Cheesman Park

A public park in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood, originally the Mount Prospect Cemetery established in 1858. When the city converted it to a park in the 1890s, only some bodies were relocated -- thousands remain buried beneath the lawns. Often cited as the inspiration for the movie Poltergeist.

In 1858, General William Larimer designated a stretch of windswept prairie east of Denver as Mount Prospect Cemetery, the young city's first formal burial ground. By 1866, some 626 bodies lay in designated sections for Masons, Odd Fellows, Catholics, the Jewish community, the Grand Army of the Republic, and a segregated area for Chinese immigrants. But as Denver boomed, the cemetery fell into disrepair and earned a grim reputation. In 1872, the federal government assumed control through an 1860 Arapaho treaty and sold the land to the City of Denver for just two hundred dollars. By 1890, Congress authorized its conversion into a public park, and families were given ninety days to exhume and relocate their dead. Thousands of graves went unclaimed.

In 1893, the city hired undertaker E.P. McGovern to remove the remaining bodies, paying him one dollar and ninety cents for each coffin transferred to Riverside Cemetery. What followed was one of the most gruesome episodes in Denver history. McGovern discovered he could increase his profit by hacking apart adult corpses and cramming the pieces into child-sized coffins -- one adult body filling three small boxes at nearly six dollars instead of one payment of a dollar ninety. Body parts were strewn across the open ground, and souvenir hunters looted exposed graves for brass fittings and personal effects. When the Denver Republican broke the story under the headline "The Work of Ghouls!" the scandal forced the mayor to terminate McGovern's contract. But no replacement was ever hired. The remaining dead were simply left in the ground, and the park was built on top of them. An estimated two thousand to five thousand bodies still lie beneath what became Cheesman Park, which officially opened in 1907 and was named after water company president Walter Cheesman.

The paranormal activity began during the botched exhumation itself. Workers reported ice-cold pressure settling onto their shoulders as they dug. One worker named Jim Astor abandoned the job entirely after experiencing the sensation while removing brass fittings from coffins. Nearby residents heard disembodied moaning and anguished cries rising from the open graves at night, and confused apparitions were seen knocking on doors and peering through windows of neighboring homes, as if the disturbed dead did not understand what was happening to them.

The activity has never stopped. Visitors report shadowy figures moving between the trees and the outlines of headstones visible in the spring grass, marking graves that were never emptied. Children's spirits are seen playing in the park at twilight, vanishing the moment anyone approaches. A female apparition has been witnessed walking and singing softly before disappearing. The most disturbing named entity is Slackjaw -- described as a pale, thin man with a visibly broken jaw, wearing a blood-soaked and torn hospital gown. Witnesses say he roams the park at night seeking his killers; in one account, he approached two young men and asked for a cigarette before revealing fifteen stab wounds across his torso. Multiple visitors have reported an unseen force holding them to the ground when they lie on the grass, unable to stand until the pressure releases.

Bodies continue to surface. As recently as 2010, human remains were discovered during the installation of an irrigation system. The park is widely cited as one of the inspirations for Steven Spielberg's 1982 film Poltergeist, in which a suburban housing development is built atop a relocated cemetery where the headstones were moved but the bodies were not -- a plot point that mirrors Cheesman's actual history with eerie precision. Several Denver ghost tour companies now offer dedicated Cheesman Park walking tours, and the park remains one of the most active and well-documented haunted locations in the American West.