Denver’s Haunted History: Cheesman Park
No Rest for the Dead at Old City Cemetery
By Mary. J Russell
Stories persist over more than a century that menacing spirits prowl the grounds at Denver’s Cheesman Park. Looking at the perfectly-maintaned site today, it’s hard to imagine the park’s morbid history. Cheesman Park was once a graveyard, an eternal resting place for thousands of Denver residents. Or it was supposed to be a graveyard, before the city dug up all of the bodies!
Cheesman Park is a city park on roughly 80 acres, located southeast of downtown Denver. The land was in fact one of the city’s very first cemeteries. The federal government claimed ownership of what was originally a 160-acre property in 1860, but the city eventually won rights to the land for burial, at a cost of $1.25 per acre.
The city envisioned a park-like cemetery, but City Cemetery was a weedy, seedy, poorly managed graveyard that city officials considered a blight — and they were anxious to do away with it. Water irrigation, or the lack thereof, was perhaps the leading reason that the land couldn’t be fashioned into a “garden cemetery.”
Early in City Cemetery’s existence, stories of grave-robbing and body-snatching abound. As new Denver cemeteries were developed, City Cemetery’s days were numbered. Finally, Capitol Hill residents decided that City Cemetery had to go! It was determined that graves would be moved to nearby cemeteries, and the land and surrounding area would be renamed “Congress Park.”
Moving the graves proved to be a wretched task indeed. Grisly discoveries were made: bones were scattered about, multiple corpses were found to share single graves. Undertakers were paid a mere $2 to bury paupers. The gruesome process of digging up bodies gave rise to stories describing eerie voices, heavy breathing and ghostly figures seen prowling the cemetery at night.
In 1893 the city contracted undertaker E.P. McGovern, offering $1.90 per grave, to begin “resituating” the rest of the graves to nearby Riverside Cemetery. The city ordered some 10,000 bodies moved within 90 days.
The workers placed the remains of the transient corpses in 3 x 1 foot pine boxes. They ended up breaking body parts into pieces to get them to fit into the tiny caskets. Body parts littered the grounds and got mixed up with other bodies.
An unnerved reporter for the Denver Standard described the scene:
“The line of desecrated graves at the southern boundary of the cemetery sickened and horrified everybody by the appearance they presented. Around their edges were piled broken coffins, rent and tattered shrouds and fragments of clothing that had been torn from the dead bodies…All were trampled into the ground by the footsteps of the gravediggers like rejected junk.”
The workers stripped the corpses of all valuables as they shucked bodies in the move. Not only did the workers dig up bodies, they apparently stirred the spirits of the hapless deceased at City Cemetery. People in neighboring homes began to report confused spirits wandering through their homes: Reports of disembodied voices, misty figures and shadows darting past corridor walls, were among the first ghost stories to emerge.
In August 1893, the City issued a deadline for all of the bodies to be removed, or be permanently left behind. Thus, nearly 3,000 bodies remain buried beneath the perfectly trimmed grass and fashionable Denver high-rises that frame the park today.
Cheesman Park is said to be extraordinarily haunted. Some have even reported witnessing a misty old graveyard in an apparition at night. Many others have encountered a sharp and decided chill — something indescribably odd — while jogging or strolling through the park on any given day.
Somehow, a picnic at Cheesman Park doesn’t sound all that appetizing now, does it?
Note: This story was first published online as a Halloween feature for The Children’s Hospital staff.