Hidden · 1849 – present
The Friends Quaker Cemetery
A private Quaker burial ground older than Prospect Park — the only private land in the park, where Montgomery Clift is buried in a grave they won't identify.
Older than the park around it
The Friends Cemetery was laid out in 1849, a Quaker burial ground on a wooded rise in what was then open country. When Olmsted and Vaux designed Prospect Park beginning in 1866, they simply built the park around it. The result is a quiet anomaly: roughly ten fenced acres of plain headstones — Quaker custom keeps them modest — that form the only privately owned land inside the entire park, still owned and used by the Religious Society of Friends, and closed to the public.
The hidden grave
The cemetery's most famous resident is the actor Montgomery Clift — star of A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity — who died in 1966 at 45 and was buried here because his mother was a Quaker. His marker is tiny and plain, in keeping with Quaker custom; the actress Nancy Walker is said to have planted two hundred crocuses around it, and the stone was reportedly cut by the same craftsman who made John F. Kennedy's marker at Arlington. But you can't go find it — at the family's request, the cemetery won't reveal which grave is his, even on the rare guided tours.
Myths, lore, and the Clift pilgrims
Burials happened on this rise — “Quaker Hill,” along Center Drive — since at least the 1820s, before the cemetery was formally established and long before the park grew up around it. Because Quaker custom forbade headstones until the 1850s, the oldest graves are unmarked entirely; you are looking at a field of people whose names the ground keeps. That secrecy, plus a movie star hidden somewhere inside, made the place a magnet for legend. In 1998 the cemetery's keepers told The New York Times they were ready to stop their quarterly tours altogether because of all the “people with purple hair and black T-shirts” turning up to ask where Clift was. The high fence is topped with barbed wire — partly to keep out the Clift-obsessed, and partly, according to long-running and entirely unsubstantiated neighborhood rumor, because people were said to have slipped in after dark to practice devil worship or Santeria among the stones. There's no evidence any of that happened. But a sealed, nameless graveyard in the middle of a public park is exactly the kind of place a city writes its ghost stories about.
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