Colonel Buck's Cursed Memorial, Bucksport: The Witch's Leg Legend

Drive through Bucksport on U.S. Route 1 and you pass a small hilltop graveyard by the town’s only traffic light. Its tallest stone is a granite obelisk to Colonel Jonathan Buck, the man who founded the town. Below his name, on the smooth face of the stone, is a dark mark that looks uncannily like a woman’s lower leg and foot, toes and all.

For well over a century people have told the same story about it: that Buck sentenced a woman to death for witchcraft, and that she cursed him as she died, promising that her mark would sit on his tomb forever. The town has put up a sign telling the legend, and a second one explaining the stain. This guide covers both.

Who was Colonel Jonathan Buck?

Jonathan Buck was born on February 20, 1719, and came up the Penobscot River to settle at what was then called Plantation Number 1. He built the area’s first sawmill, its first grist mills and its first boat, and he opened its first general store. The settlement that grew around him became Bucksport. He was a justice of the peace and an important local figure, and he died in the town in the 1790s.

His original grave was marked in the ordinary way. Decades later his descendants raised a much grander memorial in the town cemetery on Main Street: a tall obelisk of Blue Hill granite with the name BUCK on its base. It is a memorial, not his headstone. Before long, people noticed a dark patch on the shaft below his name, and the more they looked, the more it looked like a leg.

The story that grew up around the mark began, NewsCenter Maine reports, as a tabloid newspaper tale about 120 years ago, long after Buck’s death, and it has been retold in books, on television and in countless lists of haunted places ever since. Buck’s descendant Ed Buck told NewsCenter Maine that the family and town tried to deal with the stain over the years, and that the mark seemed to come back.

Bucksport has made peace with its most famous resident. Two signs by the fence now tell visitors the legend and the likely explanation side by side, and the town’s Halloween festival, Ghostport, makes the most of it each October.

The legend of the witch's curse

The story

In the usual telling, Buck, as the local magistrate, condemned a woman to death for witchcraft. Some versions say she was hanged; others that she was burned, and that as the flames rose she turned to him and said that her curse would be upon him and her sign upon his tombstone. In the most lurid version her leg fell from the fire and rolled to his feet. Another version says she was not a witch at all but carrying Buck’s child, and that her death solved a problem for him.

The leg that comes back

The legend’s second half says the stain cannot be removed. People say it was scrubbed, and even that the stone was replaced, and each time the leg returned. That claim is repeated often, but the town and the historical marker both say the stone is the original one.

Why the story does not hold up

The historical marker beside the cemetery is direct: there is no record of any witchcraft execution in Maine. Buck had no power to sentence anyone to death. He was born in 1719, long after the Salem trials of 1692, and witch executions in New England had ended decades before he was an adult. The obelisk is not even his tombstone; it went up long after his death. And the mark itself is a common defect in granite caused by iron oxidizing in the stone.

Is it haunted?

There are no ghost sightings attached to the memorial, only the curse. It belongs on any list of Maine’s haunted places because of the legend’s grip: it is one of the oldest and best-known supernatural stories in the state, and it is a rare chance to see the thing the story is about with your own eyes.

Where to look

• The stain: on the obelisk’s shaft just below Buck’s name, clearest from the Route 1 sidewalk.
• The two signs: by the fence: one tells the legend, the other explains the stain.
• The rest of Buck Cemetery: a small hilltop graveyard of old slate and marble stones.

Visiting Colonel Buck's memorial

The memorial is in Buck Cemetery on Main Street (U.S. Route 1) in Bucksport, at the corner of Hinks Street and across the road from the Hannaford supermarket. Free parking is on Hinks Street. The cemetery is fenced and you cannot walk up to the stone, but you can see and photograph it easily from the sidewalk.

It takes ten minutes, so pair it with Fort Knox, which sits directly across the Penobscot River in Prospect, and with Bucksport’s waterfront walkway, where markers tell the story of Buck’s sawmill. In October, check whether the town’s Ghostport festival is on.

• Visiting Seen from the sidewalk by the cemetery fence on Route 1, across from Hannaford
• Ghost hunting None; it is a cemetery

Tips for your visit

• Visit in soft afternoon light, when the stain shows up best in photos.
• Read both signs before you decide what you think.
• Stay on the sidewalk; it is an old cemetery and the fence is there for a reason.
• Cross the bridge to Fort Knox for Maine’s best-known haunted fort.

More haunted places nearby

• Fort Knox, Prospect: Maine’s most haunted fort, just across the river
• The Lucerne Inn, Dedham: a haunted inn about 25 minutes away
• Haunted places in Bangor: Mount Hope Cemetery and the Bangor Opera House, 30 minutes north
• Haunted places in Maine

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Wikipedia: Jonathan Buck (Bucksport)
• Historical Marker Database: The Legend of the Buck Memorial
• Atlas Obscura: Cursed Memorial of Colonel Buck
• NewsCenter Maine: Maine Mysteries, the Buck curse of Bucksport
• Bangor Daily News: 7 supposedly haunted Maine places (2024)