Sad Angel: Adamsville Cemetery

I got so intrigued by the Sliding Hill ghost story that I asked my grandson Jared, who is visiting from Los Angeles, to go with me to explore the area. I can't say there is a lot to see--a country highway that borders the railroad tracks that hug the riverbank, small towns and rural homes and farms. But Jared is an adventurer and an explorer, and as intrigued by strange tales as I am.

We drove up Sliding Hill Creek Road, turning here and there, meandering for miles and just looking at the countryside. 

On Sliding Hill Creek Road

We ended up back on the highway, miles from our starting point, in a community called Clifden which  has its own strange story. According to the lady at the diner where we stopped for lunch, there is (or was) a house in the town where the walls just started crying one day. Literally. Water began seeping out of the walls for no reason anyone could discover. She said that the woman living in the house at the time wrote a book about it, but I have not yet found any information about the event or the book. A story for another day.

After leaving Clifden we turned back toward Sliding Hill, stopping on the way at a graveyard I've passed many times but never had time to visit. 

Check out the orb in this photo. I didn't notice it at the time, but now I'd like to go back and look at that gravestone the grave is centered over.

This is the Adamsville Cemetery, as I learned after a long search--it is not listed on Find-A-Grave, or if it is, it is under another name. The cemetery is not being maintained very well, as the grass and weeds were about a foot high, but we waded in anyway.

Yet another bright orb. Usually I can attribute these to dust, but today there was no dust at all;
the grass was still wet with dew.

I have wanted to stop at this cemetery because of this monument:

This angel has caught my eye so many times over the years, and this time I was determined to stop and take photos of her. And would you believe it, I forgot to get the name of the person buried in that plot. So I will have to stop again sometime. Which I will not mind doing. When a cemetery has become a forgotten place, it feels all the more important to stop and visit, a mark of respect for those beneath the soil.

In the center of this graveyard is a stonewalled enclosure made of large cut stones. I believe this might have been the original cemetery and that there was a church down below at one time. Few of the graves within the walls have markers but their presence was obvious when I walked across the area--the ground was sunken in regular intervals. 

Other sites apparently once had wrought iron fences around them; some of the fenceposts are still standing but the fences are missing.

One of the remaining fenced plots

One grave, far up the hill and against the treeline, particularly interested us. The parents' names, Charley and Emma Martin, were clear, as were their birthdates and that of their married daughter. 

There was also a son, Charley Jr, who was buried here. Oddly, there were no death dates for the parents or the daughter. I searched online in West Virginia death records for them and even googled the names but found nothing. Did the family move away after the young son died? How very lonely his grave if that is the case.

In searching for this cemetery's name online, I found another graveyard in the area that I will need to visit one day: the Welsh Cemetery. Suprisingly, Welsh immigrants ended up in Gallipolis, Ohio, and apparently several made their way across the river to West Virginia. We noticed at least one grave in the Adamsville Cemetery that listed place of birth as Wales. So far from their home.


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