Erie Cemetery — the Vampire's Crypt

OVERVIEW

A 75-acre garden cemetery in the centre of Erie, opened in 1850 and holding the city's founders and industrialists. Among its mausoleums is a small, blackened, nameless vault — the Brown family's, by the cemetery's records — with a V-shaped mark over the door that Erie legend has read as a vampire's.

HISTORY

The cemetery's records list seven burials in the vault; the family's name was removed or never carved.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The legend, in the Erie Reader's telling: a man from Romania, dead of consumption in the 1880s, sealed in the vault; the door that will not stay closed; the stain that will not wash off. It is Erie's own gothic story, told for generations; the vault and its records are real, the vampire is the city's.

VISITING

Open in daylight; a place of burial. The vault is on the cemetery's east side.