Jacksonville Cemetery

One of the oldest cemeteries in the Pacific Northwest, with 32 acres and over 5,615 graves. The town was founded during the 1851 gold rush and claims the first group of buildings in Oregon on the National Historic Landmark Register.

Jacksonville Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries in the Pacific Northwest, officially dedicated in 1860 with its first burial recorded in October 1859 when John Love received permission to inter his mother Margaret. The cemetery's establishment coincided with the Gold Rush boom that transformed Jacksonville after gold was discovered at Rich Gulch in 1851, and the town quickly became one of the largest cities in Oregon during the second half of the nineteenth century. The cemetery now spans over forty acres with more than five thousand six hundred grave sites divided into seven distinct sections: Jewish, Catholic, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, Independent and Improved Order of Red Men, the city section, and a potter's field on the northern edge that holds one hundred thirty-three bodies interred without individual markers, including Black, white, Native American, Hawaiian, and possibly Chinese residents. The gravestones chronicle the brutal realities of pioneer life, recording deaths from cholera, diphtheria, measles, smallpox, lead poisoning, and what is simply inscribed as Indian War. Jacksonville itself became the first group of buildings in Oregon to enter the National Historic Landmark Register, and the cemetery is included in that protection.

The haunted history of the cemetery is intertwined with the violent and disease-ridden history of the Gold Rush town it served. Historic Jacksonville, Inc. leads monthly Haunted History walking tours from May through October that draw on documented accounts of paranormal activity and historical tragedy. Two different one-hour tours are offered: the Britt Hill Tour, featuring stories of murder, arson, saloons, and Oregon's first Chinatown, and the Courthouse Tour, highlighting tales of brothels, epidemics, and hangings. The tours regularly sell out, and costumed guides share history that blurs the line between documented fact and persistent legend.

Visitors to the cemetery have reported apparitions that appear and quickly vanish among the headstones, particularly at dusk and in the early morning hours. The stonework throughout the grounds features elaborate Victorian funerary symbolism: lambs marking the graves of children, half-opened roses for lives cut short, beehives representing industry, and horses symbolizing the journey to the afterlife. Some visitors have described feeling watched or followed while walking through the older sections, particularly near the potter's field where the unmarked dead lie in collective anonymity. The cemetery's isolation from the main town, combined with its enormous size and the weight of over a century and a half of continuous burial, gives it an atmosphere that even skeptics find unsettling. The Gold Rush that built Jacksonville was violent and brief, and the cemetery received the consequences: miners killed in claim disputes, families destroyed by epidemics, immigrants buried far from their homelands, and children taken by diseases that modern medicine would consider trivial. Whether the spirits that reportedly walk among the graves are echoes of that suffering or simply the projection of visitors confronting so much condensed mortality, Jacksonville Cemetery remains one of the most atmospheric and historically significant burial grounds in the American West.