🔥 Rosalea’s Warning: The Burnt Tree of Clifton Cemetery

The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers Near Lake Tawakoni...

CASE FILE #8

In the quiet town of Point, Texas, where the fog clings low and the trees whisper secrets, Clifton Cemetery holds one of East Texas’s most unsettling legends. Locals still speak of Rosalea—a little girl, no older than ten or eleven, who died in the late 1800s. Her grave sits near the edge of the cemetery, marked by a modest stone and a scorched tree stump that refuses to rot.

But it’s what happened before her burial that haunts the town.

After Rosalea passed, the grave diggers prepared her resting place. But when they returned the next morning, the pit had filled with groundwater—murky, cold, and rising. That night, every man who touched a shovel swore they saw her. Pale. Silent. Standing at the edge of their beds.

She didn’t speak with her mouth. She spoke with her eyes.

“Don’t bury me there.”

They did anyway.

The next morning, an image appeared on the tree at the head of her grave. Not carved. Not painted. Just… there. A faint outline of a girl’s face, pressed into the bark like a photograph burned into wood. The men who had dug the grave—those who had laid her to rest—couldn’t resist touching it. One by one, they died within the month. Sudden illness. Accidents. No clear cause. Just gone.

The town panicked. They cut the tree down. Burned it. Buried the ashes.

But the stump remains.

Visitors say it’s colder than the surrounding ground. That no grass grows near it. That sometimes, if you stand too close, you’ll feel watched. Not by something angry—but by something waiting.

Rosalea’s grave is still there. So is the stump. And the warning.

Don’t touch the tree.

If CASE FILE #8 is the first you're reading, make sure to go back and check out "The Dark Beneath" series of posts! The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers Around Lake Tawakoni

For more Texas urban legends and ghost stories, check out Ethan Blackwood's book, Glitchy - Texas: Unexplained Mysteries, Urban Legends, and Paranormal Encounters in the Lone Star State.

Until the next body drops,

Loretta & David Allseitz

"Unmasking evil, one body at a time"