Near where I grew up and lived for some twenty seven years is a cemetery that is pretty much like a thousand other cemeteries around the United States. There are manicured lawns, headstones for the lost beloved, and the sense of absence or loss that always hangs about these places. If you find it though, there is a small road that takes you back past the cemetery, over a small bridge, and to another place that seems far less holy but far more powerful. It is called Tyrone Sunken Garden and is, truly, a garden of stone. Supposedly the former owner had brought stones from across the globe together in this garden and had laid it out in a circle, with a stone in the center and pathways out from it, like a wheel. There are stone gates you go through and each stone is carved with the name of a U.S. state that tells you what the state’s bird and nickname are. The garden is beautiful and the shame of it is that wrong-minded people will come and either vandalize the area or perform some manner of dark ritual in the hopes of gaining power they’d never be able to wield.
Make no mistake, there is something strange about the garden but there too is something that draws you there. There is something haunted about the place, as if it is waiting to be re-discovered and loved anew, as if it is waiting patiently for that time but its patience is wearing out. Perhaps it’s just an effect of the dime store Satanism that has plagued the area in recent years but it just feels as if something is there with you and there’s a weight on you as you wander from stone to stone. A weight you don’ t easily forget.
Welcome to the garden…
(While you’re here – check out my podcast about the Gardens and check out my fiction, maybe you’ll find something you dig.
https://spookychris.com/2020/11/25/the-spooky-chris-podcast-tyrone-sunken-gardens/
Check out this follow up post as well.)
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 
[…] already gave a brief idea in a previous post about what Tyrone Sunken Gardens is like so I’ll spare you other than to say – imagine […]
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So glad to have found this blog. The gardens were a staple of my teenage years; it was both beautiful and mysterious. My friends and I took frequent trips there in the middle of
The night hoping to get a scare, but everytime it was an enlightening and interesting experience. It was always sad to see the area vandalized, as we coined it our “Jedi Training Ground” ( nerdy I know). We were always respectful of the place and it had always lived in my heart as part of my local “lore”. I just hope to take my kids there one day so that they might see how the place can charge the imagination.
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Just visited the Gardens today. Heard about it last Sunday at a car show. There are trails that go off from the big circle, does any one know if they go any place. Worth a visit.
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The times I had been back there they didn’t lead to anywhere but overgrowth. It was years since it’d been kept up, the last I knew. There had been an old storage shed but beyond that I can’t say I know where they went to.
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talk about weird , as a teen we stumpled upon some of that and let me tell you it was no garden! it was totally overgrown. erie with brush as tall as some of the stones. im glad its been returned and i finally got some answers as to what all that was . cool!
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Alas, Mark, I can’t tell you that it HAS ever been restored.
These photos are from about twelve years ago at this point and I haven’t been back since. I know that the idiots didn’t stop showing up there and causing mischief and I am not sure if the owners of the cemetery ever really worked to keep the place up. Last I had heard was the bridge to get over to the garden had washed out, which may be the best thing until someone makes an effort to really protect and preserve that space.
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[…] already gave a brief idea in a previous post about what Tyrone Sunken Gardens is like so I’ll spare you other than to say – imagine […]
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