Bellefonte Cemetery outlasts ghost town

The path to Bellefonte Cemetery is maintained through the efforts of volunteers, who also work to clean markers and the areas surrounding them.
Photos courtesy of Annette Bradford, Jackson County Historical Association

On a hill overlooking Town Creek, Bellefonte Cemetery is the final resting place of at least 229 residents of Jackson County’s once-thriving government seat that has been a ghost town for the last century. The cemetery’s oldest engraved monument bears the date 1826, making this year the bicentennial of its first recorded interment.

With only 57 inscribed headstones and many graves marked with plain rocks or not at all, the exact burial count at the site isn’t known. Trees and weeds overrun the scattered plots, and many markers are askew or in pieces, their inscriptions worn down by time and weather. Yet the cemetery is a magnet for visitors, many of them hoping the long-dead town of Bellefonte isn’t the only ghost in the vicinity.

YouTube teems with videos about the cemetery and claims of unusual activity there, like visitors seeing strange shadows and apparitions or having their hair pulled. Others mention extreme cold spots, odd gusts of wind or patches of fog that descend on the area. Some report unnerving sensations of being watched, followed or even touched by someone or something unseen. And one video host who recently spent a great deal of time at the cemetery clearing weeds and cleaning headstones claims he heard and recorded voices commenting on his work.

One of the more popular Bellefonte Cemetery tales involves sightings of a floating light. The story goes that George Washington Higgins, one of Bellefonte’s founders, was also the town’s first physician and lived near the cemetery hill. A flickering light sometimes seen in the woods here is said to be a light from his lantern, as though he’s still making his rounds from his home to the town square.

Circle of life

Bellefonte was incorporated in December 1821 on a 640-acre parcel Higgins and Stephen Carter bought from James Riley, who was Cherokee. They named the town Bellefonte, “beautiful fount” in French, for the spring that served the property.

The town grew rapidly after the state legislature made Bellefonte the seat of Jackson County. A two-story brick courthouse built in 1828 was the centerpiece of a bustling square, alongside inns, a post office, two churches, a blacksmith shop and much more. The population grew to 400, and businesses thrived. Yet Bellefonte’s days were numbered.

In 1849, residents rejected the chance to bring the railroad through their town. Then the Civil War came roaring through, bringing devastation. Fire destroyed the courthouse and many other structures. Residents moved away, and the state moved the county seat in 1868 to nearby Scottsboro, which had embraced the railroad. In 1883, Bellefonte’s population was down to 100.

By the 1920s, the town was abandoned. Its only physical remains are Bellefonte Cemetery — which the town established as its official cemetery even before the courthouse was built — and a chimney ruin from one of the former inns.