Idaho Falls Cemetery with the Were-Wulff Werewolf Legend
1500 Saturn Avenue, Idaho Falls, ID 83402
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free; municipal cemetery open during daylight hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery drives with grass burial sections
Equipment
Photos OK
Rose Hill Cemetery is a municipal cemetery in Idaho Falls, Bonneville County, Idaho, owned and maintained by the City of Idaho Falls. The cemetery is one of the older surviving public burial grounds in eastern Idaho and is documented on Find a Grave and in the city's parks-and-facilities listings.
The cemetery's best-known folklore stops are the side-by-side burials of two unrelated individuals whose surnames, read together, produce the word were-wolf. Find a Grave and regional Idaho folklore reporting place the graves of Wulff and Wear next to one another at the cemetery's southwest end. According to local accounts, the cemetery has moved one of the two markers at some point in its history, which is occasionally cited as further evidence in the folklore but is consistent with standard cemetery practice for plot maintenance.
A separate folklore stop at the cemetery is a square above-ground tomb associated with the local knocking-tomb tradition.
Sources
The Were-Wulff legend is the cemetery's signature folklore. The story holds that townspeople once killed a werewolf, cut the creature in two, and buried the halves in separate graves under the alphabetically suggestive surnames Wear and Wulff. The actual side-by-side graves belong to two unrelated individuals whose surnames coincidentally produced the legend. Find a Grave and regional folklore reporting are uniform in identifying the names as a naming coincidence rather than the basis for any documented incident.
The second Rose Hill tradition involves an above-ground square monument said to return knocks. Visitors reportedly knock on the side of the tomb and listen for a response from within. A 2005 visitor follow-up cited in the original community submission found one tomb matching the description and reported that no response was heard.
The legends circulate primarily through local Halloween coverage, paranormal travel sites, and a long-running idahohauntings.com entry. No paranormal investigation report establishing documented activity at the cemetery has been located.
Notable Entities
Walk the City of Idaho Falls's largest municipal cemetery. Two folklore stops anchor the visit: a square above-ground tomb said to return knocks, and the side-by-side Wulff and Wear graves at the cemetery's southwest end that gave rise to the local werewolf legend. The cemetery has reportedly relocated one of the two stones at some point in the past.
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