The Vengeful Ghost of Carl Pruitt

In Kentucky, June 1838, a carpenter named Carl Pruitt arrived at his house and he caught his wife having an affair with another man.  The other man managed to run away and escape by leaping out of a window, but carl went into a blind rage and he choked his wife to death with a metal chain.  When Carl's rage subsided, he then realised what he had done and that his life was ruined, so he decided to take his own life.  Unlike many couples who die, Carl and his wife were not buried beside each other.  They were not even buried in the same cemetery.

A few weeks after carl had been buried, residents noticed that a discolouration was developing at the top of his headstone and it looked like the shape of a chain.  Some of the locals suggested that it was a bad omen and that the headstone should be removed and placed somewhere else, but officials disagreed with the idea and they chose to let the headstone stay.  A month or so passed and a group of boys were passing past the grave on bicycles, and one of the boys named James Collins, stopped and threw rocks and chipped the supposedly "cursed"gravestone, probably to show that he wasn't scared of all of the hype that the grave had gained.  On his way back home, James lost control of his bike, as if it were being manipulated by an unknown force, and it began to pick up speed until he eventually crashed his bike into a tree.  To everyone's surprise, the bicycle chain not only came off of the bike, but it also managed to wrap itself around James's neck, strangling him to death.  News of the incident spread quickly, and when residents went to investigate the gravestone, they noticed that it was unharmed, despite James's friends saying that James had thrown stones at it. This event began to fuel rumours that Carl's Ghost was responsible for the boys death.

As expected, James's mother was heartbroken that she had lost her son.  A month after, she went to the graveyard with an axe, and enraged, she hacked away at Collin's gravestone until it lay on the floor in numerous pieces.  The next day, she was hanging her washing outside on a washing line made of chain instead of wire or rope, and she slipped and got entangled with the chain.  despite all of her struggling and her best efforts, she was unable to break free and she choked to death on the chain.  After her death, Carl's gravestone appeared to once again, be undamaged.

Rumours continued to circulate, and shortly after the incident, a farmer and his family were riding past the graveyard on their horse-drawn carriage.  The farmer began to boast how he wasn't afraid of ghosts, then he pulled out his pistol and began firing shots at the gravestone, damaging it.  The horses that were pulling the carriage got spooked and they began to run faster and faster.  The family managed to jump off to safety, but the farmer stayed on and tried to stop the horses from running.  The horses ran too fast round a corner, resulting in the farmer being thrown off of the carriage and getting his neck caught on one of the chains on the traces.  The farmer's neck was broken, and once again, another victim was claimed and the gravestone remained undamaged.

The police were eventually called to the cemetery to try and investigate the gravestone and all of the misfortune that it had caused, but there was nothing that they could actually do, and one of the officers laughed at the gravestone and at the townspeople's superstitions.  The officers eventually got into their car and began to drive away.  The officer who had laughed was driving the car and he glanced back towards the graveyard.  He saw a light rising from the graveyard and quickly fly towards the police car.  The officer suddenly lost control of the car and it began to pick up speed.  The car went off of the road and crashed between two posts and began to roll around.  The officer who was sitting in the passenger seat was thrown out of the car, but he only suffered minor injuries. The officer managed to get to his feet and he went to check on his partner.  His partner had been killed, but not due to the impact of the car crash itself.  There had been a metal chain hanging between the two posts, and as the car crashed, the chain broke off through the car's windshield, and wrapped around the officer's neck, and it almost took his head off!

After this incident, most of the residents became afraid and they decided to avoid the cemetery altogether.  One man named Arthur Lewis wasn't afraid and he was adamant that everything was superstitious gibberish, and he was determined to prove it to everyone.  He told his wife what his plans were before he left to go to the graveyard at night with a hammer and chisel.  Arthur began to chip away at the gravestone, and everyone who lived nearby could hear the noise.  Suddenly, the noise of the chiseling was replaced with a spine-chilling scream.  A group of men with lamps ran towards the cemetery where they found Arthur's dead body lying at the cemetery gate with the gate's chain wrapped around his neck.  Despite countless witnesses having heard the gravestone being chiseled, it remained undamaged.

Eventually, the graves from the cemetery were moved to somewhere else, but Carl's grave remained and was forgotten under weeds.  In the 1950s, a strip mining operation took place in the area, and Carl's grave was destroyed in the process.  No more deaths had happened as a result of this, but the 5 previous similar deaths still remain to be mysterious and unexplained.

Do you think that all of these related deaths were just caused by random unfortunate events, or do you think that they were caused by dark forces at work?  Let me know by commenting in the comments section.