Jacksonville Cemetery

5,600 graves on the edge of an Oregon Gold Rush town, including 133 unmarked dead in the potter's field. Figures vanish at dusk.

Among the 5,600 graves at Jacksonville Cemetery, 133 of them are in a section called the potter's field, where the dead lie without individual markers. Black, white, Native American, Hawaiian, and probably Chinese residents share that ground in collective anonymity. Their names didn't survive. The cause of death, in some cases, did: cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, lead poisoning, and a single grim inscription that reads only Indian War.

Jacksonville exists because in 1851 someone found gold at Rich Gulch. The town that grew up around the strike became one of the largest in Oregon during the second half of the 1800s, and it filled this cemetery in something close to real time. The first burial was Margaret Love in October 1859, interred by her son John, who had received special permission. The cemetery was officially dedicated the following year. Forty-plus acres now hold a layered cross-section of frontier death, divided into seven sections by who you were in life: Jewish, Catholic, IOOF, Masonic, Red Men, the city section, and the potter's field on the northern edge.

The headstones are the document. Lambs mark the graves of children. Half-opened roses signal lives cut short. Beehives stand for industry, horses for the journey to whatever came next. The funerary symbolism is dense and Victorian and unusually well preserved, partly because Jacksonville became the first group of buildings in Oregon to be entered into the National Historic Landmark Register, and the cemetery is included under that protection.

Historic Jacksonville, Inc. runs monthly Haunted History walking tours from May through October. There are two routes: the Britt Hill Tour, with stories of murder, arson, saloons, and Oregon's first Chinatown, and the Courthouse Tour, with brothels, epidemics, and hangings. The tours sell out. The guides wear costume, and the line between documented fact and persistent legend gets blurred, on purpose, because the legend grew out of the fact and there is no clean way to separate them.

Visitors who walk the cemetery without a guide describe seeing figures appear and vanish among the headstones, especially at dusk and in the early morning when the fog comes in off the Applegate Valley. The sensation of being followed shows up most often in the older sections, particularly near the potter's field. Skeptics report it too. The cemetery is set apart from the main town, large enough that you can walk for stretches without seeing another living person, and the weight of a century and a half of continuous burial does something to the air, regardless of what you believe about ghosts.

The Gold Rush that built Jacksonville was violent and short. The cemetery is what it left behind. Miners killed in claim disputes are buried near families wiped out by epidemics, near immigrants who died far from where they were born, near children taken by diseases that modern medicine treats with a single shot. Whatever the figures are that visitors see slipping between the headstones, the headstones themselves are the harder document, and they were never trying to haunt anyone. They just keep telling the same story to anyone who comes close enough to read them.