Every October, people visit Old Burial Hill cemetery ahead of Halloween. This year, tourists could come across one grave with particularly spooky symbolism. The grave of Susanna Jayne can be found in the Minister’s Row Cluster of Old Burial Hill. While there are many intriguing and mysterious slabs of slate in the nearly 400-year-old cemetery, Jayne’s may be considered the most ghoulish of them all.
Jayne resided in Marblehead with her husband Peter before she died on Aug. 8, 1776, at the age of 45. Her grave was carved out of slate by Henry Christian Geyer.
“I think she was well regarded, but I don’t think there was anything unusual about her,” Marblehead Historical Commission Chair Pam Peterson said.
While there may not have been anything particularly haunting about Jayne, her headstone tells a symbolic story of its own. It has a fairly long epitaph that is rendered difficult to read two and a half centuries later.
“Here Sleeps the precious Dust — She Shines above, whose form was harmony, whose soul was Love. What were her Virtues? All that Heaven could spare what were her Graces? All Divinity Fair. Mingling with Angels, they admire a guest, As spotless Good and lovely as the Rest,” the grave reads.
Peterson explained that in addition to having the grave’s creator identified, Jayne’s grave is unique because it contains more imagery than any she’s encountered.
The centerpiece of the gravestone is a skeleton donning a laurel wreath. The wreath is known for representing victory. A snake is circling the skeleton and is pictured eating its own tail. In addition, the skeleton is holding what is supposed to be the moon in one hand and the sun in the other. Both of which represent the endless passage of time and eternity. The grave has been defaced, and the moon carved out at some point in the last 75 years, as a photograph from 1949 is the most recent record of the moon still intact. Two cherub angels are juxtaposed with two bats, with the skeleton in between the pairs.
“The bats represent the night,” Peterson said. “I don’t think they really necessarily represent evil, although some references say they do.”
At the rounded head of the stone is an hourglass flanked by two bones. They represent mortality in that when time runs out, death approaches.
Many decorative gravestones like Jayne’s will attempt to scare people this Halloween.