Bellefontaine Cemetery

A 314-acre rural cemetery established in 1849, serving as the final resting place of many notable St. Louisans including William Clark, Adolphus Busch, and members of the Lemp family. Features elaborate Victorian monuments and mausoleums.

Bellefontaine Cemetery has been receiving the dead of St. Louis since 1849, when it was established in response to a devastating cholera epidemic that overwhelmed the city's existing burial grounds. As the fourteenth rural cemetery developed in the United States and the first west of the Mississippi River, Bellefontaine was designed in the garden cemetery tradition, its four hundred acres of rolling hills, mature trees, and ornamental plantings intended to serve as both a final resting place and a pastoral retreat for the living. Nearly ninety thousand souls now rest within its grounds, including General William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Adolphus Busch of Anheuser-Busch, and William S. Burroughs, inventor of the adding machine.

With over 175 years of burials and tens of thousands of interments, it is perhaps inevitable that Bellefontaine has acquired a paranormal reputation that matches its historical significance. The cemetery's most famous ghost is Hitchhiking Annie, a pale young woman with dark hair who has been spotted along the roads near the cemetery since the 1940s. Annie flags down passing drivers, sometimes managing to enter their vehicles, where she engages in brief conversation before simply vanishing from the passenger seat as the car leaves the cemetery grounds. The encounters follow a consistent pattern that has been reported by multiple independent witnesses over more than eight decades.

Other spectral figures populate the cemetery's winding roads and pathways. A young boy in Victorian clothing has been spotted standing in the road near the cemetery's main entrance, and a woman dressed in the black mourning attire of the nineteenth century has been seen among the headstones, her grief as vivid in death as it was in life. Several city bus drivers have reported encountering a woman in a red dress who appears to be searching desperately for something within the cemetery. The drivers describe a strange certainty that she is looking for her baby, though none can explain how they know this.

One of the cemetery's most unsettling phenomena is a dense mist that materializes spontaneously among the graves. Unlike natural fog, which follows predictable weather patterns, this mist can appear on warm, sunny days, rolling through the headstones and monuments before dissipating as quickly as it formed. Visitors caught within the mist report an intense sensation of disorientation and the feeling of being surrounded by presences they cannot see.

Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum does not host, or permit other organizations to conduct, any paranormal, ghost, or supernatural tours on its grounds. The cemetery asks visitors to respect both the living and the dead by treating the property as the solemn memorial space it was designed to be. But the ghosts of Bellefontaine appear to follow their own rules, manifesting for those who cross their paths regardless of whether anyone has invited them to appear.