Mount Nebo Cemetery
A cemetery in Clarke County, Alabama, Mount Nebo Cemetery is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Cemetery in Alabama; research record. HauntHunt files it with haunted places. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. It is the sort of entry the archive keeps because the ground and the telling both survive.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Mount Nebo Cemetery haunted?
The record holds 1 claim — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed unverified. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
Mount Nebo is the death-mask cemetery — the African-American burial ground outside Carlton where Isaac 'Ike' Nettles, the inventor and recluse, cast the faces of the living in sand molds and set them in concrete on the graves. Four masks between 1933 and 1946 — his mother Celina, his aunt Ezella, his wife Korean with the faces of their three daughters beside hers, and Manul Burrell who commissioned his own. The National Register calls them unique in the Southeast — folk art made from the faces of people still breathing.
The masks are dying — concrete weathers, vandals got to some, and the stones that were exact portraits are going back to anonymity. The gate keeps the traffic out; the gravestones keep what the gravestones keep. Nettles himself is unmarked — buried here or in Detroit, nobody knows — the artist who preserved the faces of his family left no face of his own.
The file keeps Mount Nebo: Nettles's sand molds, the four death masks, Korean's triple-daughter stone, and the graveyard where the living were cast for the dead.
Mount Nebo is the archive's death-mask file — the cemetery where the artist cast the faces of the living.
Why this file matters
Mount Nebo is the archive's death-mask file — Nettles's concrete portraits and the unmarked artist.
A cemetery keeps its faces — the file's suggestion being that Mount Nebo's hold is the art: the masks cast from living faces for their graves, unique in the Southeast, and the maker who went into the ground without one.
Mount Nebo Cemetery, also known as Mount Nebo Baptist Church Cemetery, is a historic cemetery located near Carlton, in rural Clarke County, Alabama, United States. The cemetery contains the Isaac Nettles Gravestones, a series of unusually designed gravestones with "death masks" on them, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2000. It is considered a haunted site by some people.
Mount Nebo CemeteryThe record of claims
Southern Spirit Guide notes a haunted listing but questions supporting evidence. The burial ground at the area is exactly the setting the account needs — old graves, older grief, and a story that won't settle. Nothing verifies the account; it survives as a claim, not a conclusion. The account appears in 'Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part II'. The haunting is unproven and unfired: it keeps showing up for work anyway.
Sources on file
- 01Alabama Hauntings — County by County, Part IISouthern Spirit Guide · blog · A4
Field notes & open questions
Discovery pass. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.