Comet Lodge Cemetery

Seattle bulldozed grave markers at this Beacon Hill cemetery on the Day of the Dead in 1987, then built eleven homes and a dog park on top of the burial plots without moving the estimated 500 bodies beneath. Families in the houses built over the children's section report ghost boys playing with dolls and toys at night.

On November 2, 1987, the Day of the Dead, Seattle city crews bulldozed grave markers at Comet Lodge Cemetery on Beacon Hill to trench a sewer line. They built eleven homes and a dog park on top of the burial plots. Nobody moved the bodies first.

The cemetery started as Duwamish burial ground long before Seattle existed. When Luther Collins brought the first white settlers to Georgetown in June 1851, they buried their dead in the same soil. Samuel Maple, one of Seattle's earliest settlers and a member of the Collins party, became the first recorded pioneer burial in 1880. The Odd Fellows platted it officially in 1895 as the cemetery of Comet Lodge No. 139, and at its peak, the grounds stretched across five acres holding an estimated 500 dead, including five Civil War veterans and a children's section known as Baby Land.

Then the sell-off began. In 1908, the Odd Fellows sold the whole cemetery to one of their Nobles, H.S. Noice, for a single dollar. Noice flipped burial plots until 1912, then transferred ownership to Grand Noble H.R. Corson for ten dollars. Corson and his wife Eva subdivided Baby Land in 1927 and sold it to Seattle for one dollar, removing the baby grave markers beforehand. The last burial, Jewel Lundin, happened in 1936. Two years later, King County seized the property through tax foreclosure, claiming the graveyard had been "abandoned for many years." The city later said it had no idea a cemetery ever existed there. A 1954 King County statement saying the land "includes the graves or remains of deceased persons" suggests otherwise.

Of the estimated 500 burials, roughly 15 to 20 headstones survive today, most re-erected in the 2000s by community volunteers. Many have been vandalized with spray paint or covered with posters. Samuel Maple and his son Jacob were relocated to a memorial site at King County International Airport in 1939. Henry Van Asselt was moved to Lakeview Cemetery on Capitol Hill. Everyone else stayed put under the new construction.

The hauntings center on the homes built over Baby Land. One woman who moved into a house directly on top of the former children's burial ground had disturbances from her first night: lights switching on and off, voices in empty rooms, and the ghost of a small boy wandering her hallways. Another family kept an expensive collection of porcelain dolls locked in an illuminated display cabinet, checking the lock every night before bed. By morning, the dolls would be scattered across the house. Their living son kept getting scolded for leaving his toys everywhere until he explained that a boy in old-fashioned clothes visited him every night and was responsible for the mess.

Visitors to the remaining cemetery grounds hear children's laughter. Residents in the surrounding Beacon Hill and Georgetown neighborhoods have seen young pioneer children in period clothing darting among the gravestones. Author Bess Lovejoy, who featured Comet Lodge in her guidebook Northwest Know-How: Haunts, noted the grim irony: this is the real-life version of the horror-movie trope where developers move the headstones but leave the bodies.

Preservation advocate John Dickinson, who has an ancestor buried at Comet Lodge and possesses records of over 400 known gravesites, started restoration efforts in 1999. The city responded with cease-and-desist letters. In 2002, Cleveland High School students under teacher Faith Beatty partnered with the Washington State Cemetery Association to clean the grounds and collect oral histories. King County Executive Ron Sims contributed about $100,000 for landscaping. Today the cemetery is maintained as a memorial space through periodic mowing by King County Facilities Management.

The annual Comet Lodge Haunted Trail draws families each October. It is a lighthearted counterpoint to a neighborhood where five hundred people rest beneath houses, sidewalks, and a dog park, their headstones gone, their graves unmarked.