Gregory Four Corners
Trumbull, Connecticut
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Gregory Four Corners is a very small burial ground located on Spring Hill Road at the Trumbull/Monroe line in Connecticut. It was established in 1761, and by appearances has not been maintained since then. As you'll be able to see in the photos, most of the stones are reduced to nubs, and the few that still stand are so weather-worn or have sunken so drastically that only a handful remain intact and are legible. Hannah Cranna Hovey's is the only marker in perfect condition.
Stories abound about Hannah Cranna, the "witch" of Monroe, but none have ever been verified. Hannah was the wife of Captain Joseph Hovey. Supposedly, he died a mysterious death - he awoke one morning to go for a walk, became disoriented and walked off a cliff. Hannah then lived off the kindness of strangers. It was rumored that those she favored experienced good luck; those who invoked her displeasure would be cursed. A man who fished on her property without her permission was said to be cursed, never again able to catch a fish. A woman who refused to give Hannah Cranna a pie that she was cooling in the window, lost the ability to bake entirely.
Hannah even had a "familiar", a rooster named Old Boreas. When Old Boreas died, Hannah told a neighbor that she, too, would soon die and that when she did, she wanted her coffin to be carried by foot, not by wagon, to the cemetery. She died the next day, but a snowstorm made efforts to carry her casket difficult. It was decided to load her coffin onto a wagon, but it slid off the cart and ended up halfway down the hill toward her house. They secured it with chains and several men sat on top of the casket. The casket began to shake, fell off the wagon and dumped the men off in the process. They finally decided to bring her casket to the cemetery on foot. Afterwards, they returned to town, to find Hannah's house in flames.
Urban legend claims that at least once a year, a driver passing by the burial ground swerves to avoid a woman in the road, and crashes into the same tombstone - Hannah Cranna's. (Some versions of the story have the driver crashing into a tree at the site.) While Hannah's stone is at the street edge of the burial ground, it is up a hill, so crashing into it would be a feat. People claim that the town of Trumbull has to replace her tombstone almost annually; others say that there is no record in either Trumbull or Monroe of the stone ever having to be replaced. The sign for Gregory Four Corners has been replaced, for reasons unknown, and the photos below show that it is only a few feet from Hannah's marker. Hannah's stone, incidentally, is in excellent shape when you consider its age and the ruined condition of ALL the other grave markers (several from the same time period). Hannah's stone is also made of a different material than all the others.
See how Gregory Four Corners features in Connecticut's "Little Salem".
Estimated number of interments, as of January 2024: at least 22.
Photos were taken 12 October 2008 and 11 July 2010.
Made a visit to Gregory Four Corners on Halloween night, 2010, at approximately 11 PM. The trip resulted in some interesting photos, displayed at the bottom of this page.
