LA's oldest continuously operating cemetery, founded 1877, and the source of the Mexican-American 'Vanishing Girl' legend immortalized in Frank Romero's 1987 painting 'Ghost of Evergreen.'
204 N Evergreen Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90033
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public cemetery, free to visit during open hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved paths throughout much of the cemetery; some older sections have uneven ground
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1877 · Oldest continuously operating cemetery in Los Angeles (est. 1877) · Wikipedia — documented city historical significance · Frank Romero's 'Ghost of Evergreen' (1987) — Chicano art canon · Boyle Heights Paranormal Project investigations documented 2010 · Boyle Heights Walking Ghost Tour stop
Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1877 on the east side of the Los Angeles River in what is now the Boyle Heights neighborhood. Wikipedia confirms it as the oldest continuously operating cemetery in the city of Los Angeles, a designation that reflects its unbroken operation across the periods of dramatic demographic change that have defined Boyle Heights.
The cemetery's earliest sections reflect the late-Victorian Anglo Protestant community that first settled the area east of downtown. By the early twentieth century, Boyle Heights was becoming one of Los Angeles's most diverse neighborhoods — home to large Jewish, Japanese, Russian Molokhan, and Mexican-American populations — and Evergreen's burial records reflect that succession. Jewish sections, Japanese-American sections, and sections serving Mexican-American families accumulated over the century.
The PBS SoCal community history series documented the cemetery's role in the neighborhood's changing identity, noting how Evergreen serves as a kind of material archive of Boyle Heights's often-overlooked communities. The Boyle Heights Paranormal Project, a community group documented by the LA Eastside blog in 2010, conducted investigations at the cemetery as part of a broader effort to record the neighborhood's uncanny traditions.
Artist Frank Romero, a leading figure of the East Los Angeles Chicano art movement, painted 'Ghost of Evergreen' in 1987, directly engaging the cemetery's folkloric reputation and the Vanishing Girl legend that had circulated in the community for decades.
Sources
The most durable legend attached to Evergreen Cemetery is the 'Vanishing Girl,' a story that has circulated in Mexican-American Boyle Heights for generations. The basic shape: a young man meets an attractive woman at a dance, often described as wearing a white ball gown; he walks her home at the end of the night; she stops at the gates of Evergreen Cemetery, says goodnight, and vanishes. He later learns she died some time ago and is buried in the cemetery.
The LA Local's coverage of Boyle Heights haunted sites places the Vanishing Girl explicitly in the Evergreen Cemetery tradition and notes that the story functions as a local variant of the 'La Llorona' and 'resurrection Mary' ghost-bride cycles that appear across Mexican, Mexican-American, and Central American folkloric traditions. The Evergreen version is sufficiently specific to the neighborhood — to Boyle Heights streets and this particular cemetery — that it reads as a genuinely localized tradition rather than a generic import.
Frank Romero's 1987 painting 'Ghost of Evergreen' gives the legend its most formally documented expression. Romero, a founding member of the Los Angeles art collective Los Four and a leading figure of Chicano muralism, depicted the cemetery's ghost tradition as subject matter meriting the same attention as any other aspect of East LA life. The painting circulates in reproductions and references in discussions of Chicano visual art.
The Boyle Heights Paranormal Project, a community investigation group documented in a 2010 LA Eastside blog post, conducted organized investigations at the cemetery and collected visitor accounts, treating the site as one of the neighborhood's primary paranormal locations.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Explore LA's oldest operating cemetery, where Boyle Heights community history is layered across 147 years of burials. The Vanishing Girl legend, the Boyle Heights Paranormal Project investigations, and Frank Romero's 1987 painting 'Ghost of Evergreen' have made this site a touchstone of Mexican-American urban folklore.
Boyle Heights History Studios includes Evergreen Cemetery on its organized walking ghost tour of the neighborhood, connecting the cemetery to other historically documented sites in the community.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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