Forest Home Cemetery

Forest Home Cemetery holds 110,000 burials across 198 acres in Milwaukee, including a mass grave of 64 unidentified victims from the 1883 Newhall House fire, beer barons Pabst and Schlitz, and three Harley-Davidson founders. Built over Paleo-Indian burial mounds the Winnebago considered taboo, the hill by the reflecting pond triggers nausea and visions in visitors to this day.

Sixty-four people are buried in a single grave at Forest Home Cemetery, and most of them have no names. They died on January 10, 1883, when fire ripped through the six-story Newhall House hotel in downtown Milwaukee. Of the 71 killed, 43 were burned beyond recognition. The mass grave is marked by a thirty-foot granite monument with their names on the base, though "Unknown" appears more often than any real name.

The cemetery goes back further than the fire. Increase A. Lapham, one of Wisconsin's first scientists, laid out the grounds in 1850 over land the Paleo-Indians had used for centuries. Lapham catalogued over sixty earthworks on the property, including a rare panther intaglio, a figure carved into the earth rather than mounded above it. An Indigenous village had occupied the corner near present-day Lincoln Avenue, drawn by the nearby Kinnickinnic River. The Winnebago considered the area taboo. Only the medicine man could enter because the energies were, as one account put it, too weird.

That reputation stuck. The hill beside the reflecting pond on the cemetery's north side, downhill from the main offices and mausoleums, has a particular hold on visitors. People who walk up it describe sudden nausea, acute fear, and a need to leave immediately. One visitor documented seeing visions of splintered coffins and shredded corpses, followed by bloodshot eyes and a headache that lasted hours. These reactions happen during the daytime, with other people around. The hill doesn't care about conditions.

Over 110,000 people are buried across Forest Home's 198 acres. The guest list reads like a Milwaukee hall of fame. Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, Valentin Blatz, Jacob Best, August Uihlein: the men who built Milwaukee's brewing empire, all within walking distance of each other. Three Harley-Davidson founders (Arthur, William, and Walter Davidson) are here. Christopher Sholes, who invented the QWERTY keyboard layout. Billy Mitchell, the Army general court-martialed for insisting the military needed an air force. Twenty-eight Milwaukee mayors. Seven Wisconsin governors.

The cemetery runs "Spirits of the Silent City" tours every October, and they sell out. The Landmark Chapel, a Gothic Revival building from 1892 made of Lake Superior sandstone from the Apostle Islands, anchors the grounds. It's beautiful in a heavy, permanent way.

Paranormal investigators have captured EVPs near the older sections: responses that appear to be intelligent replies rather than ambient noise. One recording picked up the phrase "Just came to give my condolences." The first burial at Forest Home was Orville Cadwell on August 5, 1850, during a cholera outbreak. Between the cholera dead, the fire victims, the Indigenous burial mounds, and 175 years of Milwaukee's most powerful and most tragic, the ground here has absorbed a lot. Visitors who feel fine on the paths tend to lose that feeling on the hill by the pond.