The Single Grave in the Asphalt Mary Ellis (New Brunswick)
This is a legendary piece of oddity lore, but for locals who actually frequented the Route 1 corridor, the reality of it is distinctly eerie.
Down in New Brunswick, in the back parking lot of the AMC Loews movie theater, sits an island of earth raised several feet above the asphalt. Atop it sits a single, weathered 1828 gravestone belonging to a woman named Mary Ellis. The land around it was entirely excavated to build the shopping complex, leaving her grave stranded on a pedestal of dirt.
"I worked at that theater for over a year, and the older layout of that grave site before the theater remodel was genuinely unsettling. It used to be surrounded by a crumbling, rusted wrought-iron fence and choked with overgrown weeds right up against the asphalt. Walking back there at night to dump trash or wait for a ride was terrible.
The creepiest part is the spatial distortion. Because the entire area was graded down for construction, that grave sits exactly where the original ground level used to be. When you stand down in the parking lot and look up at the headstone, you realize you are standing below where the dead were originally laid to rest. It gives off a heavy, depressing energy, like the modern world aggressively forced itself around her ghost."