Comet Lodge Cemetery

A desecrated 1880s cemetery on Beacon Hill built atop a Duwamish burial ground, reduced from five acres to less than half by city development and a 1987 sewer trench that bulldozed grave markers on the Day of the Dead.

Long before Seattle existed, the wooded hillside above the Duwamish Valley on what is now Beacon Hill served as a burial ground for the Duwamish people. When Luther Collins led the first white settlers to Georgetown in June 1851, they buried their dead in the same ground. The first recorded pioneer burial was Samuel Maple in 1880, a member of the Collins party and one of Seattle's earliest settlers. The site was officially platted in 1895 as the cemetery of Comet Lodge No. 139, a chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows that functioned as an insurance society and safety net for its members. At its peak, the cemetery stretched across five acres and held an estimated 500 pioneer dead alongside an unknown number of Duwamish remains, including five documented Civil War veterans and a designated section for children known informally as Baby Land.

The cemetery's descent began in 1908, when the Odd Fellows sold it to one of their Nobles, H.S. Noice, for one dollar. Noice sold burial plots until 1912, then transferred ownership to Grand Noble H.R. Corson for ten dollars. In 1927, Corson and his wife Eva subdivided and sold the northern half of the cemetery -- the children's burial section -- to the City of Seattle for one dollar, with baby grave markers removed beforehand. After the last recorded burial in 1936 (Jewel Lundin), the property went through tax foreclosure in 1938, with King County claiming the graveyard had been abandoned for many years despite evidence to the contrary. In 1986, Seattle rezoned the historic cemetery to retail space and single-family residences. Then, on November 2, 1987 -- the Day of the Dead, All Souls' Day -- city crews bulldozed grave markers to trench a sewer line. Eleven homes and a dog park were built over the burial plots, including directly atop the children's section. No records exist of any bodies being exhumed or relocated before construction. The city later claimed it had no knowledge a graveyard had ever existed there, despite a 1950s press release from the city government acknowledging the cemetery's existence and a 1954 King County statement that the land "includes the graves or remains of deceased persons."

Of the estimated 500 burials, approximately 15 to 20 headstones remain today, most re-erected in the 2000s after community activism. Many have been vandalized with spray paint or covered with posters. Samuel Maple and his son Jacob were moved to a memorial site at King County International Airport in 1939, and Henry Van Asselt was relocated to Lakeview Cemetery on Capitol Hill, but the vast majority of the dead were simply built over.

The paranormal activity centers on the homes constructed over Baby Land. One woman who moved into a house directly atop the former children's burial ground reported disturbances from her first night: lights switching on and off, disembodied voices echoing through empty rooms, and the apparition of a small boy wandering her hallways. Another family kept an expensive collection of porcelain dolls locked in an illuminated display cabinet, checking the lock each night before bed. By morning, the dolls would be scattered across the house as though someone had been playing with them. Their living son was repeatedly scolded for leaving his toys strewn about, until he explained that a boy in old-fashioned clothes visited him every night and was responsible for the mess. Visitors to the remaining cemetery grounds report hearing the tinkling laughter of children, and residents in the surrounding Beacon Hill and Georgetown neighborhoods have seen young pioneer children in period clothing darting among the gravestones. Author and historian Bess Lovejoy, who featured Comet Lodge in her guidebook Northwest Know-How: Haunts, documented these accounts and noted the grim irony of the site echoing the horror-movie trope of moving headstones without moving the bodies beneath them.

Preservation advocate John Dickinson, who has an ancestor buried at Comet Lodge and possesses records of over 400 known gravesites, began restoration efforts in 1999 but was met with cease-and-desist letters from the city. In 2002, Cleveland High School students, under teacher Faith Beatty and in partnership with the Washington State Cemetery Association, cleaned the grounds and collected oral histories from neighbors. King County Executive Ron Sims contributed approximately $100,000 for landscaping improvements. Today the cemetery is maintained as a memorial space through periodic mowing by King County Facilities Management, and local ghost tours regularly visit. The annual Comet Lodge Haunted Trail draws families each October, a lighthearted counterpoint to the genuine unease that lingers in a neighborhood where an estimated five hundred souls rest beneath houses, sidewalks, and a dog park -- their headstones gone, their graves unmarked, their children still heard laughing in the dark.