Own your own graveyard

Farmhouse with extras: Tree farm – and cemetery

Location: Shaftsbury, Vt.

Spookiness score: 2

Private graveyards aren't as rare as you might think. "Beyond the Ghosts," a blog about historic cemeteries, says home-based cemeteries once were common, especially in the South but also in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. There are a number of marked graves along the Oregon Trail, which the blog calls "the longest rural graveyard."

The cemetery pictured here holds 15 souls who died throughout the 1800s. It's on a 32-acre Christmas tree farm in Shaftsbury, Vt., that is listed for $314,500.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

Like the movies

Location: Shaftsbury, Vt.

Spookiness score: 2

Buying a property with a graveyard isn't for everyone. Some buyers flee at the thought. Others adore the idea, real-estate agents say. This Vermont tree farm's cemetery, about 300 yards from the house, holds the remains of the Kelly and Stanley families, who raised sheep on the farm.

Their original farmhouse was some distance away, on what's now a separate property.

"It was like the old movies where you'd see the wagon with the body of a family member who'd died and the family members following the wagon to the cemetery," says Joyce Novotny. She and her husband, a finish carpenter, bought this land, in what's known as Granger Hollow, in 1979.

They're selling the two-bedroom, one-bath, 1,030-square-foot home, built in 1978, along with the tree farm and outbuildings. This historic barn, from the 1800s, was constructed with wooden pegs instead of nails.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Haunted treasure

Location: Richmond, Va.

Spookiness score: 10

Ghosts moan through the lonely corridors and overgrown grounds of this uninhabited mansion. If you've got a thing for Gothic surroundings, this place could be yours for $299,500, well below the $353,000 assessed value. The once-majestic brick manse at 1900 Avondale Ave. was headquarters for the Deep Run Hunt Club of Virginia during the Civil War.

Built about 1810, it originally reigned over 1,400 acres. Today, a tad less than two acres remain with the home.

NOTE: This property is no longer listed.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

'One spooky house'

Location: Richmond, Va.

Spookiness score: 10

"Let me tell you, this is one spooky house," says real-estate agent Matt Ghazarian. On the grounds, the headstones of a Civil War cemetery molder among weeds. The great stable that sheltered the hunt club's mounts is in ruins. The English hunting beagles' quarters are long gone. A cannonball once was pulled from the home's foundation.

The two-story house has five bedrooms. There are two and a half baths on the first floor and another, with a shower and a claw-foot tub, on the second floor. The house has 340 feet of porch -- a mere scrap of the veranda that once encircled the entire home. And yet, the brass elevator still moves between floors, the call button still rings in the servants' pantry and the home's great cherry wood pocket doors still slide.

NOTE: This property is no longer listed.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

A journey back in time

Location: Richmond, Va.

Spookiness score: 10

Inside the 3,918-square-foot mansion, time spins backward. Below the ornate trim are walls plastered with horsehair for strength. The rooms are so stuffed with relics – antique music boxes, a piano, 200-year-old children's books, hand-blown Portuguese decanters, an old sideboard from France – that you see only glimpses of the home's leaded glass windows, the vaulted and box-beamed ceilings, the four fireplaces with hand-carved mantels and the oak and cherry floors edged with parquet inlay.

NOTE: This property is no longer listed.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

A baby's grave

Location: Waynesville, N.C.

Spookiness score: 8

In 1894, Ben and Eliza Winchester dragged their animals, belongings and nine children across six miles of low but rugged hills to these 92 acres in the Plott Balsam Range of the Appalachian Mountains.

It was wilderness then. Today, it's 620 Falling Waters Road in Waynesville, N.C. – for sale for $1.42 million.

Eventually, the Winchesters made a small farm, growing corn and vegetables, fruit trees and grapes for wine, and raising cattle, hogs and horses that they supplemented with wild turkeys and bear shot from the surrounding hardwood forests.

