A photographer has offered a glimpse inside a long-abandoned pet cemetery located within an area of Massachusetts woodland that has its own dark history.
Donald Pimental took to social media to share snaps from a recent trip to the cemetery, which is located in the heart of Freetown-Fall River State Forest. Pimental, who has visited many abandoned places across the country, told Newsweek there was an especially “eerie vibe” to this graveyard, which closed its gates around 1989.
For some, even the mere mention of the words pet cemetery is enough to send a chill down the spine. Much of that is due to Stephen King and his 1983 horror novel, Pet Sematary, and the subsequent film adaptation, released in 1989. The story centers on a pet cemetery at an ancient burial ground where the dead are capable of being raised.
Pet cemeteries, or cemeteries of any kind, may pose no threat to visitors, but try telling that to the human brain.
Professor Joanne Cantor of the University of Wisconsin has spent years studying the lasting impact that scary films can have on us. In an interview with BBC Science Focus, she explained how horror films trigger the part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is highly active in situations where we are afraid.
Essentially, in an encounter involving a perceived threat, the amygdala works to trigger nervous responses associated with fear, like increased heart rate, sweating or raised blood pressure. The amygdala is also connected to the hippocampus, where memories are stored. This means our brain often reminds us to be afraid if a similar threat is encountered again.
“The amygdala doesn’t control what we think but rather our instinctive bodily reaction to an event,” Cantor said. “It evolved so that when we come across something threatening, regardless of whether it’s real or not, it reacts.”
Maybe that’s what makes Pimental’s photographs from inside the pet cemetery so unsettling. Then again, there may be some valid reasons to feel uneasy about this burial ground.
The cemetery was established by the Animal Rescue League of Fall River, and Pimental said the woods are “known locally to be haunted.”
“There are all kinds of rumors about cultists in the 1980s performing rituals in the woods,” Pimental said. “The woods themselves are also part of the Bridgewater Triangle.”
The Triangle is a 323-mile area of Massachusetts where people have purportedly had encounters with UFOs, poltergeists and mysterious flaming orbs. It’s even been claimed that Bigfoot walked among the trees there.
Pimental does not “buy into” such ideas but he felt a little perturbed during his trip there. For one thing, the cemetery does not appear on any official park maps.
Walking into the cemetery sounds like something out of a horror movie. “To get to it is a little spooky as you walk down through the woods, where the decaying branches of the increasingly bare trees are visible,” Pimental said.
Then there are the graves themselves. As the pictures and video footage show, the cemetery has the graves of dearly departed dogs like Snoopy as well as cats like Mittens, who now reside under tombstones befitting a human grave.
But there’s something else that’s eerie about some of the burial sites. Over time, the earth where these pets were put to rest has, well, changed. “A lot of the graves have sunken holes in front of them, which immediately makes you think of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary,” Pimental said.
Have these pets risen again? Of course not. As Pimental explains, “The reality is people are burying their pets in wooden boxes not too deep, and as time goes on the wood rots and it caves in.”
But while the pictures he shares will have imaginations running wild, Pimental has grown used to the pet cemetery and is happy to ignore what the locals might say. “It was a bit spooky the first time I went there, but now I find it relaxing,” he said. “It’s a nice walk in the woods.”
Does anyone else have a bad feeling about this?