People picnic here. Walk their dogs. Play volleyball. But beneath Cheesman Park’s grass, thousands of people are believed to remain buried. For the first stop in our Haunted Colorado series, we’re starting with a Denver park whose real history is unsettling enough before the ghost stories begin.
The site opened as Mount Prospect Cemetery in 1858. When Denver decided to turn it into a park, undertaker E. P. McGovern was hired in 1893 to relocate graves. He was dismissed amid allegations of mishandling remains, including breaking bodies apart to fit smaller coffins. Newspapers disputed what happened, but the relocation was never completed. Denver Botanic Gardens estimates that 2,000–3,000 people’s remains still lie beneath the park. Irrigation workers even uncovered skeletons in 2010.
So what have people actually reported? In a personal account published by Rocky Mountain Paranormal, a visitor named Jim described walking near the pavilion with his cousin in 2002 when they heard a nearby voice telling them to leave. They searched around a tree but couldn’t find anyone speaking. Another contributor, Francis, described taking a nighttime shortcut near the 12th Avenue alignment and suddenly entering a patch of intense cold. A few steps later, the temperature felt normal again.
A third contributor, signing as “MK,” recalled a fall 2005 visit when his wife reported hearing footsteps approaching through fallen leaves and sensing someone beside her. The couple left. These are unverified personal accounts, and not everyone interprets the park’s odd moments as paranormal: another regular visitor described the same cold patch but suggested a natural temperature change, reporting no unusual encounters.
