Welcome to Amity, Indiana (why is weird stuff always happening in places called Amity?), a small community, seemingly normal enough. But then there’s this:
“Honey, did you see that? There was a grave right in the middle of the road!”, said no few amount of out-of-the-way travelers, one would expect, heading down Amity’s County Road 400. Why in the world would they leave a grave there like that? The answer: the road crews were terrified of disturbing it.
Back in 1808, a happy family settled here, Nancy and William Barnette, who had 11 children together before Nancy died in 1931 and William buried her on her favorite hill. The spot ended up becoming an official graveyard for a number of locals who wanted to be buried there as well. Flash to years later when the county was building its roads (as they do) and the process of moving the graves began. But Nancy’s ancestors weren’t having it.
Daniel, her grandson, grabbed his shotgun and camped out right on her grave. Nobody would come near it or the clearly irate and trigger-happy Daniel. Finally, the county gave up and just split the lanes down the middle around the site and to boot, gave it a protective concrete slab and a historical marker.
Now you can’t just put a grave right smack dab in the middle of the road and not start some ghost stories. Sure enough, the neighborhood kids tell tales and visit the grave late at night to scare themselves silly, as neighborhood kids have been wont to do in any given neighborhood near the creepiest monument accessible, probably since the birth of civilization. But the grave doesn’t represent the eternal spirit of Nancy, I suspect, so much as the eternal stubbornness of Hoosiers.
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