City Cemetery is the Nashville's original cemetery and the primary burial ground for many of the city's founding fathers. Instead of a standard tombstone, one cemetery plot is covered by a large boulder, plus a large iron fixture to hold a lantern. Because this is unusual, it makes for some good urban legends.
The legend goes something like this:
Up until 2014, there was a plaque with the name Ann Rawlins Sanders 1815-1836 on it. (If you look closely, you can see the outline where a plaque was.)
As one story goes, Ann was killed in a carriage accident on the way to her wedding. In another version, after a lover's quarrel, Ann jumped off this rock into the Cumberland River to drown away her sorrows. While going through bereavement, her husband somehow moved the rock she jumped off of to her grave site. The iron fixture held a lantern so that if her spirit was scared or waited to look for her husband, she would have a light. None of this is true. Instead, Ann is buried in the stone box barely visible behind the rock. The lantern seen in older pictures was removed as it was not original or from the same time period.
The Rock is actually the tombstone for Lucy Rawlins Steele (perhaps Ann's sister.) Her name was actually carved in the rock on the other side, but it's weathered and not visible today. Lucy died in May 1847 of Tuberculosis. Her husband Edward G. Steele was a commissioner overseeing the building of the state capitol. He had this stone from the same quarry as the capitol delivered here for the tombstone. Two years later, Edward moved to another state and the locals forgot who Lucy was.
Read the entire story in this PDF from the Nashville City cemetery association, starting on page 3: They tell the real story and how they learned about it:
www.thenashvillecitycemetery.org/spring2014.pdf
www.thenashvillecitycemetery.org/180060_steel.htm
www.thenashvillecitycemetery.org/180058_sanders.htm
www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/24272
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