Cheesman Park

Denver paid E.P. McGovern $1.90 per body to move the old cemetery. He cut adults up to fit children's coffins. An estimated 2,000 never left.

There are roughly 2,000 bodies still buried under the lawns at Cheesman Park, and the reason is one man and a contract written the wrong way. In 1893, Denver hired undertaker E.P. McGovern to exhume the unclaimed dead from the old Mount Prospect Cemetery and move them to Riverside Cemetery. He was paid $1.90 per body. The city supplied only small child-sized coffins. McGovern, looking at the math, started cutting adults into pieces and stuffing each one into up to three small boxes, collecting triple payment per corpse. By the time the story broke, body parts were strewn across the open graves, and souvenir hunters had started showing up.

The Denver Republican ran the front-page story on March 19, 1893, under the headline "The Work of Ghouls!" The mayor terminated McGovern's contract almost immediately, and no replacement was ever hired. Everything he hadn't already dug up was left where it was. The graves were covered over, grass was planted on top, and the park opened in 1907.

That's why Cheesman Park is considered the most haunted spot in Denver. The hauntings aren't legend. They're the logical consequence of the ground.

Mount Prospect Cemetery was laid out in 1858 as the city's first burial ground, on the high rise east of early Denver. It held the poor, the smallpox and diphtheria dead, criminals, and the nameless people who died passing through during the Colorado gold rush. By the 1880s, Denver had grown up around it and the neighborhood wanted the land back. The authorization to convert the cemetery into a park came in January 1890, and the families of the wealthier dead had time to move their relatives to Fairmount and Riverside. The poor and the unclaimed were left to McGovern.

When the contract was cut, the cemetery was a mess. Graves stood open. Bones were scattered. Half-relocated remains were still in the ground. The city covered it all back up and planted grass. The park was renamed for Denver pioneer Walter Cheesman in 1910, after his widow and daughter, Gladys Cheesman-Evans, donated the neoclassical marble pavilion that still carries the family name.

The ghost stories started almost immediately. Park employees reported footsteps crossing the lawn in the early morning. Picnickers described figures walking across an open stretch of grass and vanishing at a spot where, according to the old cemetery plats, there used to be a grave. Residents of the apartment buildings around the park, some of which sit directly on top of the old cemetery footprint, have described figures in their hallways and the sound of someone weeping on the landing. The 1980 horror novel The Changeling, and the film adaptation with George C. Scott, is loosely based on stories from a house near the park.

Locals aren't surprised by any of this. Denver old-timers have been pointing out the bones under Cheesman since the park opened. When construction work cuts into the soil, most recently for drainage and landscape restoration, workers turn up human remains. Estimates of how many are still down there range from around 2,000 to more than 5,000, depending on the source. Either way, nobody is digging them up.

The apartment buildings on the east side of the park are the ones with the quietest hauntings, the ones residents don't like to talk about. Property values stay high anyway. The pavilion is gorgeous, the Front Range view is one of the best in the city, and people walk their dogs here every morning over ground nobody ever really dug up.