Case 11: Widow Susan Road

Yes, even roads can be haunted. This road near the town of Amsterdam, New York is one such instance, and ended up being one of our most unique investigations as a result. Because this is a public road, this would not be a traditional lockdown-style investigation, nor would EVPs be a realistic option here. This one would be conducted primarily with photo and video cameras.

Widow Susan Road runs up a steep hill from Chapman Drive to New York State Route 67. It is so named due to a woman who once lived close by named Susan Thomas. Born in Scotland, Susan Thomas moved to the United States and married a man named Harmanus DeGraff when she was eighteen years old in 1838. The two had a farm and several children, but just ten years later, Harmanus died. This left Susan and her children with the farm by themselves. Eventually, after her children grew up and moved, she ended up living by herself, and it was around this time she became known as ‘Widow Susan’ within the town of Amsterdam (not to be confused by the city of Amsterdam, which at the time of these events was a village within the town before it seceded and became a city).

In 1892, Susan died of old age. She desired to be buried with her husband and his family in a plot owned by the DeGraff family. However, in spite of her wishes, she was instead buried at Green Hill Cemetery, most likely due to the DeGraff family plot being in a state of disrepair by this point. This is when tales of her ghost began to spread throughout the area, with people reporting seeing her spirit wandering down the road that would eventually bear her nickname, searching for the grave of her husband.

Along the road are three cemeteries: St. Michael’s Cemetery, St. Nicholas’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery, and St. Casimir’s Cemetery. None of these are the cemetery that Harmanus DeGradf was buried in, which is located on Church Street in what is now the city of Amsterdam. Despite this, Susan’s ghost is said to wander the road near these cemeteries, hoping that her husband is buried in one of them. It is said she appears in a white dress and is visibly crying while walking up and down the road.

We first heard about this road from Naomi, as a matter of fact. Her mother’s family was buried in St. Casimir’s Cemetery as many of them live or used to live in Amsterdam, and she had long heard stories about Widow Susan’s tearful treks along the road the cemetery was on. Sure enough, upon her own passing, she too was buried in St. Casimir’s. Although we would focus on the legend of Widow Susan, we thought that perhaps Naomi herself would make a spiritual cameo, given that we would not be ghost hunters without her in one way or another.

…

It was late at night when we parked Jared’s truck on the side of Cemetery Road, a small branch road that led to St. Michael’s and St. Nicholas’s respectively. We would split into two groups: Me, Ashley, and Yukiko as Team 1, and then Marie and Jared as Team 2. Both groups would walk up and down the entirety of the road, which was no easy feat given the road was a mile and a half long and up a rather steep hill. We would also briefly explore all three of the cemeteries as best as we could.

We in Team 1 decided to explore the two cemeteries first, and as we walked into St. Nicholas’s, we were talking among ourselves about what had happened at Forest Park Cemetery a few nights before. “Looking back,” Ashley said to me and my sister. “We probably could have stayed a bit longer. I’m sorry I dragged you guys out so early into the hunt.”

“It’s fine,” I assured her. “We got enough evidence there, Ash. Besides, after what happened in Harukawa, I don’t want to take any chances. If anything, maybe we’ll go back there one day. Maybe.”

“Whatever was chasing me and Jared was evil. I don’t know if it was a regular ghost or some other entity. Whatever it was, I’d like to not cross paths with it again if I don’t have to.”

“Maybe we could go there alone,” Yukiko proposed to me. “We did it for the church back in town after the rest of the crew didn’t want to go.”

“That is a possibility, although getting in there would be an issue as we’d have to ask again.” I then looked around the graves from the road within the cemetery, noting in my head the many American and Ukrainian flags that dotted the landscape. A few graves even had Ukraine’s coat of arms, the tryzub, on their headstones. I noticed one grave in particular that had, in Ukrainian, the phrase ‘Glory to Ukraine’ emblazoned on it. Unsurprisingly, it was a rather recent one from May of 2023, over a year after Russia had invaded Ukraine. “You can tell these people really had a connection to their homeland.”

“Yeah,” Ashley nodded. “I noticed a few graves with those golden tridents Ukrainians like to use. What does that one grave say over there?”

“Slava Ukraini,” I explained. “It means ‘Glory to Ukraine’ in Ukrainian. Many of these people probably have relatives still in Ukraine.”

“I can only imagine how they must feel given what Putin is doing.”

“To be honest, I didn’t even know about Catholic Ukrainians. I always assumed most of them were Orthodox like the Russians. Most are, but there’s a significant minority who are Catholic instead.”

Yukiko then noticed a set of lights out near the main road and called us over. “Hey guys, look at this! There’s lights floating above the road!”

We turned around and walked over to where she was standing, but as we looked at the lights, we realized they were not supernatural and had a much more mundane explanation. “Wait a minute, Yukiko,” I cautioned her. “That could be explained.”

“How?”

Ashley put a hand on her shoulder and pointed out the lights as they moved down the road. “Look at how they’re moving.”

After a few seconds, Yukiko understood what we meant and blushed in embarrassment. “They’re car lights…”

“Yep.” To add insult to injury for Yukiko, the same source of the lights then honked its horn at something on the road we could not see. “See what we mean?”

