Black Diamond Cemetery

A 3.5-acre cemetery established in 1884 as the final resting place for coal miners and their families, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Black Diamond Cemetery was established in 1884 by the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company, a California outfit that transplanted nearly the entire population of Nortonville in Contra Costa County to the coal-rich foothills of the Cascade Range in the early 1880s. Welsh superintendent Morgan Morgans oversaw both the mines and the company town, controlling everything from housing to medical care to the cemetery itself, which was funded through a graveyard fee deducted directly from miners' paychecks. By 1900, approximately 3,500 residents called Black Diamond home, organized into ethnic neighborhoods including Swede Town and Welsh Town, with immigrants arriving from Wales, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Finland, and Australia to work ten-hour days for $1.50 in the dangerous slope mines.

The 3.5-acre hilltop cemetery, hidden from the road behind rows of trees, became a grim chronicle of the town's tragedies. The earliest surviving marker dates to 1886. On October 1, 1902, an explosion at the Lawson Mine killed eleven men when a second dynamite shot ignited methane gas and coal dust released by the first. Then on November 6, 1910, at 6:40 in the morning, a catastrophic explosion and cave-in at the same mine killed sixteen miners, all foreign-born — nine Italian, four Belgian, one Finnish, one Polish, one Austrian. Five of their bodies were never recovered from the collapsed slope and remain entombed in the mine to this day. Eight of the recovered dead were buried together in a single grave. The Seattle Star reported on November 14, 1910, that 1,500 people turned out for the funeral, the procession stretching from St. Barbara Catholic Church on Lawson Hill all the way to the cemetery. Rescue efforts employed four Draeger oxygen units from the University of Washington Mine Rescue Station, equipment that had been demonstrated at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Just five years later, on November 16, 1915, an explosion at the nearby Ravensdale mine killed thirty-one more men; at least three of those victims are also buried at Black Diamond. The cemetery also holds children who perished in the smallpox and influenza epidemics of the early 1900s, and at least one Civil War veteran.

The haunting reputation centers on the cemetery's most iconic phenomenon: on foggy nights, floating lights resembling swinging miners' lanterns drift over the gravestones, particularly on the south side of the grounds. Some interpret these as the spirits of dead miners still searching for coal seams in the afterlife, their phantom lanterns bobbing through the mist exactly as they would have on the walk to the mine entrance before dawn. Skeptics point to will-o-the-wisp, the natural combustion of methane gas rising from decomposing organic matter, which produces a cool blue flame — a plausible explanation given the cemetery sits atop coal country where methane seeps are common. The other signature apparition is a spectral white horse with a glowing aura, seen weaving between tombstones at night despite the cemetery being fenced and enclosed. Visitors also report disembodied whistling and voices, the sound of heavy footsteps through the surrounding woods, unexplained scents of coal dust and baby powder, sharp headaches and chest heaviness, and electronic equipment malfunctions including sudden battery drain and camera shutdowns.

Multiple paranormal teams have investigated the grounds. In May 2018, Ghostly Activities and AGHOST conducted a joint investigation with MEL meters that detected electromagnetic spikes, though ambient noise pollution compromised their EVP recordings and camera power failures prevented solid documentation. On October 24, 2020, Cascadia Paranormal Investigations led by Kyle Richmond conducted a more formal inquiry for the Courier-Herald newspaper. Their Spirit Box session produced what sounded like a voice responding "it's me" when asked "Is anyone here?" An Ovilus device generated the words "homicide" and "riverbank" when radio host Heidi Yoast arrived, which she connected to the then-recent murder of Nicholas Germer in nearby Kent. Richmond urged caution about declaring the cemetery haunted, noting that many reported phenomena — orbs from flash photography reflecting off marble headstones, whistling from wind in dense vegetation — have straightforward explanations. Still, he could not account for everything his team recorded and expressed interest in returning. At least one visitor has reported being physically shoved by an unseen force, injuring their ankle, while others describe an overwhelming sense of being watched, particularly in the south end of the cemetery where many of the miners' graves are concentrated.

The cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 2000. King County historic landmarks coordinator Kate Krafft noted that it "illustrates broad historic, ethnic, and cultural patterns of the company coal mining town" that Black Diamond represented at the turn of the century. The city has maintained the grounds since 1977, and the Black Diamond Historical Society conducts periodic cemetery tours and maintains searchable burial records. The cemetery remains open to the public, its weathered headstones inscribed in a half-dozen languages standing as testament to the immigrant miners who built and died for the town.