Eugene Pioneer Cemetery

A bagpiper in Scottish regalia, women in white tending graves, and a 25-foot Union soldier statue that walks at night.

Eugene Pioneer Cemetery has the rarest sort of haunting: a cheerful one. University of Oregon folklore professor Dan Wojcik, whose research on the cemetery is preserved in the Randall V. Mills Archives of Northwest Folklore at the university, calls the spirits there the good dead, or the happy dead, a community of kindly figures who animate the place rather than terrorize it. This is not how American ghost stories usually go.

The cemetery covers sixteen acres on the southern edge of the U of O campus and was established in 1872 by the Spencer Butte Lodge No. 9 of the International Order of Odd Fellows. More than four thousand people are buried here, including many of the Oregon Trail pioneers who founded Eugene. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. Its centerpiece is the Grand Army of the Republic plot, where fifty-seven Civil War veterans and their families rest beneath a twenty-five-foot marble Union soldier. The statue was commissioned by Union veteran John Covell on his death in 1903, carved in Vermont, and shipped by rail across the continent to Eugene.

Bagpipes are the headline ghost. After dark, students living on the campus edge have heard the music drifting from the cemetery on countless nights, and a few have walked toward the source and seen the piper himself, dressed in full Scottish regalia. The closer anyone gets, the thinner he looks, until the music carries on without him. No living bagpiper has ever been identified as the source, and the music carries far enough that it sometimes reaches deep into the U of O campus. He has been playing for as long as students have been listening for him.

Women in white move through the cemetery at night, cleaning headstones and tending the graves. American folklore has a stock figure called the Lady in White, almost always vengeful, almost always a wronged woman returning for satisfaction. The Lady in White at Eugene Pioneer is something else, a maintenance crew, performing eternal upkeep on the resting places of the pioneers. The campus rule of thumb on when to look for them is the bell tolling ten in the evening at the church across the street. Students have been known to gather at that hour hoping to catch a glimpse.

The marble Union soldier himself has joined in. Students at the U of O have reported watching the twenty-five-foot statue move at night, as if the old soldier is still pulling sentry duty over the men buried beneath him. Flashes of marble movement have been seen across the grounds after sundown. There's a long-running campus tradition that at midnight on a specific night each year, all the statues in the cemetery wake up, walk around, talk to each other, and help people when they can. It's a folktale, basically, the sort of story students at any university will eventually invent. The point is the same. Even the marble in this cemetery is friendly.

Eugene Pioneer Cemetery does not match the usual American haunting template, which leans on rage, grief, and unfinished business. It matches something older and warmer, the European graveyard tradition where the dead and the living share the same village square and the dead help out where they can. The pioneers built Eugene. The veterans died in the Union army. The bagpiper plays. The white-clad women polish the stones. The marble soldier keeps watch. The bells across the street ring at ten o'clock and the cemetery, in its quiet way, gets to work.