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Hidden History: The Florida Witch's Grave [1]
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Date: 2023-06-06
One of the oddest tourist spots in Tallahassee FL is the gravesite of a purported witch.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Elizabeth Budd Graham’s gravestone in Tallahassee
When the United States acquired the Territory of Florida from Spain in 1821, there were two major cities—St Augustine and Pensacola. Officials from both argued with each other over which should be the new territory's capitol, but the blunt reality was that each of them was too far away from the other to make travel between them easy. So Territorial Governor William Duval appointed one representative from each city to choose a more central location that would serve as the capitol. They both settled on the little town of Tallahassee, roughly halfway between. Tallahassee had previously been an Apalachee and Seminole village and the site of a Spanish Mission.
As the territorial capitol, the little village quickly grew into a large city, and one thing it needed was a cemetery. So in 1829 the Territorial Legislature designated a plot of land on the outskirts of town which was to be the “public burying ground”. The land was purchased in 1841.
Like all areas of the South, the cemetery was racially segregated. The resolution establishing it as a public cemetery declared, “It shall further be the duty of the superintendent to keep two separate books, in one of which he shall fairly and accurately register the interment of white persons, and in the other the interment of all negroes and persons of color in this burial ground... The latter book... shall distinguish between free persons of color from slaves, and stating the date of interment, the name of the person interred, and if a slave, the owner's name, the age, place of nativity, time of residence in the city, and the disease or casualty of which the person died.”
Today the two separate sections of the cemetery are still easily distinguished: one half of the grounds contains a large number of stone grave markers, often crowded close together, while the other side looks mostly empty with just a few stones scattered widely. This is the African-American section: it is just as crowded as the White section, but the buried slaves usually received a plain wooden grave marker, which quickly rotted away and disappeared. As recently as the 1950s a wire fence divided the two sections from each other. The White half of the burying grounds was also separated, with each religious group (Protestant, Catholic and Jewish) getting its own subdivision.
The new cemetery quickly had occupants. Each summer, the Yellow Fever swept through town and killed large numbers. During the Civil War there were battles at Olustee and Natural Bridge, and both Confederate and Union dead from those battles were buried here. (As an intentional insult, the Union troopers were buried in the segregated “Black” section of the cemetery.)
By 1902 the cemetery had a bit over 1500 burials, and no more plots were available. Among those buried here are Thomas Brown, Governor of Florida; Thomas Van Renssaler Gibbs, state legislator; Laura Adorkor Kofey, an African-American activist for Marcus Garvey's “Back to Africa” movement; and James Page, pastor at the local Baptist Church.
One of the best-known and most-visited graves here, though, is a stone obelisk bearing the name “Elizabeth Budd Graham”. She was, according to the local legend, a witch.
We like to think of belief in witches and witchcraft as a historical relic of the ignorant Middle Ages, the result of a long-gone time of superstition. But belief in witches has a long history in the United States. The most famous example of course is the Salem Witch Trials, which happened in 1692. But in some hyper-religious quarters, belief in witches continued right up to modern times.
Florida, though at the time remote and sparsely-populated, was apparently not immune to these types of supernatural fantasies.
In 1899, Elizabeth “Bessie” Budd Graham died in her home of heart disease. She had married her wealthy husband, cattle rancher and landowner Alexander Graham, only two years before, and they had two children. She was just 23 years old when she died.
When she was buried in the cemetery, her grave was marked by a tall ornately-carved granite obelisk, surrounded by a low wall. It was for the time a very expensive display, imported stone being hard to obtain in faraway Florida, and it marked her prominence in Tallahassee's social pecking order. It remains the largest grave marker in the entire cemetery.
At the time of her death, Elizabeth was considered to be a well-loved upstanding Christian member of the community who tragically died young. But decades later, some citizens with a good imagination began to point out some things they considered strange about Elizabeth's grave. Unlike every other grave marker in the cemetery, which faced east, they said, her obelisk faced to the west—towards the setting sun. A sign of a non-Christian burial and a witch, it was whispered. (In reality, there are other graves in the cemetery which also face west, and this was not an uncommon thing at the time.) And she had also been born in October, the witchy time of the year.
The epitaph carved into her memorial was also odd. A quotation from one of Edgar Allen Poe's poems (himself a well-known symbol of witchery and the supernatural), it read:
“Ah! Broken is the Golden Bowl.
The spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!
A saintly soul
Floats on the Stygian River;
Come let the burial rite be read
The funeral song be sung;
An anthem for the queenliest dead
That died so young
A dirge for her the doubly dead
In that she died so young.”
It was, the demonologists asserted, full of references to witchery. The lines about her “spirit flown forever” and “floating on the Stygian River”, it was said, mean that her unrepentant soul could not enter Heaven and was trapped between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The “queenliest dead” is, they say, a reference to the ancient belief that witches were the “Queen of the Dead” and could command spirits and demons. And the “doubly dead” line refers to the idea that a witch is “undead” and must be killed twice.
Since there was nothing in the historical record to suggest that Elizabeth had ever actually been accused or suspected of anything harmful, it was now suggested that perhaps she had been a “White Witch”, who used her supernatural powers for benevolent purposes, and who had apparently by magic spell or love potion bewitched her wealthy husband into marrying her.
It was all nonsense, but the tale remains. Today, visitors flock to see the “Witch's Grave”, and throughout the year modern Wiccans hold ceremonies and rites in the cemetery in celebration of the witch Elizabeth Budd Graham. The low wall surrounding her grave is often decorated with coins, shells and stones, left there by visitors.
Naturally, there are also rumors that the cemetery is haunted, and “ghost-hunter” tours can often be seen in the cemetery at night.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/6/2140308/-Hidden-History-The-Florida-Witch-s-Grave
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