Cheesman Park

Cheesman Park’s eighty acres of lawns and trees, framed by Capitol Hill apartment blocks and the Denver Botanic Gardens, began as a graveyard. Mount Prospect Cemetery opened on the edge of the young city in 1858 and took its first burial the next year. In 1872 the federal government determined that the land had been ceded by the Arapaho under treaty and was federal property; Denver bought it for $200 and renamed it the Denver City Cemetery. Sections were set aside for Catholics, Jews, fraternal orders, Union veterans and – segregated at the southern end – Chinese residents, but much of the ground, especially the paupers’ section, was neglected.

As fashionable neighbourhoods spread east, developers wanted the eyesore gone. In 1890 Congress authorised the city to vacate the cemetery and families were given ninety days to move their dead. Those who could afford it did; the Catholic section became Mount Calvary Cemetery, and most Chinese burials were returned to China. More than 5,000 graves, many of them belonging to the poor and unclaimed, were left.

In March 1893 the city gave undertaker E. P. McGovern a contract to move the remaining remains to Riverside Cemetery at $1.90 per coffin. Within days the work had become a scandal: to multiply his fee he used undersized boxes and divided remains between them, while crowds of onlookers and souvenir-hunters picked through open graves. The Denver Republican exposed the scene on 19 March 1893 under the headline “The Work of Ghouls”, and the mayor cancelled the contract. No one finished the job. The ground was graded and landscaped, and the park was completed in 1907 with an unknown number of people still buried beneath it. Remains have continued to surface during utility work, including several skeletons uncovered in 2010.

That history is the foundation of Cheesman Park’s ghost lore. Residents and visitors describe figures among the trees at dusk, an oppressive sadness in certain spots, and voices or moaning after dark. The surrounding neighbourhood contributed one of Denver’s most famous ghost stories: musician Russell Hunter’s account of a haunted house on East 13th Avenue near the park, which became the basis for the 1980 film The Changeling – though historian Phil Goodstein found that its details did not check out.

Ghost-tour guides and local accounts describe shadowy figures among the trees and on the lawns at dusk, a sense of grief or of being watched, unexplained voices or moaning at night, and sudden feelings of heaviness in certain parts of the park.

Throughout the park’s central meadows and tree groves, around the marble Cheesman Memorial pavilion, and in the adjoining Capitol Hill blocks; most reports come after dark.

Cheesman Park is one of Denver’s best-known ghost stories, featured in local ghost tours and books such as Phil Goodstein’s The Ghosts of Denver: Capitol Hill, and linked with the 1980 horror film The Changeling. Today it is also a much-loved city park and long-time centre of Denver’s LGBTQ community.