Evans City
Evans City Cemetery
Evans City Cemetery. 1968 film location
Evans City Cemetery is on Franklin Road, just south of the town, in Butler County. It is a small country burial ground, used long before 1967 and still used. A short lane off the road leads up to a chapel near the gate.
In the summer of 1967 George A. Romero filmed the opening of Night of the Living Dead among those stones, and kept shooting in and around Evans City into January 1968. The brother and sister are Russell Streiner and Judith O’Dea. The line spoken in the cemetery is “They’re coming to get you, Barbra.” The film was released in 1968. In 1999 the Library of Congress placed it on the National Film Registry. An oversight at release left it without a copyright, so it has circulated free ever since. The farmhouse used for the rest of the night stood nearby and was pulled down after the shoot. Years later the chapel was close to being demolished. It was repaired, and in 2014 it reopened, with Romero there.
The cemetery’s own story of itself has no ghost older than the film. People who come looking for one are looking for the movie.
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