Prospect Hill Cemetery

Prospect Hill is the oldest pioneer cemetery in Omaha. Moses Shinn set aside land for burials in 1856 while laying out an addition to the young city, and in 1858 Mayor Jesse Lowe formally designated the ground; the first official burial that year was Alonzo F. Salisbury, a pioneer and territorial legislator. The real-estate man Byron Reed took over the management, absorbed the older Cedar Hill and Omaha City cemeteries into it, and kept it going for decades at his own expense. About 15,000 people lie there, from mayors, senators and the brewer Frederick Krug to the madam Anna Wilson and at least 800 African American Omahans buried between 1863 and 1971, including Buffalo Soldiers. The last official burial took place in the 1970s, the city made it a landmark in 1979, and a volunteer association now cares for it.

The ghost story is older than the neglect that later overtook the grounds. On Saturday, 18 July 1874, the Omaha Bee published an item headed “A Ghost Story,” about events across the street from the cemetery at the shop of H. P. Stanwood, a sculptor and marble cutter who sold headstones to the families of the dead. The paper said that, one night that July, one of two brothers who worked for Stanwood and slept in the shop saw a woman dressed entirely in white moving toward him through the dark graves. He ran inside, woke his brother, and the two watched the figure enter the shop and blow out a lamp.

They fled to Stanwood’s house, and when Stanwood went to look for himself the figure, as the story goes, struck him in the back and asked whether her children were buried in the tombs behind her. She then passed through the house and upstairs, where she frightened a person into jumping from a window; one of the brothers fired a gun at her without effect, and the men chased her back into the cemetery, where she vanished at a grave. The story says she returned the next night, and that the frightened workers went into town to sleep. Stanwood himself told the Bee that he was not a superstitious man and had no faith in ghosts.

The newspaper account is the main evidence for the legend, and it names only Stanwood. Later retellings, including a North Omaha history blog, repeat the details and sometimes shorten the story to a woman in white asking visitors for her children. The cemetery’s modern history points in another direction: after decades of neglect, it has become a place of remembrance, with a walking tour, a Memorial Day tribute to Anna Wilson and research on the African Americans buried there. Anyone interested in the ghost story should visit by day and as a mourner would, respecting the graves.

A woman in white wandering the graves, asking whether her children lie in the tombs behind her; objects such as a lamp blown out; a figure that vanishes at a grave.

The cemetery grounds and the neighboring marble works on Parker Street, as told in 1874; modern retellings place the woman among the older tombs.

The woman in white is a favorite of North Omaha history writing and Halloween features, and the cemetery runs walking tours and events that focus on the lives of the people buried there.