“That’s embarrassing. I thought we really had something.”

I assured her with a pat of her head, “You’ve been doing this for a while, so you know it happens. It’s fine.”

Messing with me a bit, Yukiko told me in Japanese with a stereotypical little sister-esque voice, “Oniichan, your headpats feel so nice… Keep going…”

“Okay, now it’s too weird,” I said as I stopped.

“All I understood was ‘oniichan’,” Ashley joked. “That was enough for me to check out of that conversation.”

“Understandable,” Yukiko chuckled. “I just told him his headpats feel nice.”

“I don’t think I want to know the rest…”

I then began to take photos of the cemetery, taking in the sights of the many headstones and mausoleums dotting the landscape. Unlike Forest Park Cemetery, all three cemeteries along Widow Susan Road were maintained pretty well, and all of them had been cleared of trees and brush, giving them a nice and relatively smooth appearance. The grass was not too long, and the graves were clearly cared for. Additionally, several graves at St. Nicholas had mementos left behind by living relatives, and not a single grave was vandalized or damaged.

I highly doubted any of these three cemeteries were haunted, and if they were, they certainly were not hotbeds of activity besides the legends about Widow Susan herself. You see, contrary to popular belief, cemeteries are not teeming with spirits just by virtue of being resting places for the dead. Most spirits don’t tend to haunt where they are buried or where their ashes were dumped or interred, and instead seem to prefer to haunt locations where they lived, worked, or otherwise visited in, especially, but not always, places they died in. That said, there were certainly exceptions, like the Volendam Lutheran Church and Cemetery in our hometown and the aforementioned Forest Park Cemetery.

As I took some photos of a mausoleum, I heard a message from Marie over my radio. “Hey guys, we just saw something really creepy along the road.”

Curious, I put the camera down and radioed back, “What’s up, Marie?”

“It looked like dancing lights or something,” she explained. “They definitely weren’t car headlights. Jared got it on camera, too.”

…

So while me, Ashley, and Yukiko were in St. Nicholas, Marie and Jared had begun walking up the road. This late at night, there were very few vehicles that passed by, and nobody else was walking with them. As they continued on their trek, Marie began talking to Jared about things that had been happening since she got back from Japan. “There’s been a few minor disturbances at my house. It’s nothing u haven’t dealt with before, but it hasn’t happened in a while.”

Jared turned around and asked her, “Like what?”

“Things getting moved around a bit, cold drafts with no explanation, footsteps when no one else is around, that kind of stuff. I also feel like my family is once again not alone in the house.” Marie assured him, “Don’t worry. It doesn’t feel malicious. Not this time. I don’t think it’s whatever attached itself to me in Leesville.”

“I hope it’s not. All this attachment and possession shit freaks me the Hell out. I never thought ghost hunting would actually get this deep when Takeo asked me to come along.”

Curious, Marie asked her, “Well, what were you expecting?”

“Just some bumps in the nights and maybe a good scare or two. I didn’t expect it to be this deep. Did you?”

“I’ve known it could get this dangerous for a while. Jared, I’ve grown up around the paranormal. I’ve seen things I was unable to explain ever since I was born. Naomi also believed in ghosts, too. Takeo didn’t until he stayed over that one night at my house with Ashley.”

Jared looked out onto the road as a car came closer and closer to them. “I honestly didn’t believe it until Takeo told me about it, either. I’ve known him for a long time. He wouldn’t lie about something like this, especially not with how he said it to me. He genuinely sounded scared when he called me that night.” As the car passed by them, he looked down the road and asked, “Speaking of Naomi, isn’t she buried here?”

“She’s buried in St. Casimir’s Cemetery,” Marie explained. “Her mother’s maiden name was Gapsys, a Lithuanian one.”

“Huh… I didn’t know she was Lithuanian.”

“Half.” She looked up ahead towards the direction of St. Casimir’s Cemetery and explained, “The plan was to not only investigate the road, but to also see Naomi later.”

“What time?”

“Around eleven, so about forty minutes from no-“ She stopped herself when she saw a set of lights she could not identify as a car ahead of them. “Hold up… Jared, over there!”

Jared turned the camera in the direction Marie was pointing in, revealing a set of three orbs of light moving down the road before turning into the woods. All three seemed to be grouped together but moved somewhat individually, and the light they gave off had a bluish tint to it. “Woah…”

“We gotta tell the others about this.” As Marie went for her radio, the lights continued to drift further into the woods before they disappeared from view. “That was incredible…”

As Marie radioed Team 1, Jared continued to film the woods. He would later tell me that at that moment, he began to feel like they were being watched, and it would only intensify after we split up once again following our visit to Naomi’s grave.

…

At 11:17, we all arrived together at St. Casimir’s Cemetery and walked over to the Smith/Gapsys family plot, where Naomi was buried. All five of us visited the grave relatively frequently, either together or alone, and at times would even talk to her like she was still with us. Even though she had been dead for a year, in some ways, her death felt like it happened yesterday.

