Haunted Cemeteries of Colorado

Central City Masonic Cemetery was started in the early 1860s when gold miners came to the area. The cemetery is maintained by Central City in Gilpin County. There are 217 records for this cemetery with around 40 markers that are missing, broken, or irreparable.

John Cameron is one of the departed here. Every year on the anniversary of his death, Nov. 1, 1887, a young woman dressed in black satin brocade appears and places fresh blue columbine flowers on his grave. No one knows who she is and he was never married.

Some twelve years later in 1899 some of the townspeople had had enough of the “ghost” talk and were determined to put an end to it. Fourteen men gathered at the gate to the cemetery shortly before sunset. They saw her approaching over a crest and watched as she performed the same ritual as every year before. When she was ready to leave she “glided” back in the direction from which she had come. The men ran to catch up with her but lost sight of her when she went over the hill. Seconds later they were on top of the hill. She was gone, nowhere in sight.

Bingham Hill Pioneer Cemetery is also known as Laporte Cemetery. It is located near the towns of Laporte and Bingham Hill in Larimer County. This cemetery is very old with some unmarked graves. Most of the records are missing. There are 94 verified interments, the oldest with a date of 1862 is a 9-month-old baby named Bazille Provost.

One of the stories of Bingham Hill is that ghosts will actually come out of the cemetery and chase your car as you drive by at night, and the sound of babies crying will seem to fill the car. Some have even claimed to feel an icy cold hand on their arm.

There is a tree in the cemetery that was once used for hangings. That could explain the presence of some of the spirits.

Cheesman Park is a beautiful 80-acre park in downtown Denver. The history of the park began in 1858 when General William Larimer claim jumped the St. Charles Town Company and established the town of Denver. Technically, neither owned the land because it legally belonged to the Arapaho Indians.

Larimer set aside 320 acres for a cemetery. This is now the site of the Cheesman and Congress Parks. It was called Mount Prospect Cemetery. As time went by only paupers, vagrants and outlaws were buried there. The well-to-do of the town were buried elsewhere. The whole cemetery fell into a state of disrepair. In 1890 Congress authorized the city to leave Mount Prospect and turn it into the parks.

Families were allowed to move their loved ones to other cemeteries, but as most of the buried were vagrants and paupers a company was hired to move them. It turned out to be a disaster. Part of a story appearing in the Denver Republican newspaper on March 19, 1893:

“The line of desecrated graves at the southern boundary of the cemetery sickened and horrified everybody by the appearance they presented. ...”

To make a long gruesome story short, there are still somewhere around 2,000 bodies still buried under Cheesman Park. It should come as no surprise that those left behind try to make themselves known.

The haunting began in 1893. The first report was from a grave digger who was looting the bodies as he moved them. He said a ghost landed on his shoulders and tried to push him down. He ran away and never came back to work.

In the present, visitors say they have feelings of dread and sadness in the park which is quite ironic since parks usually represent peace and calm. There are reports of what sounds like hundreds of people whispering and moaning.

Ghost children have been seen playing in the park, but when they realize they’re being watched they simply disappear. The same is true of a singing woman. On moonlit nights the outline of old graves can clearly be seen on the ground. Shadowy and misty figures wander through the park in what looks like a state of confusion.

The Littleton Cemetery was started in the 1860s in Arapahoe County. There may have been burials before records were kept, but the record books show the first burial was in 1869. The cemetery was deeded to the present owners, the Littleton Cemetery Association, in 1888.

The most famous person buried here is Alfred Packer. He was a gold prospector that admitted to cannibalism in the winter of 1874. Packer and five other men tried to travel through the Colorado high country in the dead of winter. He hid for nine years before he was captured and tried for murder. Though it is a horrible story it does have one funny bit. His cause of death was listed as “stomach trouble.”

Surprisingly, it’s not Packer that haunts the cemetery but his goat, Angelica. She was alleged to be Packer’s spirit medium and she wanders the graveyard.

Pueblo Pioneer Cemetery was established in 1870 and is the oldest cemetery in Pueblo. There are 900+ interments. It is also known as Masonic Cemetery and Odd Fellows Cemetery.

There is quite a bit of supernatural phenomena here even though there is not one particular ghostly entity. There are very noticeable temperature changes and some extremely cold spots. There is a visible black mist in places, stinky odors, and sometimes a visitor will feel an intense sense of dread.

Evergreen Cemetery was founded by General William Jackson Palmer in 1874. He was the founder of Colorado Springs in 1871. There were already two cemeteries serving El Paso County, but the town was growing too fast for those two alone to accommodate the town. The new cemetery was located two miles outside of town and was originally called Mount Washington Cemetery or Mountain Home Cemetery. The name was changed to Evergreen Cemetery in 1877. The original ten acres of the cemetery has grown to 220 acres. There are over 90,000 interments and there are still about 700 burials each year.

Visitors to this cemetery are sometimes treated to a light show in the form of blue orbs that seem to weave in and out of the treetops.

There is a woman dressed all in white that flies just above the tombstones all over the cemetery. Her identity is not known.

There is also a small chapel on the property that has fallen into disrepair. Dark figures have been seen inside the crumbling building. People have also claimed to feel a negative force throughout their body when inside the chapel. Crypt doors have been seen opening and closing by themselves.

Silver Cliff Cemetery was started in the 1880s outside the town of Silver Cliff in Custer County. It is split into two sections, half for the Catholics and half for the Protestants. It has around 1,000 interments.

The cemetery is famous for its dancing blue lights. The lights are said to bounce off tombstones and float through the air. Skeptics say the lights are nothing more than a natural phenomena called “wildfire” or “will-o’-wisp.” The only problem with that theory is that “wildfire” is commonly seen around swamps and marshes and Silver Cliff is definitely not that.

At one point critics were saying the lights were just reflections being caused by lights from the town so to prove them wrong the whole town turned off the lights. The dancing blue lights were still dancing.

Greenwood Pioneer Cemetery is also known as Woodpecker Hill and is located in Cañon City in Fremont County. There are almost 4,000 interments. It is the second known burial ground in Cañon City and the only one still in existence. The first known burials were of the Bowen family in the early 1860s.

The western corner was used for prisoners who got the death penalty or convicts that died in jail. Their graves are only marked with their cell number on their tombstones. In the early 1900s they started adding children and teenagers to this section.

The cemetery is known for cold spots and many variously colored orbs. Shadowy figures are visible during the day and lighted figures are seen at night. Maybe the same figures? Sometimes you can hear small children laughing, but the sound seems to be coming from quite a distance.