In search of long-lost burial grounds

I had sneakers and rubber boots; I decided on the boots. We were heading into a field and from where I sat in my parked vehicle on the side of the road, the grass looked high.

It was, in fact, taller than my five-foot-two-inches in some places, as I followed explorer, writer and photographer Steve Skafte in search of a forgotten burial ground on North Mountain in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.

Steve is an expert on forgotten places. The 35-year-old Bridgetown, NS native’s Facebook pages dedicated to abandoned roads, properties and cemeteries have more than 25,000, 46,000 and 8,000 followers respectively. He’s well known in the area (I’ve been following him on social media for several years).

It was a hot August afternoon. The field was long and wide, stretched out behind a dilapidated barn and an old house that Steve told me had been uninhabited since 2005. He seemed confident where he was going, even though there wasn’t a path or sign of life in sight. He carried a camera, a small tripod and tools for cutting trees.

We were headed to see what he called “the shrine,” which he’d discovered hidden in the woods back in 2012. Someone had pointed him in the general direction and—as he does with all his “abandoned places” tips—he just looked until he found it.

He told me that a hippie couple built it in the 1970s. They had a stillborn baby, or perhaps a child who died very young, and they constructed this little place behind their home to visit for remembrance and prayer. He thought the child might be buried below the structure or nearby. The family moved many years ago and none of the neighbours knew what became of them.

In memory of Katie R. (Daughter of Henry & Wilhelmina Banks; Died 30th June 1868) Aged 3 years & 6 months.

Eventually we reached the end of the field, and Steve led the way into a wooded area, thick with undergrowth. He walked a few paces ahead, cutting branches with his shears and breaking most of the cobwebs.

We could hear the sound of running water moments before the shrine came into view, nestled alongside a sharp bend in a small stream.

Steve pointed in the opposite direction, and there it was. Hidden in the trees. A small trapezoid-shaped structure with a small triangle yellow window at its point. It had a coffin motif about it, looking both out of place and completely natural.

A large tree had fallen in front of it, missing the roof by less than a foot. There was a similar, equally large tree down on the other side.

“This one fell a few years ago,” Steve told me of the front tree, noting it was there at his last visit.

He started cutting the branches around it and once the area was clear, he opened the door. It was unlocked but secured.

“Do you run into much wildlife?” I asked, thinking the inside could be swarming with wasps’ nests and angry raccoons.

“Not really. Porcupines, more than anything else, because they like to hide under things.”

No surprises greeted us inside, except a strong smell of mould and rot.

At first glance, the inside of the shrine reminded me of a small, rundown hunting camp. There was a little wood stove with stones at its base. A bit of garbage, but not much, and pieces of rotten chip board from the ceiling.

Steve walked up to the far wall and pointed out the alter, where he told me they would have knelt to pray. Above it was the little yellow window; from that angle with the light pouring in I saw a small cross cutting through it. He said he heard they practiced something called isolation meditation.

Steve held up a piece of burlap that was hanging limp on the wall.

“This was a curtain they would have closed when they prayed. It fell down years ago and I stapled it back up, but burlap tears easily.” I saw there was a second curtain balled-up on the wooden ledge by the door.

I had asked Steve to show me places that were a bit on the creepy side. Was the shrine creepy? Yes. But it was also decidedly peaceful.

The walk back to our cars seemed to take less time, perhaps because Steve told me about the three separate bear encounters he’d had in the woods, and I picked up my pace.

He explained that when he’s out there alone, he tries to make as much noise as he can and often comes up with poems as he walks, reciting them aloud. “We’re talking today, so nothing will come near us,” he assured me.

Before we got into our cars to drive to the next stop on our abandoned cemetery tour, Steve paused a moment and looked a bit uncertain. “This next place is a bit of a hike, and part of it is pretty steep,” he warned me. “I hope you don’t regret it.”

I asked him if it was worth it and he assured me it was, so I said fine. I figured it couldn’t be much worse than that field. We got in our cars, and I followed him up the road a few minutes’ drive before he stopped at the beginning of an overgrown dirt road.

This time I opted for sneakers, as scaling this so-called steep hill in rubber boots seemed like a bad idea.

We talked easily as we walked. When I asked him why he does what he does, he told me his goal is to rediscover things.

“I can’t discover any new land. What’s left? What’s left for me is stuff that’s been lost in the last 100 years or so. There’s nothing particularly interesting about these people. They are not historically significant. It’s about the place. I feel a connection to that. These are places and things that no one else is bothering with.”

Although I didn’t check the time to see how long we were on the road, it felt like forever before we turned off into the woods. There was a bit of an incline and I, stupidly, assumed this was the “steep” part he was talking about. It wasn’t.
A few minutes later we literally scaled down the side of a cliff. Somehow, I managed. And then the hike continued.

Eventually, I spotted the headstones hidden amongst the overgrown brush. A human-made stone wall in the shape of a circle surrounded them.

This was the Banks family burial ground. (It’s referred to as a burial ground and not a cemetery because it’s just one family.) There are three headstones; one is broken so it looks like there are four. Two are standing on their own, the third—the largest—is propped up against a tree, thanks to Steve on a previous visit.

“Some people will cement the broken pieces back together, but I feel it’s more important to clear around it and show a path,” he tells me as he works to cut away the growth that has invaded the space since he was last there. “For all I know, there are more here hidden and buried.”

And there very well could be. Clearly few people had been to that cemetery in the last century, and nature has done its part to reclaim the land.

The headstones there tell a story. The burial ground belonged to Henry Banks’s family and was in use from 1847 to 1878. The largest headstone is for his first wife and their five daughters, who all died of diphtheria in 1859. One of those daughters was named Henrietta, and there is also a second Henrietta noted on the stone who died in 1847, at the age of two. (In the 19th century, people often named a second child in honour of a lost sibling.) The third headstone was for another lost daughter, Katie, who Henry had with his second wife.

Steve has heard that Henry was also buried there, but with no family left to bury him properly, he had no headstone.

He pointed out a sunken area beside the headstones, where one or more coffins likely decayed and collapsed over the decades. There were also footstones scattered about, which are smaller cemetery stones that would have been laid about two metres from the headstone.

Up until that point, no part of our adventure had felt creepy (which had been my original goal for the day!), but as we stood there, within that 175-year-old burial ground, I felt uneasy.
It was still sunny, but the tall trees cast mid-afternoon shadows everywhere. It was eerily quiet. The sound of a breaking branch made me jump. The rustling of leaves seemed unnaturally loud. 

On the way back to our cars, I timed our walk: almost 55 minutes. But even so, if I hadn’t been so exhausted, I would have asked Steve to show me other forgotten cemeteries in the area.

He later told me if I ever wanted to do another story about any of his discoveries, I’d “already been to the hardest ones. It’s all downhill… or rather, it’s all on level ground from here.”

I laughed and had no doubt that was true. I was also happy for a potential future invitation.

Steve has been visiting and photographing long lost places for 15 years, and mapping abandoned cemeteries since 2020. Many of them have been added to Find a Grave so other people can find them as well.

If you’d like to find out more, follow his Facebook page, Abandoned Cemeteries of Nova Scotia, or check out his book about forgotten cemeteries, The Dead Die Twice, which will be available mid-March 2023 from Nimbus.