Riverside Cemetery

Denver's oldest active cemetery, established in 1876. The 77-acre grounds contain over 67,000 graves including Augusta Tabor, Barney Ford, Jack Swigert, and other notable Coloradans. Many graves were relocated here from the former City Cemetery (now Cheesman Park).

Riverside Cemetery opened in 1876 -- the same year Colorado achieved statehood -- on a seventy-seven-acre stretch between Brighton Boulevard and the east bank of the South Platte River, about four miles downstream from downtown Denver. The first Coloradan buried here was Henry H. Walton on June 1, 1876. Over the following century and a half, more than sixty-seven thousand people were laid to rest in its grounds, including some of the most consequential figures in state history: three territorial governors (John Evans, Samuel Elbert, and John Routt), Augusta Tabor (wife of silver magnate Horace Tabor), Barney and Julia Ford (prominent Black entrepreneurs who fought for civil rights), Clara Brown (a freed slave and one of the first Black women in Colorado), Captain Silas Soule (the cavalry officer who refused to fire on Cheyenne and Arapaho families at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and was later murdered for testifying against the perpetrators), and over twelve hundred Civil War veterans including three Medal of Honor recipients. The cemetery was designated a National Historic District in 1994.

Riverside's supernatural reputation is inseparable from the grotesque events of the 1890s. When Denver's old City Cemetery -- now Cheesman Park -- was ordered converted into a public park, the city hired undertaker E.P. McGovern to transfer roughly five thousand bodies to Riverside Cemetery, paying him approximately one dollar and ninety cents per coffin. McGovern infamously hacked adult corpses apart and stuffed the pieces into child-sized coffins to multiply his payments. When the Denver Republican exposed the scheme under the headline "The Work of Ghouls," the contract was terminated -- but by then, body parts had been mixed, misidentified, and scattered across both the old cemetery and the new. The remains that did arrive at Riverside were often incomplete, wrongly labeled, or piled into mass sections with little ceremony.

Visitors and paranormal investigators report that the disturbed dead make their presence known. Apparitions are commonly seen among the headstones, particularly in the older sections where the 1890s transfers were interred. Locals describe an overwhelming sense of being watched when walking the grounds, though none of the spirits are reported as harmful -- some visitors have even claimed to feel a friendly, warming sensation when encountering them. Orbs and strange mists appear frequently in photographs taken at the cemetery, with the mists forming unusual spiral patterns that seem to rise directly from the ground. Paranormal investigators have conducted electronic voice phenomenon sessions at Riverside and captured unexplained whispers and phrases on their recordings, with the area around the administration buildings -- including the Old Stone House, a limestone office that doubles as a holding tomb -- identified as a particular hot spot for activity.

The cemetery hosts guided Halloween tours each October that explore the grounds' most active locations and the stories behind the sixty-seven thousand souls resting beneath the neglected, largely treeless expanse. Whether the spirits are those of governors and pioneers or the mutilated remains of McGovern's gruesome relocation, Riverside Cemetery carries the weight of Denver's full history -- and some of that history, it seems, has never been willing to stay buried.