Sierra Nevada Ghost-Town Burial Ground at 8,375 Feet
Within Bodie State Historic Park, Bodie, CA 93517
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Park entry fee per vehicle covers cemetery access. Check California State Parks website for current rates.
Access
Limited Access
High-altitude sagebrush hillside with uneven ground and original wooden grave markers
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1860 · National Historic Landmark · California State Historic Park · Gold Rush Mining Camp · Frontier-Era Burial Ground
Bodie was founded in 1859 after prospector W.S. Bodey discovered gold in the eastern Sierra. The strike turned into one of the most productive — and most violent — gold camps in California history. By 1879, the town claimed more than 10,000 residents, sixty-five saloons, four volunteer fire companies, a Chinese quarter, a school, a Wells Fargo bank, a jail, multiple newspapers, and a mortuary.
The cemetery on the hill west of town reflected the conditions of high-altitude frontier mining. Pneumonia and typhoid moved through the camp's crowded boarding houses. Mining accidents — shaft collapses, premature blasts, hoist failures — produced regular interments. The cemetery's wooden markers, when legible, name infants and toddlers in roughly the same proportion as adult miners, a reflection of the disease mortality of the period.
Notable interments include the so-called Angel of Bodie, the monument for three-year-old Evelyn Myers, who died in 1897 after being struck by a miner's pickaxe in an accident. The marble angel marking her grave is among the most photographed objects in the park. The cemetery also contains the graves of several gunfight victims from Bodie's reputation as one of the deadliest mining camps west of the Mississippi.
By 1881, Bodie's ore deposits were depleted. The population collapsed below 1,000 within a decade. The last residents left in the 1940s. California purchased the remaining buildings and grounds in 1962 and designated the site Bodie State Historic Park, maintained in a state of "arrested decay" — stabilized but not restored.
Sources
The cemetery anchors much of Bodie's paranormal reputation. Visitors describe a small child figure near the marble angel marking Evelyn Myers's grave, observed from a distance and reported with consistency across decades. Park staff have collected accounts of children visiting the cemetery who describe seeing or speaking with another child near the monument without prompting from adults.
The second tradition extends beyond the cemetery. The Bodie Curse holds that any object removed from the park — a square nail, a piece of bottle glass, a sun-bleached wood fragment — brings misfortune to the visitor until the object is returned. The California Department of Parks and Recreation receives hundreds of returned items each year, often accompanied by handwritten apologies describing job losses, illness, accidents, and financial reversals. Park rangers have publicly acknowledged that the curse narrative was at least partially encouraged by staff to discourage artifact theft. The returned objects, regardless of origin, are no longer placed back in their original positions and accumulate in a storage area sometimes referred to as the curse room.
Additional cemetery accounts describe phantom hymn-singing near the older sections, the smell of pipe tobacco at unoccupied gravesites, and equipment malfunctions reported by photographers working near the Myers monument at low light.
Notable Entities
Walk the burial ground on the windswept hill above the Bodie townsite. Wooden and stone markers identify miners, families, and victims of the typhoid, pneumonia, and mining accidents that filled the cemetery during Bodie's 1879-1881 boom. The Angel of Bodie monument marks the grave of three-year-old Evelyn Myers.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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