Cheesman Park

Visitors to Cheesman Park describe a heavier, more troubled feeling walking certain paths, and sunken depressions in the grass where old graves have settled. Local legend says the park is haunted by the disturbed dead of the old graveyard, naming among the spirits the Denver gambler Jack O'Neal and the man who killed him, John Stoefel; a folklore collection also records a belief that lying down in the park leaves you unable to get back up, as if spirits were holding you there. The park was Denver's city cemetery from 1858 until the 1890s, when the city hired an undertaker to relocate the graves ahead of turning the ground into a park. He was paid by the coffin, and the exhumation was rushed and badly handled: bodies were broken apart to fit smaller boxes, remains were left exposed, and an unknown number were never moved at all. Estimates of the graves still beneath the park run from about 2,000 to several thousand, and remains have kept surfacing, in the 1960s and again in 2010, when four skeletons found during irrigation work were reburied at Mount Olivet Cemetery.