disembodied voices with no visible source
• Tapping sounds among the stones

Orbs in particular deserve a caveat: a dark, wooded, damp burial ground photographed with a flash is close to a laboratory for producing them out of dust, insects and moisture. Cold spots in a shaded hillside cemetery are similarly cheap to come by. None of that disproves anything, but a reader deciding whether to make the trip should know that the evidence here is entirely anecdotal, and that Abel Blood’s reputation as the most active presence at Pine Hill rests on repetition rather than documentation.

Visiting Blood Cemetery in Hollis

Pine Hill Cemetery is open to the public and it is still an active historic burial ground, not an attraction. That distinction matters more here than at most haunted sites, because the vandalism problem is real and ongoing. Police and private security keep an eye on the place, and patrols increase sharply as Halloween approaches, when the volume of curiosity seekers peaks. People have been moved along and worse.

Go in daylight. Stay on the paths, keep off the stones, take nothing, and remember that the families buried here have descendants in the town. The eighteenth-century markers alone justify the walk, whatever you make of the story about the hand.

See Blood Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• Saint Joseph Cemetery
• Manchester (Diocese) [Catholic-Hierarchy]
• GeoHack – St. Joseph Cemetery (Manchester, New Hampshire)
• Wikipedia: St. Joseph Cemetery (Manchester, New Hampshire)

Address: Nartoff Road

More Haunted Cemeteries

Pine Hill CemeteryErie Street CemeteryCave Hill CemeteryHeady Lane Cemetery FishersDawson CemeteryKeystone Cemetery