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 10). The satanic undertaker that supposedly lived in the carriage house of the mansion is often thought to be McGovern, most likely because of his work in Cheesman Park, but this spirit is most often called “Willie.” In addition to the holding of satanic rituals, the wild stories also say there was a young boy murdered and later hanged from a tree in the yard of the mansion. People claim that the dead bodies from Cheesman were not enough for the carriage house occupant and that he eventually began kidnapping people off the street. The metal beam on the upper floor of the carriage house was supposedly where he would hang bodies after he killed them in his rituals. There is also a now-closed tunnel that he supposedly used to transport bodies from the main house to the carriage house. There are, however, no records that anyone lived in the carriage house, or that it had other uses outside of such a building’s normal functions. In fact, real estate records also show that McGovern lived in an entirely different house on Pennsylvania Street.
This stage area in Cheesman Park was once used for performances of Broadway show tunes and other theater pieces. It’s rumored that in some areas of the park, patches of grass grow greener because they mark the site of a grave.
Despite the number of bodies removed from Cheesman Park by McGovern and the families of the dead, it is estimated that 2,000–3,000 remain there. Close observers of the park may note that parts of the grass have rectangular plots that are lower than others and that in the spring some plots, also rectangular in shape, become green faster than others. Park goers also report cold spots throughout the park or the feeling of hands grabbing their ankles as they walk through the grass. Some also claim to have seen ghostly limbs or other body parts lying around, and others still have reported seeing ghostly figures looking for their own remains—the most horrifying of which are missing their heads. This ties in with widespread ghostly lore that the spirits of the dead cannot properly rest if their bodies are not intact or in one piece. Supposedly, under the right type of moonlight, visitors can also see the ghostly shapes of old gravestones in the park.
Because of the type of clay soil Colorado has in this area, much of which is found in Cheesman Park, caskets and skeletons have been known to move or shift positions. On a haunted tour with the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society, Matthew Baxter and Bryan Bonner will paint a picture typical of scary movies in which a ghostly hand reaches through the soil to grab someone’s ankle. They go on to say that, due to the shifting clay, bones can really shift to the surface of the park.
Because of a lack of funds, the park initially remained fenced off and untamed from 1894 to 1898. In the early 1900s the park did open but lacked a lot of architect Reinhard Schuetze’s original designs, such as a pavilion. Mayor Robert Speer offered anyone who would donate the funds to build the pavilion the right to name the park. The wife and daughter of recently deceased Walter Cheesman donated $100,000, giving the place its current name. Construction of the pavilion started in 1908, and it still stands today. Of the 320 acres originally used for Mount Prospect, only 81 were used for Cheesman Park; the rest were allocated for the new Congress Park and the Denver Botanic Gardens.
On occasion, when work is being done in Cheesman Park, such as in 2010 when the city was digging a new irrigation system, skeletal remains are found and then reburied in a different location by the municipality.
DENVER BOTANIC GARDENS AND THE SURROUNDING AREA
IN 1892, local Catholics moved their burial grounds from the York Street area of Mount Calvary to Mount Olivet Cemetery, although interments continued in the original location until 1908. It was finally sealed off in 1910. Twenty acres of the Catholic cemetery were sold to a real estate developer to create Morgan’s Addition in 1887. Development of the land began in 1903 and was quickly used for homes for the wealthy. The few houses that remain surround the Cheesman Park area and sit next to the land that became the Denver Botanic Gardens.
In 1950, Denver had convinced the Catholic archdiocese to deed the remaining property of Mount Calvary back to the city. After an excavation of the remaining bodies, two-thirds of which were infants, the land was riddled with holes. Through much of
