Denver's popular public park was a 19th-century cemetery — and when a contractor hacked up bodies to fit them in child-sized coffins in 1893, up to 3,000 were simply left in the ground
E 13th Ave & Franklin St, Denver, CO 80218
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public park, no admission fee
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Wheelchair OK
Paved paths throughout; gently sloped public park
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Est. 1858 · Denver's First Municipal Cemetery · 1893 McGovern Scandal · Unmarked Mass Burial Site · Denver Parks History
William Larimer platted Mount Prospect Cemetery in 1858 as Denver was first being organized. The intended clientele — Denver's emerging wealthy class — chose instead to bury their dead in more fashionable locations as the city grew, and Mount Prospect became the default burial ground for those without alternatives: indigent residents, disease victims, executed criminals, and transients who died in the city without family to claim them.
By the 1880s, the cemetery occupied prime real estate near the expanding city center. City officials decided in approximately 1890 to convert the grounds to a public park and contracted with E.P. McGovern to relocate the estimated 5,000 bodies to other cemeteries. The contract specified $1.90 per body.
McGovern began work in March 1893. Rather than purchasing full-sized coffins, he bought child-sized boxes, and when his workers exhumed adult remains, they disarticulated the bodies to fit them in the smaller containers, maximizing the number of bodies per box — and thus his payment — while cutting supply costs. On March 19, 1893, the Denver Republican published a front-page account of the work under the headline 'The Work of Ghouls!' Mayor Rogers fired McGovern five days later, on March 24, 1893.
The removal work halted with a substantial number of bodies still in the ground. City estimates of remaining interments range from 2,000 to 3,000. The park was completed in 1907 and named for Denver pioneer Walter Cheesman. The Denver Botanic Gardens occupy land adjacent to the park's eastern edge, also former cemetery ground. Periodic construction in the neighborhood has exposed human remains as recently as the 20th century.
Sources
Cheesman Park's haunted accounts begin in real time, not in retrospect. The Denver Republican's coverage of the 1893 McGovern scandal included first-person accounts from workers at the site. Gravedigger Jim Astor told the paper that while working in the cemetery he felt something land on his shoulders with enough force to startle him, looked behind him and saw nothing, and left the site immediately. He did not return to work the following day. His account appears in the contemporaneous newspaper record, not in subsequent folklore.
Residents of the large houses that bordered the cemetery reported, in the weeks following the scandal, seeing translucent figures near their windows after dark — figures that knocked or pressed against the glass before disappearing. These accounts were also documented in Denver newspaper coverage of the time, framed as a neighborhood disturbance rather than supernatural entertainment.
Modern reports follow the same pattern: figures seen at dusk in the park's interior, sometimes described as children, sometimes as adults, consistent in their brevity — visible for seconds before disappearing. The reports concentrate at the park's north and east edges, the areas most densely occupied during the cemetery's operating years and least disturbed during the partial removal.
The 1893 removal was documented enough — newspaper archives, mayoral records, the contractor's dismissal — that the burial history of Cheesman Park is not in dispute. The city's own estimates acknowledge thousands of bodies beneath the grass. Whatever interpretation visitors bring to that fact, the fact itself is settled.
A public Denver park that sits on a former 19th-century municipal cemetery. Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 bodies remain interred beneath the grounds, per city estimates. The Denver Botanic Gardens adjoin the eastern boundary. Visitors can walk freely through the park and read interpretive materials available from local historical organizations.
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