Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainTraverse City's oldest burial ground holds the city's founders, Northern Michigan Asylum patients, and — on guided Grave Tales tours — the legend of the White Lady.
850 Parsons Rd, Traverse City, MI 49686
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Cemetery grounds are free to visit. Grave Tales guided tours are ticketed; see hauntedtraverse.com for pricing.
Access
Limited Access
65-acre cemetery with gravel paths, grass, and uneven ground. Evening tours require comfortable walking shoes.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1861 · Traverse City Founding Cemetery · Northern Michigan Asylum Patients · Civil War Veterans · Perry Hannah Land Grant
Oakwood Cemetery was established in 1861 on land donated by Perry Hannah — the same lumberman whose Queen Anne mansion still stands a few miles away on Sixth Street. Hannah's donation of 40 acres for a public burial ground was part of his broader role in building early Traverse City's civic infrastructure. The cemetery has since grown to 65 acres as the city expanded.
The burial record at Oakwood spans Traverse City's full history. Early plots contain the founding settler families of the Grand Traverse region. Among the notable interments is David Duane, documented as a Confederate soldier — an unusual presence in a northern Michigan cemetery that reflects the mobility of Civil War-era Americans. The cemetery also contains the graves of patients from the Northern Michigan Asylum (now the Village at Grand Traverse Commons), the large psychiatric institution that operated from 1885 until 1989 on the western edge of the city.
The Traverse City Record-Eagle covered Oakwood's cemetery tours as a serious historical product, noting that the guided walks surface facts about local history that most residents don't know — maritime deaths on Lake Michigan, logging accidents, the lives of Asylum patients — as much as ghost stories. The tours are organized by Haunted Traverse Tours, run by paranormal historian Desirae Dine.
The cemetery's long continuous use, the presence of historically significant and sometimes troubled interments, and its 65 acres of wooded and open sections give it the physical scale that sustained ghost lore requires.
Sources
Haunted Traverse Tours' Grave Tales product is the primary documentation of Oakwood Cemetery's paranormal tradition. The White Lady is the cemetery's named entity — a female apparition reported in the older sections of the grounds, consistent with the genre of White Lady legends that appear in Victorian-era cemeteries across the Great Lakes region.
The Grave Tales tours frame the cemetery's ghost stories in the context of the actual lives and deaths of the people buried there. Northern Michigan Asylum patients occupy a significant portion of the grounds; their circumstances — institutional confinement, often distant from family, in some cases premature death — give the Asylum section a particular atmospheric weight that tour guides draw on. The apparitions reported near this section of the cemetery are not attributed to specific named individuals.
The Traverse City Record-Eagle's coverage of the cemetery tours treated the ghost lore as an entry point to local history rather than the primary product — a framing that reflects the tours' own approach. The haunting tradition at Oakwood is not deeply elaborated in paranormal literature compared to Michigan's more intensively documented sites, but the White Lady account and the cemetery's continuous use since 1861 give it a stable local reputation.
Notable Entities
Oakwood Cemetery's 65 acres contain the graves of Traverse City's earliest settlers, Northern Michigan Asylum patients, veterans including a documented Confederate soldier (David Duane), and figures from the city's logging and Great Lakes maritime era. A self-guided daytime walk through the grounds is free and publicly accessible.
Haunted Traverse Tours runs the Grave Tales guided walking tour through Oakwood Cemetery, covering local ghost legends including the White Lady and other cemetery apparitions. Traverse City Record-Eagle has covered the tour as a legitimate local history product. Tickets available through hauntedtraverse.com.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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