Eureka Springs City Cemetery

The historic cemetery overlooks the Victorian village from a wooded hillside. Graves date to the 1880s founding of the resort town and include many early pioneers and hotel workers.

The Eureka Springs City Cemetery sprawls across 46.5 acres of hillside in Carroll County, overlooking the Victorian resort town that sprang into existence in the late 1870s when thousands of health seekers descended on the Ozarks to drink from the springs they believed held curative powers. The land was originally used as a burial ground by the Lamar family as early as 1880, the year after Eureka Springs was founded. The local chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) formally established the cemetery in 1889 and managed it until 1965, when the city acquired the property. The cemetery now holds approximately 4,500 burials spanning nearly a century and a half, its oldest markers dating to the town's frontier beginnings. A city cemetery commission was established by Ordinance 1031 on March 18, 1978 to govern its operations.

Eureka Springs itself is a town with more spirits than living residents — its permanent population hovers around 2,095, but the number of people who came to the springs seeking miracle cures and died in the attempt is beyond counting. Many of those who failed to find healing in the waters found their final rest on this hillside. The cemetery holds the graves of health seekers, Civil War veterans buried far from their homes, paupers interred without family to claim them, and children whose small headstones have weathered to near illegibility. The terrain is classic Ozark hillside — steep, wooded, cut through with narrow paths that wind between Victorian-era monuments, wrought-iron fences, and headstones tilted by a century of settling earth.

Visitors to the cemetery have reported consistent paranormal phenomena over the years. The most commonly described experience is a sudden heaviness in the air upon entering the grounds — not a temperature change, but a pressure, as though the atmosphere itself thickens. This sensation is frequently accompanied by an immediate and unshakable feeling of being watched, even when no other visitors are present. Some people have reported sudden nausea that lifts the moment they leave the cemetery grounds, an effect they cannot attribute to exertion or the terrain.

A woman in Victorian dress has been seen walking among the headstones at dusk, her appearance described in remarkably consistent terms by independent witnesses over the years — long gray or dark dress, moving with deliberate purpose between specific graves before vanishing when approached. A family visiting the cemetery reported that their young daughter pointed to an empty spot near the fence and described seeing a woman in a long gray dress who was "smiling but sad." Other visitors had reported an identical figure in the same location across multiple years.

Pale orbs of light have been observed floating low to the ground throughout the cemetery, particularly in the far sections where the foliage grows dense and the graves are oldest. These lights appear most frequently on moonless nights and are described as moving with intentionality — not drifting randomly but following the paths between headstones. A local group of paranormal investigators recorded the sound of crying on audio equipment with no one else present on the grounds, and during the same investigation, EMF meters spiked dramatically near an unmarked grave far from any power source or structure.

The sounds of children laughing have been heard near the oldest section of the cemetery, where small, weathered headstones mark graves from the 1880s and 1890s. Whispering voices drift through the grounds at dusk, carrying fragments of conversation that stop abruptly when the listener tries to locate their source. The cemetery is included on the costumed walking ghost tours that operate in Eureka Springs, taking visitors through the grounds on Highway 62 East. In a town where the 1886 Crescent Hotel has been named America's Most Haunted Hotel, the cemetery remains one of Eureka Springs's most quietly unsettling destinations — a hillside where the health seekers who came looking for miracles have never quite departed.