Cheesman Park
Denver, Colorado, United States
A Denver city park on the site of the Mountain View Cemetery potter's field, where thousands of unremoved graves lie beneath the lawns and the parks history is unquiet by any telling.
Cheesman Park was Denver's first cemetery, opened as Mount Prospect in 1858 and later renamed; by the 1890s the city had decided the dead were an inconvenience and gave families a deadline to move their relatives. Those unclaimed, thousands of them, most of them poor, immigrant, and Chinese residents barred from other grounds, were left in place, and the park built over them. In 1893 the city hired laborers to exhume the rest for reburial and, in the notorious worst case, shipped remains in crates and coffins that collapsed; the work was stopped amid scandal.
The result is an urban park that is still a burial ground, with graves under the lawns and drives, and Denver's haunted-park reputation is one of the better-grounded in the country: the dead are actually there. The city has since studied the ground with ground-penetrating radar, and the honest posture is remembrance, not ghost-tour thrills.
Visiting
Cheesman Park, Denver; open public park. See the Denver Public Library history.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CO_Cheesman_Memorial_Denver_1911.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories