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The Ghosts Of Hazel Ridge Cemetery
Sunday, November 18, 2012 7:24
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Hazel Ridge Cemetery sits atop a hill in Chariton County, Missouri, off a rural blacktop highway, and at the end of a tree-shrouded gravel road. Tina and her boyfriend Randy stepped out of their car at the entrance of the cemetery, and into horror. “My boyfriend and I have been checking out old cemeteries in Linn and Charlton County,” Tina said. “We have had a few experiences, but nothing like I had at Hazel Ridge.”
The couple stood outside their car at the edge of the cemetery; their normally active dog Rose cowered at Tina’s side. Tina felt someone with them, someone they couldn’t see. “I said, ‘Hello. Hello. Anyone here? We are not here to hurt you we just wanna talk to you.”
Someone, or some thing, heard her.
“I got a tapping on my chest as if a child wanted my attention,” she said. “Then my pearl necklace went straight out and turned over and landed hard on my neck.”
Rose, still pinned to Tina’s side, began to growl. Tina and Randy grabbed the dog and rushed back to their car.
“As we drove off I had a sadness come over me like I left someone there, and I can’t shake it,” she said. “Randy thinks we had a hitchhiker come home with us.”
The couple endured this hitchhiker’s small ghostly activities around their home until Randy couldn’t take it anymore.
“Randy told it to go back where it came from, we didn’t want it here,” Tina said. “He got scratched on the shoulder leaving three marks. We have not been to any cemeteries since.”
Hazel Ridge is a pre-Civil War cemetery a few miles north of the small town of Brunswick, the self-proclaimed Pecan Capital of Missouri. The cemetery’s most notable grave marker belongs to Pettis Perkinson, a farmer whose slave B.K. Bruce became the first black Treasurer of the United States. It’s also the favorite haunt of mid-Missouri ghost hunter Ryan Straub. Straub has investigated Hazel Ridge more than 100 times, and it’s never the same cemetery twice.
“The tombstones move,” Straub said. “I know it sounds weird, but, I’ve got every section mapped out and they’re not the way they were.”
