Central City Cemetery

Every Nov 1 and April 5, a woman in black brings columbine to John Edward Cameron's grave. The sexton once tore her rosebushes out. She came back.

John Edward Cameron died on November 1, 1885, and within a year a woman in black satin was walking up to his grave on the anniversary to plant rose bushes. In June 1888, the sexton tore the bushes out. Two years later she was back, this time with a bouquet of columbine, the wildflower that grows all over the meadows above Central City. She's been coming every November 1 and April 5 ever since.

That's the core of Gilpin County's most durable legend. Nobody has ever turned up a name for her or a photograph, just the long black dress, the flowers, and the two anniversaries. One version of the legend calls her Cameron's jilted lover. Another calls her his fiancée, who lost him weeks before the wedding. A few sources give his death year as 1887 instead of 1885. The legend is older than the documentation of it, and the dates drift depending on who's telling it.

The sighting everybody repeats is the November evening when twelve investigators gathered at Cameron's headstone to wait for her. She arrived at sunset. When one of the men stepped forward to approach her, she turned and flew off the hillside, and the group watched her disappear toward Bald Mountain. A few accounts say it was two men who tried to grab her. Either way, nobody caught her, and nobody has since.

The April 5 visit is the part of the legend nobody can explain. Cameron wasn't born on April 5. He didn't die on April 5. It's an anniversary of something the story itself forgot. That blank is part of why it lasts. A legend with a missing center is a legend people keep reaching into.

The cemetery is technically four cemeteries stacked together on a hill above Central City and Black Hawk: the Masonic, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and the Catholic grounds. Cameron is in the Masonic section, marked with the square and compass. The stones here lean at every angle because the slope never stopped shifting, and most of them belong to miners, saloon keepers, and children from the Gilpin County gold rush that made Central City the richest square mile on earth in 1859. The buried population on that hillside is larger than the current living population of Central City by a wide margin.

Beyond the Lady, the cemetery collects the reports any overgrown old mountain graveyard collects. Orbs at dusk between the headstones. Shapes in the tree line. Visitors who say they heard their own name called from behind them and turned around to nothing. One reader account from April 2005 describes three orbs near the front gate, a man standing in the trees, an elderly woman, and a young girl beside a grave, all in a single visit.

Then there's the unidentified grave that locals have pointed to for decades as belonging to a woman her peers decided was a witch. Visitors who stand a few yards off report a green mist rising from the plot. Under certain light, the ground is said to crawl with maggots. No one has tried to dig it up to check.

The oddest recurring sighting isn't the Lady at all. It's a woman in a 1980s-style red and teal tracksuit with short curly brown hair, who shows up along the border between the Knights of Pythias and Odd Fellows cemeteries. She appears at a visitor's right shoulder as they round a corner or a tree line. She has no face.