Ghosthunting Colorado. Kailyn Lamb

      The Denver Botanic Gardens are now on top of where the Catholic section of Denver’s cemetery used to be. Supposedly one of the classrooms in the atrium building (pictured) is haunted.

      THE FIELDS OF GREEN GRASS and looping sidewalks between Eighth and 13th Avenues that make up Cheesman Park look like any other city recreational area. There are trees, joggers, and groups playing volleyball or Ultimate Frisbee. It is also, however, the former location of a graveyard and body dump site.

      The land on which Cheesman Park currently resides was used by the Arapahoe tribe that inhabited parts of Colorado before it became a territory. In 1858, General William Larimer founded the city of Denver, setting aside 160 acres for a cemetery. Because the land was originally sacred burial grounds for the Arapahoe tribe, Denver had to follow very specific rules when using the land as a cemetery. American Indians were buried there at the typical 6 feet underground and, because new burials were not allowed to disturb the previous ones, they were placed only 3 feet under. This land would later be split among Cheesman Park, Congress Park, and the Denver Botanic Gardens. Larimer designated a corner of the cemetery for Denver’s up-and-coming wealthy upper class, while the opposite corner was for criminals and the poor. The middle class was set in the middle.

      The first recorded burial in the newly named Mount Prospect Cemetery was a man who died from a lung infection. The second burial was much more interesting. John Stoefel, having been tried and convicted by the people’s court for the murder of his brother-in-law, was hanged from a tree and buried in the cemetery. Despite being a new territory with only a few residents, nearly 1,000 people came to witness Stoefel’s hanging, which is listed as the first official execution in Colorado. He was buried in April of 1859 in the same grave as his victim, Thomas Beincroff.

      More and more, the poor section of the cemetery was filled with outlaws and criminals. When professional gambler Jack O’Neal was shot outside a saloon in Denver, he was buried in Mount Prospect in March 1860, and the Rocky Mountain News printed a story in which it gave the cemetery the nickname “Jack O’Neal’s Ranch.”

      Mount Prospect never became the beautiful garden cemetery Larimer had envisioned. Denver’s wealthy buried their dead in other locations, leaving the area to the diseased, the outlaws, and the poor. After Larimer left Denver in the late 1860s, the cemetery was taken over by aspiring undertaker John Walley. Walley was a cabinetmaker, which may explain why the land and graves quickly went into disrepair under his watch. Although he supervised many of the burials, he allegedly made poor caskets with as little lumber as possible. Gravestones began to topple, and many were vandalized. Cattle reportedly grazed the grass of the cemetery and homesteaders lived off of its land.

      Religious groups began sectioning off certain parts of the cemetery for their dead. Catholics purchased 40 acres of land from Walley in August of 1865, located by modern-day Eighth to 11th Avenues on one end and from High to Race Streets on the other, and, after christening the property, named it Mount Calvary. East of this cemetery from York to Josephine Streets and Ninth to 11th Avenues was the Hebrew Cemetery, which was fenced off, on land purchased from Walley by Jews in August 1866. This same year, reports say, a total of 626 people were buried in Mount Prospect, Mount Calvary, and the Hebrew Cemetery.

      But many argued that Walley had no claim to the land. In response to the city of Denver’s reaching out to Washington to settle disputes on who truly owned the cemetery land, the US government reclaimed the area and declared it federal property in March 1870. The government in turn resold 160 acres to the city of Denver for $200 after the city requested it for burial purposes. In May 1872, Congress specified that the land must always be used for burials, and the ground was renamed Denver City Cemetery.

      Water was not available for irrigation in this area until 1888, and because of this, landscaping in the cemetery was difficult. Mount Calvary and the Hebrew Cemetery are often cited as the more well-kept areas of the burial ground, while the rest remained hardly touched. The cemetery also started to be plagued by stories of grave robbing, body snatching by medical students, and corrupt undertakers removing old bodies to put in new ones. Supposedly, these evicted corpses would be found in the streets surrounding the graveyard. Softer clay beneath the graves also created problems, as it caused some of the coffins to shift positions and the ground above them to settle.

      With the establishment of the private Riverside Cemetery in 1876 and Fairmount Cemetery in 1890, many graves were removed from Denver City Cemetery in favor of the two new locations. As the public cemetery became increasingly ignored, these competitors called for its closing, and it became clear that the burial ground was on its last leg. In January 1890, Congress finally agreed to Denver’s request to make the cemetery a park. As a sign of thanks for this, it was originally named Congress Park. But first, to create a proper park, the bodies and graves needed to be moved.

      It is the story of how the bodies were removed from what would eventually become Cheesman Park that causes the spine-tingling stories of a haunted city park. The city gave families of the dead 90 days to remove the bodies. Not all of the bodies were claimed, however, and some bodies were not actually in their specified locations due to poor record keeping; cemetery records showed nearly 5,000 bodies remained, but there may have been thousands more. In addition, according to the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society, because Denver was a “pass through” city for a long period of time, hundreds of the bodies no longer had families to claim them.

      Enter Edward P. McGovern, whom the city hired to remove the rest of the graveyard’s occupants for $1.90 per casket. Often McGovern found bones scattered and not in once piece, bodies not where they were supposed to be, and more than one occupant in some graves. He also found evidence that solidified the stories of grave robberies. Also, because the bodies were buried in shallow graves, the acidic soil ate through both the caskets and flesh very quickly, leaving just skeletons in the burial sites.

      It is how McGovern started moving the bodies, using smaller child-size caskets and often cutting bodies into pieces to fit, that got him in trouble. Sometimes bodies were split between multiple caskets; even more frequently body parts were simply left behind, and there are rumors that parts from more than one body were placed in some caskets. While some claim that McGovern did this for the money, there is also the story that, due to a large mining accident in Utah, Denver had a shortage of adult caskets, as they had sent a large number of those available to the accident. Other rumors that destroyed McGovern’s reputation claimed that he began stripping corpses of their valuables. Because of the haste in which the job was being done, onlookers could see the body parts haphazardly thrown about and were even able to take “souvenirs” themselves. Once The Denver Republican caught wind of the story, the newspaper ran it with the criminalizing headline “The Work of Ghouls” in March 1893. Although the scandal got McGovern dismissed from the job, he continued to thrive in his position as city coroner until his death, and his mortuary continued as well in the wake of the scandal. Beyond all that, the city never hired a replacement undertaker to finish the job.

      Interestingly enough, McGovern became falsely associated with Croke-Patterson Mansion (page