In Brief
Riverside Cemetery in Denver is the city's oldest, and the grass died after the water was shut off. One stone never goes bare: Silas Soule's, the cavalry captain who refused to fire at Sand Creek and was murdered for it.
The Full Story
Riverside Cemetery in Denver is the oldest operating graveyard in the city, and most of it has been left to die. The grass is gone. The trees that once shaded the rows browned out and dropped. But one grave is almost never bare, and people walk to it first: a coin on it, a flower, a folded note. It belongs to Silas Soule.
Soule commanded a company of the 1st Colorado Cavalry, and on November 29, 1864, he refused. His men were ordered to fire on a sleeping Cheyenne and Arapaho village at Sand Creek, and he held them back and kept them from shooting. Then he testified about the massacre, and his account helped force the territorial governor out of office. Five months later, on April 23, 1865, Soule was shot dead on a Denver street while serving as provost marshal. No one was ever brought to justice for it.
His body was moved here in 1886. The Sand Creek Spiritual Healing Run, walked each November to honor the people killed in 1864, starts from his stone. It's the most-visited grave in the cemetery.
The rest of the ground was not so lucky. Riverside's water came from an informal handshake arrangement dating to the 1890s. That deal collapsed, the cemetery lost in court, and reliable irrigation ended. A garden cemetery built in 1876 for families to picnic among more than 67,000 dead has been drying back to bare prairie ever since, and in 2008 Colorado Preservation put it on the state's most endangered list.
Soule is not the only one buried in the dust. Three women strangled in their beds in the fall of 1894, killed by a man Denver never caught, are here too.
For all that, no documented ghost sighting has ever been recorded at Riverside. A paranormal-history writer who went looking admitted it plainly: she found no encounters, just a place where it seemed unlikely a spirit or two wasn't lingering. The fear is the silence. A cemetery this full, left this dry, with this many unanswered deaths in it, and not one ghost anybody can name.