But the first winter was hard. They built a flimsy shelter. Since no neighbor with the skill to build a chimney was available, they kept a fire going in a hole cut in the center of the floor. In December a baby boy, Vernon, was born and then died. His was the first of 15 graves in the family cemetery here.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Specter in a flowing white gown

Location: Waynesville, N.C.

Spookiness score: 8

The Falling Waters Road farm fell out of the Winchester family in 1975. "There were some financial needs elsewhere in the family, and my grandfather figured that was the only way he could meet them," says the Rev. Patrick Womack, who grew up hunting in these woods and helped his grandfather maintain the cemetery. Although their family no longer owns the land, the current owners let him and a cousin continue mowing the little cemetery.

"We just hope somebody will come up in the next generation and take it up after us," he says.

The newest grave was dug in 1984 for Moses Benjamin Beecher Winchester, who died at age 81 or 82. Is the graveyard haunted? "If it is, I never saw it," Womack says. But, he allows, "One man who owned the land said he saw a lady in some kind of flowing white garment down there."

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

Across from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Location: Concord, Mass.

Spookiness score: 9

When you snuggle into bed in this little Colonial-era home, you'll rest among a multitude of ghosts: Directly across the street are the 10,000 gravesites of the huge Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

No, this isn't the home of the famous ghostly headless horseman. That's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York, about which Washington Irving wrote the famous "Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

This Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is in Concord, Mass., and was designed by Horace W.S. Cleveland in 1855. But many graves date back to the 1600s, in the early days of the American colonialists, with their mystical visions, religious prophesies and frenzied hunts for witches in Salem, a few miles away.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Illustrious ghosts

Location: Concord, Mass.

Spookiness score: 9

The small home, less than a half-mile from Concord Center, is "cute as a button," says Carrie Hines, a real-estate agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Concord. Its two bedrooms and two full baths are tucked into just 896 square feet. There are wide-plank pine floors and a walk-up attic. It's listed for $304,900.

The location, though, is what makes it really spooky. The 119-acre burial ground – it's really a huge, tree-covered park – is the resting place for some of America's most brilliant minds, including Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.

Ghosts and spirits are said to haunt the cemetery: Concord's Beyond Twilight tour dips into the local paranormal history.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

Carriage drivers and poets

Location: Concord, Mass.

Spookiness score: 9

The Sleepy Hollow house was built in the mid- to late-1800s in what was then a working-class Irish neighborhood. Hines says a recent resident told her it's haunted.

"On several occasions he felt that something was holding him down when he was in his bed," she says. Maybe that was the spirit of Thomas Culkin, the original owner, reputed to have been a carriage driver for poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

The wheelwright's ghost

Location: Brookeville, Md.

Spookiness score: 5

The bones of Gustavus Jones rest here, on his family farm, along with the remains of his wife, his brother and several young children – eight graves in all, in "an old-fashioned family cemetery," says Kathy Virkus, agent with Re/Max Realty Centre.

Jones was a wheelwright: He made wheels and repaired them in the nearby town of Brookeville, Md. When he began his home here, in about 1819, Quarry Farm filled 120 acres. Today, what's left — listed for $890,000 — is the 2,500-square-foot home on 51.5 acres. There are fields and broad vistas, an old stone quarry and the eight graves. Not far down the road is a ghost of a different sort: a preserved slave quarters, a relic of this bucolic countryside's bloody past.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

Eccentric log home

Location: Brookeville, Md.

Spookiness score: 5

Jones began this elegant, eccentric four-bedroom, two-bath home in about 1819 with the rustic section of logs and mortar on the left. Over the next 30 years, the home gained a graceful dining room with built-in corner cabinets, hardwood floors and a fireplace, and a living room with another fireplace and windows that preside over pastoral views.

It was an odd house, though; each of the three downstairs sections was separate, with no connecting doors. Each, however, had stairs to the second-floor living quarters, and there the whole household could meet. Today, the entire home is joined with doors, upstairs and down, leaving the wheelwright's ghost free to wander.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Spirits from the Revolution

Location: Melfa, Va.

