Riverside Cemetery

Denver's oldest cemetery holds Silas Soule, Augusta Tabor, and three 1894 Strangler victims. Riverside lost its water rights; ghosts seem abandoned.

Silas Soule is buried in Section 27, and most of the time somebody has left something on his stone. A coin. A flower. A handwritten note. Soule was a cavalry captain at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864, and he refused to let his men fire on the Cheyenne and Arapaho village under John Chivington's order. He testified against Chivington afterward. He was shot dead on a Denver street five months later, and nobody was ever convicted for it. He is the most visited grave at Riverside Cemetery, and by most accounts the most restless.

Riverside opened in 1876 on what was then the northeast edge of Denver, facing the South Platte. Over sixty-seven thousand people are buried here, including a thousand veterans and the pioneer families who founded the city. It is Denver's oldest operating cemetery, and in the last twenty years it has also become one of the saddest places in the city. Riverside lost its water rights. The lawn has been mostly dust since. The trees came down or stopped being watered. The grass is brown. The place was built for families to come picnic among the dead. Now it looks like the prairie trying to take it back.

The tragedies stacked here are enough on their own. Three of the victims of the 1894 Market Street Strangler, Denver's Ripper-style killer, lie in Riverside. Lena Tapper. Marie Contassot. Kiku Oyama, a Japanese immigrant, was his third. All three were strangled with towels forced into their mouths. The case was never solved. They are buried in a cemetery where nobody is cutting the grass.

Augusta Tabor is here too. She was the first wife of silver baron Horace Tabor, the one he left for a younger woman after he hit the Matchless Mine. Augusta held onto her money while Horace spent his. She funded hospitals. She turned their mansion into a boarding house. She has two stones, which is unusual, and both get visited.

Ghost stories at Riverside are strangely thin in print. The writer at My Haunted Library looked into the cemetery and came away with the honest observation that documentation of actual sightings at Riverside is hard to find, even though, given everything buried here, it would seem almost impossible for the place not to have a spirit or two. Nobody has produced a named witness account on record. The silence might be the story. Riverside is a place where even the ghosts seem abandoned.

If you go, Silas Soule's grave is the one worth finding. It's in Section 27, and you will not have to look long because somebody will have left something on it. Stand there long enough and the silence of the whole cemetery gets loud. That silence might be haunted. It might just be neglected. Denver keeps not answering.