Two Fires Down: The Witch of Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 2, 2026 · How we verify

Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery sits on a rise above a small Yamhill County town that was once the most important place in its corner of Oregon, and it carries one of the state’s most persistent ghost stories: a woman hanged as a witch who is said to have cursed the town on her way out of it. The historical record for that execution is thin to nonexistent. The story, however, is older than most of the people telling it, and it has outlasted the courthouse, the county seat and both of the fires it supposedly predicted.

Lafayette at a Glance

• Town founded: 1846, by the pioneer and entrepreneur Joel Perkins
• Named for: the Marquis de Lafayette, the general who served in the American Revolutionary War, by way of Lafayette, Indiana, where Perkins had previously lived
• Post office: established 1851
• Incorporated: by the Oregon Legislative Assembly on October 17, 1878
• Location: on the Yamhill River and Oregon Route 99W, between McMinnville and Dundee
• Population: 4,423 at the 2020 census

The Town That Lost Its County Seat

Lafayette was not always the quiet strip of highway it is today. Joel Perkins laid it out in 1846, naming it after Lafayette, Indiana, where he had lived before heading west, and the settlement became the county seat of Yamhill County from its founding onward. A post office followed in 1851. The city was formally incorporated by the Oregon Legislative Assembly on October 17, 1878.

The fall came in 1889, when county residents voted to move the seat of government down the road to McMinnville. A town that had been the legal and commercial center of its county became a place people drove through. That decline matters to the ghost story, because the witch legend is, at bottom, a story about a town being punished, and Lafayette’s history gave the tellers plenty of misfortune to hang on it.

The Witch of Lafayette and the Curse of Three Fires

The core of the legend is short and has been repeated for well over a century. In the 1800s, so the story goes, a woman in Lafayette was accused of witchcraft and hanged. She is said to have been buried in the pioneer cemetery, and she is said to still be there.

Local retellings have elaborated considerably. The most detailed version holds that the person hanged was not the woman at all but her son, Richard Marple, and that it was his mother, Anna, called a “gypsy” by the townspeople in the language of the time, who stood at the gallows and cursed Lafayette to burn three times. Two fires, in this telling, have already come. The third has not. Whether you find that ominous or simply unfalsifiable depends on your temperament, but it is the reason the story still has teeth: a curse with an outstanding balance never really ends.

Other versions insist the hanged woman’s name is lost entirely, which is probably closer to the truth of how the legend works. None of this appears in the historical record as a documented execution. There is no verified account here of a witchcraft trial, a conviction or a hanging. What exists is folklore, carried orally, embroidered by each generation, and attached to a real burial ground where real pioneers are interred. Treat the Marple names and the three fires as story, not as history.

What People Report Among the Headstones

The most commonly reported phenomenon at Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery is the simplest one: unexplained laughter. Visitors say they have heard a woman laughing among the graves with no one else present. It is the detail that recurs most often and across the widest range of tellers, which in folklore terms makes it the spine of the haunting.

Beyond that, the reports grow more dramatic and less consistent. People describe an apparition of a woman moving between the stones, a voice telling them to run home, knocking sounds, and a noise some compare to galloping. A smaller number of night visitors claim to have been chased off the grounds, to have heard screaming, or to have found unexplained scratches on themselves afterward. Several accounts involve vehicles that refuse to start at the cemetery gates. Alongside these are the standard inventory of cemetery experiences: cold spots, footsteps on gravel with no walker attached, and the feeling of being watched from the tree line.

All of the above is reported experience. None of it is documented, and a dark rural graveyard with a famous curse attached does a great deal of the psychological work on its own. What is worth noting is how stable the laughter detail has stayed while everything else around it has shifted.

Visiting Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery

The cemetery sits in Lafayette, on Oregon Route 99W between McMinnville and Dundee, an easy stop on a wine country drive through Yamhill County. It is a working historic burial ground with pioneer-era graves, and it should be approached as one.

The important practical point: the site is closed after dark and trespassing at night is enforced. Nearly every dramatic story attached to this place involves someone there at an hour they should not have been, and the result for modern visitors is a town with little patience for headlight-lit ghost hunts. Go in daylight, stay on the paths, read the stones, and leave them as you found them. The legend will still be there in the morning, and so will the third fire that has not yet come.

See Lafayette Pioneer Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• ArcGIS REST Services Directory (Census (official))
• U.S. Census website (US Census Bureau)
• Joel Perkins
• Special Laws
• Parks (Lafayetteoregon (official))
• Wikipedia: Lafayette, Oregon

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