Here’s a scary story for Halloween. It’s interactive, and anyone can help write the ending.

Rhode Island’s historical cemeteries are in danger of vanishing.

Evelyn Wheeler doesn’t know why, but something coming from those cemeteries is speaking to her. Something compelling.

It could be the weeds and poison ivy. Or maybe it’s that when cemeteries are forgotten, a part of history is lost.

Many of Rhode Island’s historical cemeteries are overgrown, disintegrating and often a gathering spot for evil spirits, or at least underage drinkers.

Wheeler, who with her husband, Frank, volunteered in national parks for 20 years after he retired the first time in 1983, lives in Narragansett and wondered who was in charge of taking care of the historical cemeteries.

It turned out to be her.

She started calling around last year to see about getting attention for a cemetery she’d noticed. The historical cemeteries, she found, have no clear owner. They had no one to care for them. The closest thing to a government agency looking after them was the Advisory Commission on Historical Cemeteries, and it was nearly dead itself.

She undertook her own cemetery cleanup, then took steps to get the commission revived and was elected its chairman. In April, the commission organized 150 volunteers to clean 53 cemeteries in 29 towns.On Saturday, she is hoping more volunteers will join the brigade of souls looking after the souls who walked the ground before them.

Rhode Island has at least 3,500 historical cemeteries. They are listed and numbered, and the number is posted on a metal sign in each cemetery. Volunteers are trying to document each one, pinpoint its location with a global positioning device, photograph the stones, transcribe what is written there and what is known about the graves, and make everything searchable for genealogy enthusiasts online.

Genealogy led Carolyn Saleski, of South Hadley, Mass., to Westerly to find a cemetery said to contain some of her Babcock ancestors. She is related to Capt. James Babcock, the father of Dr. Joshua Babcock. Dr. Babcock was a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, served as Rhode Island’s first postmaster, helped found Brown University and built the Babcock-Smith House in Westerly. “I started doing the Internet thing, I heard about a place called Babcock House,” Saleski said. Last spring, she and her husband drove to Westerly in search of Cemetery 7.

They found Watch Hill Road. “I’m seeing Babcock everywhere, so I’m thrilled,” she said. They drove up and down and didn’t see a cemetery. “We come back one more time,” she said, and then: “Oh my God, that’s it! Historic site number 7.

“I look at this cemetery and draw my breath in. It takes my breath away. Because it is trashed.

“The beautiful stone wall is covered with briars, headstones are on the ground and leaning against trees, they don’t know where they belong,” she said. “I’m shocked.

“It was heartbreaking, for me, to see those ancestors in that disrepair.”

When she returned home, she started calling Rhode Island officials, asking, “Who owns it? What’s going on?”

As it turned out, the Westerly Historical Society was waiting for warmer weather to begin a cleanup. Years of overgrowth, briars and poison ivy were removed. Historical society member John Leach, who worked on the project, said they needed brush cutters and a chain saw and help from the town in hauling away brush.

The refurbished cemetery was ready last Saturday when a wreath was placed at the sarcophagus of Dr. Babcock, a ceremony that was part of the Babcock-Smith House’s celebration of his birth 300 years ago.

“I’m really happy they did it,” Saleski said yesterday when told of the cleanup.

The transformation of the Babcock cemetery is what Wheeler’s commission is hoping will happen at historical cemeteries throughout the state.

“People should know about the history of Rhode Island,” Wheeler said. “The people who started this country” are buried in some of these cemeteries: people who “signed the Declaration of Independence, governors, senators, millwrights, people who spun the cotton that was grown.”

Wheeler calls the cemeteries “open-air museums.”

Names and dates on grave markers tell a fascinating story, which grows more fascinating when interwoven with history and genealogy data online.

She hopes volunteers will call her at (401) 789-3503 to adopt their neighborhood historical cemetery, or one in which they have an ancestor. Adopting it means removing trash, pulling weeds and maybe planting fall bulbs, then returning in the spring to rake, tidy and plant.

If people call her, she can coordinate the many efforts. But anyone can turn out Saturday at a neighborhood cemetery with work gloves and tools and bags for carrying away rubbish.

“I just feel this is a challenge, and they should all be cleaned,” Wheeler said, “because it’s the history of the state. She hopes that lawmakers will be able to establish who the cemeteries belong to.

“There are other cemeteries in the country that are being taken care of,” she said. “Rhode Island should come forward and do the same.”

Wheeler is also hoping for another kind of help, the kind that involves going to town halls to look up deeds and easements, to give the commission the names of property owners surrounding the cemeteries if permission is needed for access.

A volunteer with a hand-held GPS device, or a cell phone with a global positioning feature, can take a reading in the cemetery and note the coordinates. The commission can get the cemetery noted on plat maps, she said, “so developers don’t build right on top of them.”

“The other thing is, if people have Google Earth and they know exactly where it is,” they can enter the coordinates, “so even people who are homebound can help.”

Photographs are needed to capture each stone before it eventually disintegrates. Rubbings are forbidden, she said, except under expert supervision. Any stone cleaning must be done gently and with expert advice because of the threat of erosion to the stone.

There’s one ritual that can be performed in cemeteries without drawing Wheeler’s disapproval. It involves a mirror, and it’s performed not at midnight but in the bright of day.

If a mirror is used to direct sunshine directly onto a gravestone, Wheeler said, lettering that was once indistinct becomes more readable. That’s when to take a photo or copy the inscription.

For information on how you can help, plus safety advice for cleaning a historical cemetery, visit the commission’s Web site at www.historicalcemeteries.ri.gov/. For more on Rhode Island genealogy and cemeteries, visit www.rootsweb.com/ ~rigenweb/cemetery/

dnaylor@projo.com