When most visitors meander through or picnic in the eighty acres of Cheesman Park, they don’t know that might be walking or sitting on graves of people, mostly paupers and criminals, who were buried there in the 1800s when the land was a graveyard. The park is surrounded by the Capitol Hill mansions in Denver, Colorado. People are attracted to the park for its botanical gardens, enjoy its panoramic view and/or to hope to encounter the ghosts who haunt it.
Haunted Cheesman Park: History
1858: General William Larimer jumped the claim of the St. Charles Town Company and founded his own town, naming it Denver, although the land legally belonged to the Arapaho Tribe. He dedicated three hundred and twenty acres for a graveyard, Mount Prospect Cemetery, current site of Cheesman and Congress Parks. Several large plots, on the hill’s crest, were designated for the graves of the town’s richest most influential residents. Middle class people were buried between them and paupers and criminals who were interred in the outermost edge of the cemetery.
1859-66: Abraham Kay was the first man buried in the cemetery on March 20th. The second was Hungarian immigrant John Stoefel who was hanged for murder. The cemetery’s outer edge began to be filled with indigent, vagrants and outlaws, so locals called it Old Boneyard and Boot Hill. After professional gambler Jack O’Neill was murdered by Rooker, a man of dubious character, in 1860, it was dubbed Jack O’Neil’s Ranch. Denver's elite were most often buried somewhere else, leaving the graveyard for paupers’ and criminals’ graves. When Larimer left Denver, Mount Prospect was claimed by cabinet-maker and would be mortician John Walley who left it go to ruin. Six hundred and twenty-six people had been buried there.
1872-81: The US Government determined that the property was federal land that the Arapahos deeded to it in an 1860 treaty. The City of Denver bought it for $200 and renamed it Denver City Cemetery. In 1881, a hospital, dubbed the “pest house”, was built for people who were quarantined with small pox or other contagious diseases, the sick, handicapped, elderly or those left there to die. The Potter’s field, where most of the dead were interred in mass graves, was behind the building. By the late 1880s, the cemetery had fallen into worse disrepair. Real estate developers lobbied for the graveyard to be turned into a park. Colorado Senator Teller persuaded Congress to allow it.
January 25,1890: Congress authorized the city to relinquish Mount Prospect for this purpose and Teller immediately renamed the area Congress Park to honor this. Families were given ninety days to transfer the remains of their departed to other cemeteries. The Denver Diocese bought forty acres because many Catholics were buried there.
1893: The city hired crooked undertaker E.P. McGovern to remove the remains. He used children’s caskets for adults, dismembered their corpses, put their remains in three coffins and scattered leftover bones. Vandals looted open graves and coffins. The Denver Republican sensationalized the incidents, which led to Mayor Rogers terminating the contract. The city built a fence around the area, but didn’t remove the remains.
1907: The cemetery was transformed into Cheesman Park, named in honor of Walter S. Cheesman, a prominent Denver citizen. Currently, an estimated 2,000 bodies remain buried there.
Ghosts Haunt Still Cheesman Park and its Area
In 1893, gravedigger Jim Astor, who plundered the graves, felt a ghost on his shoulders, sped from the graveyard and never returned. Neighborhood residents reported that melancholy and confused spirits knocked on their doors and windows and hearing moans that emanated from the graveyard. Today, park visitors have feelings of inexplicable sadness, oppression or dread and hear whispering voices and moans. Children, seen playing in the park at night, and a singing woman suddenly vanish. Eerie shadows and misty forms are sighted roaming through the park. On some moonlit nights, outlines of phantom graves are sighted. Some people claim that after they lay on the grass and tried to get up, unseen forces restrained them.
People who liked plants are attracted by Cheesman Park’s botanical gardens, while others go to enjoy its panoramic view. Ghost hunters are drawn to it in hopes that they will encounter one or more of the ghosts who haunt the area.
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Source:
Haunted Places, Dennis William Hauck, (Penguin Books, 2002)
Jill Stefko - I'd rather deal with the paranormal than human abnormal - having dealt extensively with both.
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