As night falls in Cottage Grove cemetery, that’s when the screams begin.
Old settlers used to claim there were panthers in the woods nearby, enormous cats with claws and fangs that move on deathly silent paws.
When children heard their terrorizing calls, they swore it had to be someone condemned to hell, begging for a merciful end.
As I walked the path to the cemetery entrance an icy wind sliced through me like blades. I swore I, too, heard voices and that every echoing step through the cold might be my last.
Despite the irony of dying in a cemetery, at least my final remains wouldn’t have far to travel.
BEFORE being called Cottage Grove, the cemetery was named Oak Grove, and before that, the Phillips family graveyard.
Its hauntingly moving aesthetic is immediately apparent upon approach, as are the impressive boulders that wrap around the site — which “Tales of Early Allen County” describes as being akin to “a protecting arm.”
Despite innumerable times the hungry waters of the Neosho have crawled from their banks, intent on consuming this elegant city of the dead, the barrier has nonetheless held fast, clothed in its ancient armor.
In winter, the enormous limestone blocks were draped in long, white icicles trailing to the ground, dripping slowly, slowly, eating away at the structure, meticulously shaping them, as has happened for countless millennia.
If the cemetery stands as a series of monuments to the lives of the human dead, to what, pray, do these strange and magnificent markers pay homage?
I imagine the Osage and other tribes had a story or two about these sacred forms, perhaps how they made the birth of a people possible, or marked the site of an epic primordial confrontation.
For as Suquamash/Duamish Chief Seattle once explained: “Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished.”
AS IS only fitting, the tale of how Cottage Grove cemetery came into existence involves an inconceivable local tragedy.
Dr. Isaac Phillips and his partner Elizabeth Holmes were staking out a claim in the area during the initial white settlement of the county, when just before Christmas 1859, their beloved daughter Maranda met a horrific end when she was only 9 years old.
An entry written for the Iola Register in 1931 by Lucretia Campbell outlines the event as follows:
“In 18[59] the Christmas holiday preparations were quickly turned to sorrow by the tragic death of the neighborhood doctor’s little girl.”
