History & local legend
Providence Quaker Cemetery and Chapel, outside Perryopolis, is associated with a curse said to affect anyone who reads a particular gravestone. The stone generally identified in the story belongs to Ella Mae and William Lynch. Its epitaph asks young passersby to remember that they, too, will eventually join the dead.
Folklorist Thomas White collected a firsthand account from a group of college students who visited on a Saturday night in the mid-1990s. One student read the inscription. Nothing unusual happened at the cemetery, and the group went home.
The following morning, that student returned from church to find fire trucks nearby. A friend who had accompanied him called to report that his car had burned. Another friend called from Clarion University about an apartment fire. The student connected the sequence of bad news with the previous night’s visit, adding a personal story to the cemetery’s older curse tradition.
Sources
- Thomas White, Ghosts of Southwestern Pennsylvania, chapter one, publicly accessible publisher-supplied excerpt including the students’ account and Lynch stone
- National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Providence Quaker Cemetery and Chapel
- PA Bucket List, Russ Adam, site photographs, history of the 1895 memorial chapel and cemetery entrance
- Fayette County PAGenWeb, surveyed cemetery and GPS location
