Whitehall Burial Ground holds 276 marked graves, the oldest stone dating to 1719, in a half-acre plot surrounded by modern suburban streets. The cemetery sits on land originally deeded to the town of Stonington as common burial ground when Mystic was still a shipbuilding village clustered around the Mystic River. Slate markers lean at unpredictable angles, their carved winged skulls and hourglasses weathered smooth by three centuries of coastal wind. The site served mariners, merchants, and farmers alike, and a dozen stones record deaths at sea or in foreign ports, reminders of the town's maritime economy when wooden whalers and clipper ships launched from yards within sight of the graveyard. Today, Whitehall anchors the town's folklore calendar. Evening cemetery tours tap into New England's deep tradition of gravestone rubbing, genealogy walks, and oral history preservation, practices that gained popular traction in the 1970s as preservation societies sought to document Colonial-era burial grounds before acid rain and neglect erased them. Mystic's ghost walk tradition emerged in the 1990s, initially as a historical society fundraiser, and has since expanded into a year-round offering that blends archival research with regional ghost lore. The graveyard tour format is fundamentally a storytelling exercise, anchored to specific markers and family names drawn from probate records, ship manifests, and town ledgers. Guides cite documented events—a yellow fever outbreak in 1794, a maritime disaster off Fishers Island in 1832, a disputed inheritance that led to arson—and layer them with anecdotes collected from descendants and local historians. The tour route follows a loop that takes in the oldest section, where stones bear Puritan iconography, then moves to the Federal-era markers with their neoclassical urns and willow motifs. Visitors walk unpaved grass paths under mature oaks, pausing at stones of notable families: the Denisons, who operated the region's largest shipyard; the Palmers, who lost three sons to typhoid in a single winter; the Randalls, whose patriarch was lost aboard a schooner bound for the West Indies. The experience is designed for dusk and evening hours, when long shadows and fading light amplify the site's atmospheric weight, and when foot traffic from nearby residential streets falls away, leaving the burial ground quiet and isolated despite its suburban setting.