Evergreen Cemetery

A film crew caught Evergreen Cemetery's heavy wooden crypt door swinging open on its own. The chapel basement still carries 19th-century stains.

A film crew aimed a camera at the heavy wooden crypt door in Evergreen Cemetery's chapel, watched it swing open on its own, and watched it close again on its own a minute later. No wind, no ropes, no hands. The footage aired on Biography Channel's My Ghost Story in an episode titled "The Hand of Death," and it's still the piece of evidence paranormal teams point to when the chapel comes up.

Evergreen is enormous. More than 90,000 burials across 220 acres in southeast Colorado Springs, several of them from the 1860s, before the city was formally founded in 1871. The National Register added the cemetery in 1993, making it the second in the state to earn the listing. Most of the activity, though, clusters in one small stone building at the edge of the older section.

The chapel has a staircase and a basement and a working casket-lifting device, which is what it sounds like: a mechanical rig that lowered bodies from the ceremony floor to the crypt below. People describe the same thing happening near that staircase. A sudden wall of cold on the descent. Nausea at the bottom. Visitors on separate occasions have given the cemetery office near-identical accounts. Paranormal teams have flagged the lift, the stairs, and the crypt door as the building's three repeat hotspots. Nobody has produced a mechanical explanation for the door.

The older west-side rows also catch people. Child mortality in early Colorado Springs was brutal. Tuberculosis first, diphtheria, then the 1918 flu pandemic, all of it chewing through the city in waves during a period when people moved west specifically to recover from TB in the dry mountain air. The row of 1880s children's graves near the west fence is the part of the cemetery that stops first-time visitors cold.

Evergreen's permanent residents include General William Jackson Palmer, who founded Colorado Springs and built the Denver and Rio Grande Railway, along with Civil War veterans, Buffalo Soldiers, and a large block of 1918 flu victims. A lot of the pioneer-era burials are overshadowed by the ghost stories, which is a shame, because Palmer's monument alone is worth the visit. Fairview Cemetery, Evergreen's sister graveyard managed by the same city department, sits right next door and should be on the same walk.

The cemetery office still fields calls from investigators asking for overnight access, and requests for rubbings and overnight investigator access are reviewed case by case. Lizzie Borden Tours runs a Colorado Springs ghost walk that stops at the chapel. The chapel itself was restored in the early 2000s, and the city books small private family services there.

Cemeteries are usually just sad, quiet, and very old. Evergreen is the one where the chapel keeps producing stories that don't fit that pattern. Down in the basement, the stone slabs still carry dark stains from the 19th-century remains that moved through on the way to the crypt. The stains were there before the door started swinging on film, and they will be there long after.