Old stones. Dark roads. Stories that stayed.
Growing up in Cumberland, Tower Hill Road came with stories you remembered after dark.
Near the West Wrentham end, beyond the first few bends and over the rise, a dark stretch of woods held two oak trees roughly twelve feet apart. The story was that if you stopped between them and shut the car off, it wouldn’t start again until you pushed it forward.
I never tried it; getting out to push seemed like a pretty significant flaw in the plan. I was too scared anyway.
Along Tower Hill Road, a rundown house sat back through the woods, with a light seemingly burning in an upper window near the peak of the roof. The place looked abandoned. People said a witch lived there.
Farther along toward Diamond Hill, a sharp right-hand bend carried the story of a boy on a tricycle. Growing up, I heard a child had been struck by a car there. The legend was that as you rounded that corner, you would see him riding his tricycle.
Those are the stories I remember hearing. The house’s history and the alleged accident remain unverified, but the stories certainly stayed with us.
The Monastery has enough history and haunting stories for a night of its own. We’ll take that walk another time.
In October 1999, when I was in sixth grade at North Cumberland Middle School, Mrs. Dromgoole took our class to the Pickering–Staples family cemetery beside the school. We brought paper to make gravestone rubbings.
There was a particular reason: Abigail Staples and her sister Livina Chace, the two sisters at the center of Cumberland’s vampire story.
As I remember it, Mrs. Dromgoole said the commonly repeated account pointed to Historical Cemetery 17, but she thought they might be here in 18.
Years later, it brought me back with a camera and questions I still wanted answered.
On February 8, 1796, Stephen Staples appeared before the Cumberland Town Council. Abigail was dead; Livina was the living sister he hoped to help. He asked permission to open Abigail’s grave so he could try an experiment involving her remains, hoping something might save Livina from consumption.
The council granted it, directing that Abigail be buried decently afterward.
A father had already lost one daughter; now he was asking to disturb her grave in hopes of helping another.
That’s where Cumberland’s vampire story begins.
Folklorist Michael Bell connects the request to vampire lore surrounding consumption—what we now call tuberculosis. Some families exhumed the dead and burned organs, hoping to save the living. Whether anything like that happened to Abigail remains unknown.
A 1993 Washington Post report described Bell’s theory that her remains may have been altered or burned for medicinal purposes—a possible explanation for the experiment, rather than confirmation of what the family did.
Later retellings added darker details: Stephen Chace losing his mind after the coffin was opened, and scratch marks inside it. The New England Legends podcast discusses those claims as speculation. Even the exhumation itself remains unconfirmed.
The council left us permission to open a grave; the unanswered questions left plenty of room for a legend to grow.
Between 1831 and 1833, Mason and Anna Pickering lost six children. Some were young adults; others were very young. Emma Ann was five when she died on October 11, 1832. Her three-year-old sister Delilah died October 13—two days apart.
Their initials sit together on a shared monument.
Elsewhere in that same lot, Emeline Staples’s epitaph names consumption; she was thirty-four.
People pass that stone wall every day, often unaware of the lives and heartbreak behind it. These were Cumberland families. Their names deserve a place in our town’s story.
If you remember Mrs. Dromgoole’s lesson, have family records or older photographs, or know more about Abigail, Livina, the Pickering and Staples families, or these local stories, reach out to Cumberland Sideline.