Bellefontaine Cemetery

The first rural cemetery west of the Mississippi, Bellefontaine in St. Louis holds nearly 90,000 burials since 1849 and at least five distinct ghosts, including Hitchhiking Annie, who has been vanishing from car passenger seats since the 1940s, and Confederate soldiers in gray who march through their burial section at dusk.

Drivers on the roads near Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis have been picking up the same hitchhiker since the 1940s. She is young, pale, with deep brown hair. She flags them down, climbs into the passenger seat, makes conversation. Then she vanishes before the car clears the cemetery gates. Locals call her Hitchhiking Annie, and she has been doing this for over eighty years.

Bellefontaine opened in 1849 during a cholera epidemic that overwhelmed every other burial ground in St. Louis. It was the first rural cemetery west of the Mississippi, 400 acres of rolling hills and old trees designed in the garden cemetery tradition, a place for the dead that was also meant to be beautiful for the living. Nearly 90,000 people are buried here now. General William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Adolphus Busch of Anheuser-Busch. William S. Burroughs, who invented the adding machine. The cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Annie is the most famous ghost, but she is not alone. A little boy in 1800s clothing appears in the road near the main entrance. Drivers swerve or slam on their brakes. He is always gone before they can stop. A woman in Victorian mourning attire, long black dress, black veil, black gloves, walks among the graves in the older sections. Witnesses who approach her say she vanishes behind a monument and never reappears on the other side.

City bus drivers have a different story. They describe a woman in a red dress who appears in the same spot, performing the same frantic search. Every driver who sees her comes away with the same strange certainty: she is looking for her baby. None of them can explain how they know that.

The Confederate burial section has its own presence. Visitors at dusk have seen figures in gray uniforms moving through the rows. Sounds of drums, shouted commands, and marching feet come from ground that holds only the dead. The Adolphus Busch mausoleum draws its own reports: lights flickering inside past closing hours, sounds from within the sealed structure, and a dark figure standing at the entrance.

Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum does not host or permit any ghost tours, paranormal investigations, or supernatural events on its grounds. The cemetery asks visitors to treat the property as the memorial space it was designed to be. Annie and the others seem indifferent to the policy.