Forest Park Cemetery, Brunswick
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Forest Park Cemetery is an abandoned cemetery, located on Pinewoods Avenue just west of the hamlet of Eagle Mills, in the Town of Brunswick, Rensselaer County, New York, just east of the city of Troy. It is infamous for the numerous reported ghost sightings by those who have visited, and it has been cited by Life Magazine as one of the top ten most haunted places in the United States.
[edit] History
Forest Park Cemetery was originally designed by Garnet Baltimore, the first African-American graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It was first incorporated in 1897 by a group of wealthy Troy citizens. The original area chosen for the cemetery occupied over 200 acres.
This original incorporation went bankrupt in 1914. Forest Park Cemetery was re-incorporated in 1918 by a group of investors from Chicago and New York City under the new name, "Forest Hills". This corporation also went bankrupt during the 1930s.
Today, the cemetery occupies only 22 acres (9 hectares); most of it has been bought by the Troy Country Club. It has been plagued by vandalism, and several of the tombstones have been intentionally toppled.
Various stautes in the park are missing their heads. It is possible that this is the result of vandalism. There is one statue of an angel in the cemetery whose head was removed by its owners, who believed blood was coming out of the eyes. A local historian has suggested that the blood-like marks might have been caused by a certain kind of moss that turns red when rubbed in humid weather.
The cemetery's design can prove to be very confusing for explorers, as there is a large expanse of trails twisting throughout the woods, beyond the "main" section of the cemetery. Many people have wandered these woods at night, completely lost for hours. At several points, visitors might think they have left the cemetery completely, until a shape comes into view, and they stumble upon a small cluster of monuments and/or statues. It is highly recommended that this cemetery be explored in daylight before attempting to visit at night. Furthermore, visitors are considered to be trespassing unless they have been granted express permission by the town of Brunswick.
