The Bloody Skull

While visiting the Cauvel’s in Titusville, PA we ran into some spooky-ness we didn’t even plan on.

When Daniel first moved to Titusville he was around 5 years old. They temporarily moved into a house that was separated into two apartments. Behind this house was a cemetery. This is believed to be the cause of his morbid humor and obsession with Hitchcock, The Twilight Zone, and The Walking Dead. One night he said to his mom before going to bed:

I’m just a little boy, and I need a real back yard, not just a cemetery.

Cemeteries on the east coast are OLD, people. We are talking early 1800s, even a few in the 1700s. For a Utah girl that is old. This was an oil town so it boomed quickly and the wealth was plentiful. There are many mausoleums in the cemetery which is creepy beyond belief. For some reason knowing there is 4–6 feet of dirt between me and….you know…is a lot more comforting than just some stone walls.

Daniel and his mom often went to the cemetery to feed the ducks that lived in a large stream that runs through the center. One day, Daniel wandered a little ways up a hill and found a gravestone that has haunted him to this day. It was an old headstone that laid flat on the ground with a carving of a skull at the top. The skull shape looked like it was covered in blood. Daniel ran away crying. (He was only 5 give ’em a break.) I have heard this story multiple times over the years and wasn’t sure what to believe. But apparently it led to months of difficulty sleeping and nightmares.

Flash forward 17 years to our visit to Titusville.

As we were exploring the city, Daniel decided to go back to the cemetery. He was drawn to it. Obvs. Only I would marry the sort of person who could be drawn to a cemetery. He hadn’t been in this town for 17 years, and he found the cemetery extremely quickly (it’s a small town, but not that small. There is more than one cemetery at least.) We parked the car and made our way up a hill. Yep, that hill. We found the gravestone within a few minutes and he was right. The skull was red. The only part of the gravestone that was red. The only part of THREE of almost the exact gravestones right next to each other that was red. It was very creepy.

We took pictures of it, walked around, and at this point Daniel was a distance away from me on a phone. I was gathering my courage to look through a mausoleum that had a window knocked out — because why not? This is when two ladies (in their 60’s) pulled up in a mini van and asked me about a grave. I said I wasn’t from around here and probably wouldn’t know anything. They said, “Oh, well we are looking for a witches grave.” “Neat!” I thought, but again reassured them that I was not from around here and had never heard about a witch’s grave. “It has a skull on it,” they added. “Oh,” I thought, “that changes things. That is exactly the ONLY gravestone I know anything about.” I asked, “Is the skull red?” Of course they answered, “Yes”.

Come to find out, one of the ladies went to school in a nearby town, and one of their professors was really into the occult. He was quite creepy, apparently. He had told the class that this grave was for a witch that was burned at the stake, and a few nights a week the eyes of the skull would leak blood between the hours of eleven and midnight. They told us that people had come to test why that part of the stone was red, but no one was able to find conclusive evidence what it was. It wasn’t iron, it wasn’t any sort of outside element.

As Daniel and I stood there in awe looking at each other, the skull, and these ladies we just met I realized something important on the stone. The death date: July 6, 1875; the exact day we were there. The 138th anniversary of this so called witch’s terrible death. Goosebumps anybody?

We went on and enjoyed the rest of our day. But you better believe we went back at midnight. Besides the whole part of being in a cemetery at night with absolutely no light except for the truck we were driving, it wasn’t that scary. Sadly, nothing happened. It was raining so maybe it was bleeding from it’s eyes and we just couldn’t see it? I’m going to pretend that is what happened. Either way, the kewlist story this girl has to tell.