Spookiness score: 6

You can still be buried in your backyard here in Virginia's remote Eastern Shore peninsula. It doesn't happen every day, but it's legal in many farming communities if you follow state guidelines.

Spirits from the Revolutionary War linger at this historic 110-acre farm, listed for $599,000. The property has two family burial sites; the newest grave was dug 60 years ago. The smaller graveyard, in front, holds three headstones. The larger, in a side yard, has 13 graves.

The farm is also home to a 139-year-old magnolia tree and a farmhouse. The original one-room 1790s home has been enlarged over the centuries; the largest part was built in 1875. Now, it's 2,537 square feet with two bedrooms, two baths, a library and three fireplaces.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

246 years of history

Location: Melfa, Va.

Spookiness score: 6

Do ghosts abide in these remote family graveyards? Perhaps. Or that howling may just be the wind from the Atlantic Ocean. This peninsula, settled in the early 1600s, is known to locals as "Delmarva" because it encompasses all of Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia.

This farm has been passed through just one family since 1760. Its first owner, Susanna Davis, is buried right here. Her husband had enlisted as a private in the Continental Army in 1775 and made his way home three years later after he was discharged from service with Gen. George Washington at Valley Forge.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Immigrant graves

Location: Bulverde, Texas

Spookiness score: 7

Since he was a child, Mickey Reininger has avoided this little huddle of graves in a secluded oak grove on the eastern boundary of his family's 329-acre farm in southern Texas. Not that there are ghosts, he says; he just believes the place needs to be left alone. He says his dad used to tease him about his reluctance to go there, especially after dusk.

The shady spot holds four or five headstones, written in German, that appear to mark the lives of children who died in 1885 and 1892. Reininger wonders if there was an epidemic; maybe influenza killed them.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

The ghost in southern Texas: Farming

Location: Bulverde, Texas

Spookiness score: 7

Today, the killer in southern Texas is drought. The region is haunted with the ghosts of family farms like this one in Bulverde, about 26 miles north of San Antonio. Listed for $2.75 million, the farm includes storage and agricultural buildings and a three-bedroom, two-bath home built in 1911.

"We are struggling," says Mickey Reininger of his efforts to keep the dry-land farm going. His dad started a dairy farm here in 1959. The family took a buyout in the 1980s when the federal government purchased dairy herds to reduce surplus milk and stabilize prices. Then Reininger and his sister raised beef cattle and hay until drought forced them to sell all but the last few animals.

"In the last 12 months, we've only received about 8 inches of rainfall. Normal is about 32. It's the worst since they've been recording – 130 years," he says.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?

Tennessee farm

Location: Mansfield, Tenn.

Spookiness score: 3

This seven-acre parcel on Haglersville Road in Mansfield, Tenn., is a specter of its former self. There once was a Civil War-era village at the crossroads here, with a store and a church, says Dottie Shea.

She is selling the land and house after living here for five years. All that's left of the old days are a dozen tombstones with names that are nearly indistinguishable, some with dates as early as 1762. The tombstones are sunken and tilted, the grass unmowed. "It's like a forgotten place," Shea says.

• Glo: Prepare your home for the perfect Halloween party
  
  
• Bing Cube: Famous haunted houses

What the owls say

Location: Mansfield, Tenn.

Spookiness score: 3

The old cemetery is a short walk from the 1984 log home, with its three bedrooms and one bath in 2,201 square feet. The home and land are priced at $119,900.

"If there are any ghosts here, they're good ghosts, because all the wildlife in the area come here," Shea says. "The turkeys roost right in the cemetery in the trees. The deer, the bobcats, they come, too. And birds. You can hear all the owls at night," she says.

In Tennessee, many such overgrown and forgotten small cemeteries are uncovered during construction projects, according to an article in The Washington Post. The inhabitants may have thought they would rest there for eternity but now many are moved, some are preserved and some "become forlorn islands of green amid parking lots and suburban developments," the article says.

• Bing: Maintaining graveyards
  
  
• 'Listed': Is this the home-sale bottom?