As we arrived in front of it, Ashley knelt down and left a single rose by the graveside. It was clear she still loved her girlfriend, even with her having moved on and found me. I stood next to her and placed a hand on her shoulder as she took a deep breath and told Naomi as she turned on a digital voice recorder, “Hey, it’s Ash. We’re back from Japan. We’re doing a ghost hunt on Widow Susan Road, the same road you mentioned was haunted. We’ve been hunting ghosts for over half a year now, and maybe… Maybe you could talk to us.”

“Naomi,” I told the grave. “I’m taking good care of your girlfriend. You always said that if it weren’t you, you’d want me to be with her, after all. We miss you. We all miss you.”

Ashley chuckled, remembering some jokes the three of us shared. “It was so obvious you had a crush on me back then, Takeo. Even my girlfriend knew it.” She then told Naomi in an increasingly somber tone, “He is taking good care of me, Naomi. You don’t have to worry about me.” In an emotional display of the love she still had for her, she hugged the gravestone and gave it a short kiss before whispering, “I love you.”

As she got up, Marie, Yukiko, and Jared came over to pay their respects in silence. Once we were finished, I told the group, “We got a road to investigate. Let’s do this for Naomi.”

“Agreed,” Ashley nodded. “For Naomi.”

“For Naomi,” Marie chimed in.

“For Naomi,” said Yukiko.

“For Naomi,” finally said Jared, ending the chain.

Ashley stopped the recording on the digital voice recorder and began to play it back, saying to us, “Honestly, it’s fine if we don’t get anything. I’m good wi-“ She then heard something on the recording that made her pause and rewind. “Wait a minute…”

As she played it again, we all listened in surprised silence, all of us recognizing the voice that had come through. Once it was done playing again, I wondered out loud, “Is that…”

“It’s her,” Ashley said as she began to cry. “Listen…” Sure enough, we had picked up a voice that sounded just like our friend, simply saying to us, ‘Thank you.’

“Oh my God,” a stunned Yukiko replied. “That’s Naomi.”

My girlfriend burst into tears, having not heard her former girlfriend’s voice in over a year. “It’s her… She spoke to us…” As I hugged her, she continued to sob, her emotions overcoming her in the moment. Within seconds, all of us came together in a group hug, feeling grief from the fact that Naomi was dead but joy that she was still with us from beyond the grave.

…

Once we collected ourselves, we split up once again and headed back out onto the road, but not before we got two group photos with the grave: A more formal and serious one where we all stood around it, and then a funny one where we all did poses, with Ashley and me giving peace signs in front of it. This was a tradition we did whenever we visited the grave as a group, but this time, we would pay special attention to both photos we took when we got back from the hunt.

Team 1 continued north on the road, while Team 2 went south. As me, Ashley, and Yukiko eventually made it to the end of Widow Susan Road when it met up with New York Route 67 and Clizbe Avenue, we stopped to take some final photos of the road before we would make the trek back down to Jared’s truck near St. Nicholas’s Cemetery. Once I was finished taking photos, me and Ashley began to compare the photos we had each taken. “I’m glad we got to see her,” Ashley told me as we traded cameras. “I still can’t believe we managed to hear her voice.”

“Me neither,” I replied. “I hope she’s doing alright, wherever she is.” As we scrolled through the photos, I found one that my girlfriend had taken that piqued my interest. “Hang on. Take a look at this, guys.”

Yukiko and Ashley peered over my shoulder to see the photo I had stopped at, with the former asking me, “What is that?”

“It looks like a person,” Ashley realized. “But there’s no one else on this section of the road besides us.” The photo showed what looked like a grey human figure standing on the side of the road, with its back seemingly turned to the camera and no distinct features present. It also seemed to be holding something in its right hand, which was extended out a bit from its body. “That’s really weird.”

“Maybe we got a picture of Widow Susan herself,” I theorized. “Either way, whatever’s in this picture is not human, or at least not a living human. Did you get anything from my photos, babe?”

“No,” Ashley shook her head. “I couldn’t find anything. Maybe we’ll find something when we analyze them more closely later.”

…

The rest of the night we were on the road, we got no further evidence of the paranormal. We packed up our things and headed back to Volendam around one in the morning. Even though this night was rather light in terms of activity, the evidence we did get definitely suggests there is some truth to the legends and tales of Widow Susan’s sorrowful treks along the road, searching for the grave of her husband that she will sadly never find.

It was also good for us to see Naomi. Although we had visited her grave plenty of times before, the fact we managed to capture what is most likely her voice is a first for us. It gave us some measure of comfort, knowing that her spirit was still with us. However, when we went through the photos we took that night, we found something else that further confirmed that idea.

In the second group photo around her grave, the one where we did funny poses, we found the faint shape of a hand resting on Ashley’s shoulder. When me and her first analyzed the photo seriously, she was the first to discover the anomaly, and recalled that in that moment, she felt a warm and soothing sensation on her shoulder, but did not bring it up to us at the time and brushed it off.

This was a much-needed breather for us, especially after what happened in Harukawa and at the Forest Park Cemetery. This was also our last investigation of the summer before school started up again. Our next would not be until October, and it would prove to be one of our most challenging and dangerous investigations ever.