Evergreen Cemetery

The haunting at Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs isn't out among the 220 acres of headstones. It's inside one small stone chapel, in the basement, at a heavy wooden crypt door.

In 2011, a paranormal team filmed there for the Biography Channel's *My Ghost Story*, in an episode called "The Hand of Death." On camera, with no wind, no ropes, no wires, the basement crypt door swung open on its own. About a minute later, it swung shut again. The staff are quick to point out that the doors are a century old and stick so badly they're hard to even pull by hand. And by the cemetery's own telling, the door has never moved on its own since.

The chapel was built in 1910, a small Romanesque stone building designed by architect L.A. Pease. The haunting clusters in three spots inside it: the casket-lifting device used to lower coffins, the basement staircase, and that crypt door.

The staircase is where people keep reporting the same thing. Two women, on separate occasions, described a sudden cold blast as they went down, then extreme discomfort at the bottom. A volunteer investigator named Michael Coletta ran a KII meter near the stairwell and got abnormally high readings; he said the experience made his skin crawl. Visitors have described "a cold blast of negativity" on the same stairs.

The cemetery itself was established by General William Jackson Palmer in the mid-1870s, though burials on the site date back to the 1860s. Palmer wanted Colorado Springs to be a health resort and figured a visible cemetery would scare off visitors, so he set Evergreen on a bluff two miles from town.

Somewhere in it lie an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 people in an unmarked pauper's section, many of them children. Palmer himself was buried here in 1909. He got a marker. Most of them never did.