The burial ground next to Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel is Stepney Cemetery, in the village of Stepney in Monroe. It is also called Birdsey’s Plain Cemetery or Beardsley Plain Cemetery. People searching for a “chapel cemetery” usually mean this plot. The chapel sits beside it. The graves are the town’s, not the chapel’s.
Stepney Cemetery was laid out next to Stepney Green in 1794. The oldest stone is earlier: Nathaniel W. Knapp, died 1787. Early Monroe families are buried here. The chapel next door became known later, under Bishop Robert McKenna, a traditionalist Catholic priest who assisted Ed and Lorraine Warren on cases they described as exorcisms. Ed and Lorraine Warren are buried in Stepney Cemetery. Their stone carries the prayer to St. Michael and the name of the New England Society for Psychic Research, which they founded in 1952.
The ghost attached to this ground is the White Lady, and she is borrowed from the cemetery up the road. Union Cemetery in Easton, a few miles away, is the place the Warrens and later tour writers call one of the most haunted in New England. The figure is a woman in a white gown or nightgown, with a bonnet or long dark hair, reported on Route 59 and inside the Easton yard. Because the two cemeteries are close, the same description gets applied to Stepney. Drivers say she steps into the road. One investigator told the Hartford Courant in 2025 that he swerved for a woman in a white dress who crossed in front of his car near Stepney and did not move like a person. A local telling from the late 1990s mentions lights and a figure when transformers blew in front of Stepney Cemetery on Route 25.
None of this is a documented death. One folk version says a husband drowned her at a watering hole across from the cemetery in the 1600s or 1700s. There is no identified grave that matches the story. Ed Warren said he had seen her and had footage. The footage is disputed, and the Warrens’ cases are disputed more broadly. What is reliable is that night visitors treat both cemeteries as the same haunting, and that Easton police have fined people for trespassing in Union Cemetery after dark.
Monroe’s other local tales — Hannah Cranna at Gregory Four Corners, the “melon heads” on Velvet Street — belong to different spots. They get folded into Stepney tours because the Warren grave gives the chapel cemetery a name people recognize.
Stepney Cemetery is on Route 25 in Monroe, beside the chapel and the green. It is an active historic burial ground. The Warren stone draws visitors. Daylight is the visit that does not bother the neighbors. Union Cemetery in Easton is the original White Lady site, and it is posted against night entry.
The history here is a 1794 town cemetery and, much later, the Warren grave beside a chapel whose priest worked with them. The White Lady is an Easton story that traveled one town over.
Public photo searches did not turn up a clear shot of the chapel or the cemetery gate. The image below is the Warren stone in Stepney Cemetery, next to Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel. It carries the St. Michael prayer and the New England Society for Psychic Research, founded in 1952.
The Gravesite of CT’s Most Well-Known Paranormal Investigator
More grave photos are on Find a Grave under Stepney Cemetery, Monroe, Connecticut. Night shots of a “White Lady” online are almost all from Union Cemetery in Easton, not from this yard.
Relevant links
- Stepney Cemetery, Wikipedia — 1794 founding, the chapel next door, and the Warren burials
- NESPR on Stepney Cemetery — the White Lady claim as the Warrens’ organization tells it
- Hartford Courant, 2025 — recent sighting reports around Stepney and Union
- The Monroe Sun — how local lore splits the White Lady, Hannah Cranna, and the Warren cases