Gunntown Cemetery

Nathaniel Gunn arrived at Towantic Meadows in 1733, age twenty-four, and bought land at the base of Lewis Hill; by 1799 the family holdings reached toward the Derby line, and Nathaniel called the section Gunntown. The Naugatuck Historical Society's account notes the family's Loyalist convictions cost them social standing if not property — they remained wealthy landowners until 1813, when the estate finally began to break up.

The cemetery's one brush with documented violence came in the winter of 1780, when a Tory gang kidnapped sixteen-year-old patriot Chauncey Judd and forced Jobamah Gunn, at gunpoint, to quarter them in his barn overnight. The kidnappers were eventually captured and Judd freed — two young cousins in the gang reportedly stopped a Captain Daniel Graham from shooting the boy at the brook. The kidnapping site is now on the Connecticut Freedom Trail. The burial ground itself dates to 1790 and holds many of the town's Revolutionary-era dead — Gunns and patriots together, the feud having expired before the graves did.

The report inventory is classic Connecticut-cemetery stock: a man carrying a lantern and leading a horse, a small boy playing near the back wall, a black dog seen among the stones, unexplained music and the sound of children's laughter drifting in from beyond the back wall, orbs and mists in photographs, and occasional claims of being touched or scratched. Ed and Lorraine Warren reportedly pronounced the place haunted — a claim in wide circulation that the file notes has no verifiable documentation of a visit.

The accounts come largely from the cemetery's long decades as a lovers' lane and dare destination — 1980s teenagers parking at the gates, reporting glowing eyes in the brush, an old man in farmer's clothes staring from the roadside, and car electrical systems dying at the boundary only to recover past it. The file keeps these as experiences, which is what they are: reported, unverified, extremely numerous, and filed here as such.

It is worth saying plainly what the record does not hold: no documented tragedy inside the walls, no unsolved death among the Gunns, no event on file that obliges a haunting. The lore attached itself to age, isolation, and a stone wall at the edge of the woods — the standard recipe, applied to a genuinely old place.

The ground is real, old, and still kept. Its ghosts are the unverifiable kind; its history — Loyalist land barons, a kidnapped militiaman, two centuries of shared headstones — is the kind the record actually confirms. The cemetery remains an active burying ground beside private land, and the file advises respect over trespass; the lore will keep either way, and has.