Ghosts of Princeton's past

Correction appended

Located at the intersection of Witherspoon and Wiggins streets and overseen by the Nassau Presbyterian Church, the cemetery serves as the final resting place for some of the most important and pivotal figures in the history of the University and of the nation.

One of the graveyard’s best-known occupants is Aaron Burr Jr., the third vice president of the United States, who gained notoriety in 1804 for slaying former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Burr’s flag-bedecked grave was one of the sights that brought former history professor Thorin Tritter to the cemetery.

“Here was a guy who was a founding father and caught in one of the biggest scandals [in American colonial history],” Tritter said of his favorite person buried in the cemetery, which was established in 1757.

Burr is buried in the area known as the “presidential plot,” next to his father, Aaron Burr Sr., and father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards, who served as the University’s second and third presidents, respectively.

Cemetery Superintendent Douglas Sutphen also harbors an interest in the presidential plot. Sutphens’ favorite grave, lying unadorned amid the other tombstones, is that of former U.S. president Grover Cleveland, the only U.S. president to hold two non-consecutive terms.

Other well-known cemetery occupants include American Institute of Public Opinion founder George Gallup; geology professor Arnold Henry Guyot; philanthropist Moses Taylor Pyne, Class of 1877; U.S. Olympic Committee founder William Milligan Sloane and Tulane financier Paul Tulane.

Sutphens, who has worked at the cemetery for roughly 35 years, is the fourth generation in his family to work at the burial ground.

“I came to work with my father,” Sutphen said. “He was there for 55 years and my grandfather before that and his father [before him].”

More than 2,000 visitors pay tribute to the cemetery’s deceased each year, Sutphens said, including the occasional ghost hunter.

“Some have said there’s sometimes energy coming from the ground in the way of orbs of light,” Sutphens added.

But Tritter was drawn to the cemetery less for the purported presence of the supernatural, he said, than for the “lessons of the past” which it holds both for him and for the students he took there during his precepts.

“Cemeteries were used as text to show children heroes and villains,” Tritter said, explaining that tombstones serve as testaments to historical events.

But such sights are not often seen by most of the student body.

“I’ve never heard about it, and I don’t know where it is,” Chris Sykes ’11 said. “I’m not sure if I want to visit it, but it is interesting.”

Walter Chen ’09 had also never ventured inside the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate, though he said he would “definitely consider going.”

“I have walked by it on many dark and spooky nights,” he said jokingly.

Correction

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of cemetery superintendent Daniel Sutphen and misidentified the cemetery's year of founding, which was 1757. It also incorrectly identified the individuals buried near Aaron Burr Jr. He is buried next to his father, Aaron Burr Sr., and father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards, who served as the University’s second and third presidents, respectively.