Lorimier Cemetery

Cape Girardeau's oldest cemetery (1808) is haunted by the Tapping Ghost, which taps visitors on the shoulder with increasing insistence and tugs women's hair. Over 6,500 graves, 1,200 Civil War soldiers, and a legendary tunnel to a nearby smallpox hospital.

Something in Lorimier Cemetery taps people on the shoulder. One tap, then two, then three. Visitors who don't leave fast enough get their hair pulled. A young woman from a tour group out of Washington, Missouri felt two sharp tugs near the Houck burial site. She was alone when it happened.

Old Lorimier Cemetery sits on five acres of hilltop in Cape Girardeau, overlooking the Mississippi River, and it's been there since about 1808, making it the oldest public cemetery in the city and possibly the county. The first burial was Charlotte Pemanpiah Bougainville, the Shawnee wife of Louis Lorimier, a French-Canadian fur trader who founded Cape Girardeau after being commissioned by the Spanish Governor General in 1792 to establish a trading post. Charlotte's grave marker reads "The Noblest Matron of the Shawnee race." Louis died in 1812 and was buried beside her. In 1917, the women of the Cemetery Association erected a pagoda over their burial site, which was refurbished in 2015.

The cemetery holds more than 6,500 graves. Most are unmarked. A north-south sidewalk splits the grounds: Catholics to the south, Protestants to the north, with African American burial grounds on the east slope. As many as 1,200 Civil War soldiers are buried here, and that number alone tells you the scale of death this piece of ground absorbed.

The site may have been a Native American burial ground before European settlement, which would push its history back centuries before Charlotte's burial. If true, that layer underneath everything else adds context to what people experience here, though it's worth noting the claim is traditional rather than archaeologically confirmed.

Dr. Frank Nickell, a local historian, has documented the Tapping Ghost accounts. He notes that pedestrians cutting through the cemetery on their way somewhere else would report getting tapped on the shoulder, gently at first, then more insistently. Many of these incidents were reported to local newspapers over the years. The pattern repeats across accounts: it starts mild and escalates, as if whatever is doing the tapping wants attention, not to frighten. But frightened is what people get, and they run.

Women report the hair-tugging more frequently than men. The accounts describe it as a yank from behind, not a brush. The young woman near the Houck burial site experienced it twice in quick succession and confirmed nobody was within arm's reach.

There's also the procession. Locals have talked for years about a ghostly line of figures walking from the southeast corner of the cemetery toward the river. The southeast area likely contains a mass grave for people who died on riverboats and were buried without ceremony or, in many cases, without records. The procession walks toward the water they arrived on.

A local legend connects the cemetery to the nearby Sherwood Minton House through an underground tunnel. The house served as a Civil War smallpox hospital, and the story goes that soldiers who died were carried through the tunnel at night for burial without any official record. The tunnel's existence has never been confirmed, but it would explain some of the unmarked graves.

Cape Girardeau takes its ghosts seriously. The Glenn House, less than a mile away, has its own catalog of documented activity. But the cemetery predates everything in the city by decades, and its ghost stories have a physical quality the Glenn House ones don't. Nobody at the Glenn House gets touched. At Lorimier, something reaches out.

The cemetery landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. It's open to walk through, and people do, though not everyone makes it through without getting tapped.