Silver Cliff Cemetery Lights

Silver Cliff, in the Wet Mountain Valley of south-central Colorado, boomed after a silver strike in the late 1870s. The burial ground was established around 1879 (some sources say the early 1880s) as a resting place for the mining camp’s dead, many of them miners and infants, and it is split between a Catholic and a Protestant section. It is still owned and run by the town and is still used for burials.

The legend of the cemetery’s lights is older than any written record. The most common version has two or three miners walking home from a saloon, or from a party, and taking a shortcut through the graveyard, where they saw glowing balls of blue and white light dancing between the headstones. Accounts place the story in the 1880s or 1890s, and a skeptic in the tale is said to have gone out in the rain, surrounded by a glow, crying for help. The lights, which witnesses describe as round, whitish or blue, appearing three or four at a time, were still being reported in the twentieth century, and they were mentioned in the August 1969 National Geographic, which described dim, round spots of blue-white light among the graves.

Over the years local people have said the lights show up most readily on damp, cloudy or rainy nights. Paranormal groups have been given permission by the town to investigate, with mixed conclusions: one group has reported contact with spirits, while another found nothing paranormal after several visits and suggested phosphorescence, moisture in the air or reflected light. The town clerk has granted such access to specific groups, not to the general public, and the cemetery is not a place to wander at night.

The skeptical researcher Karen Stollznow, who wrote about the lights, argues that they are a personal visual experience rather than a measurable phenomenon: not everyone sees them, and the human eye is prone to perceive faint flashes and blue-ish glows after long periods in darkness. Other suggestions are the glow of the town’s lights bouncing off polished headstones, and marsh-gas-style “wildfire”. The cemetery’s mix of fact and folklore has made it one of Colorado’s best-known ghost-light sites, but the mystery has never been settled.

Visitors describe round, bluish or whitish lights, sometimes three or four at once, hovering or drifting among the headstones at night; some say they move away when approached.

The town cemetery south of Silver Cliff in the Wet Mountain Valley, especially the Protestant (Cross of the Assumption) section, usually on damp or cloudy nights.

The lights are a staple of Colorado ghost-lore and appeared in the 1969 National Geographic, in newspaper features, in the writings of skeptical researcher Karen Stollznow and on the Silver Cliff town website. The town museum fields questions about them.