By Tim Binnall
The stolen head of a statue situated in a Canadian graveyard and said by some to be haunted has been mysteriously returned after it was taken by miscreants twenty years ago. According to a local media report, the marble monument was placed in Gray's Island Cemetery in the community of Hillsborough during the 1930s as a memorial for a young woman named Jennie Steeves, who died of tuberculosis in 1900. For the next several decades, the sizeable statue stood undisturbed at the site until around 1990 when modern-day members of the family noticed that people had begun defacing the piece. And, in an unfortunate turn of events, some ne'er-do-wells eventually managed to actually behead the monument.
As is often the case, the presence of a headless statue in the cemetery eventually gave rise to all manner of somewhat elaborate urban legends surrounding its condition. Specifically, it was said by some that the monument had been haunted and that it would watch over visitors to the graveyard, which led to the head unceremoniously being removed. Others asserted that it once sported red rubies for eyes and that, presumably, the piece was decapitated by an individual looking to pilfer the precious gems. In a testament to how far and wide a story can spread, the headless statue has appeared on various 'most haunted' lists and even serves as the basis for a handful of apocryphal tales regarding a ghost said to lurk on Gray's Island.
However, members of the Steeves family insist that these accounts are merely the result of imaginative people spotting the headless piece in the graveyard, speculating on how it came to be, and then these ideas taking on a life of their own. Fortunately, the story of the 'haunted' statue has now come to an unexpected resolution as the missing piece of the monument mysteriously reappeared beside its body earlier this month. While it is uncertain where the head has been the last two decades, much less who took it in the first place, the Steeves family are understandably happy to have recovered it and hope to restore the statue to its complete form sometime next year.