1885 garden cemetery in Asheville's Montford district; resting place of Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry near the site of the 1865 Battle of Asheville
53 Birch Street, Asheville, NC 28801
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free, active municipal cemetery. Self-guided walking maps available.
Access
Limited Access
87 acres of rolling, landscaped grounds with paved drives and unpaved paths; uneven terrain in older sections.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1885 · Thomas Wolfe and O. Henry grave sites · Battle of Asheville proximity (1865) · Montford Historic District · 19th-century garden cemetery movement
The Asheville Cemetery Company founded Riverside Cemetery on August 4, 1885 and laid it out as a garden-style cemetery intended to serve as both a burial ground and a public park. The site occupies 87 landscaped acres on the slopes above the French Broad River in what is now the Montford Historic District.
Riverside contains more than 13,000 burials and roughly 9,000 monuments, including a dozen family mausoleums. Notable interments include the novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), short-story writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910), Governor and U.S. Senator Zebulon B. Vance, Senator Thomas L. Clingman, Senator Robert R. Reynolds, and Isaac Dickson, the first African American to serve on Asheville's school council. Confederate generals R.B. Vance and T.L. Clingman are also buried here.
The cemetery sits less than a mile from the site of the April 6, 1865 Battle of Asheville, a small Civil War engagement in which a Confederate force turned back a Union raiding column near the French Broad River. The proximity of the battlefield is a recurring theme in the cemetery's folklore.
The Asheville Cemetery Company sold Riverside to the City of Asheville in 1952, and the cemetery remains an active municipal burial ground today. The City maintains the grounds and publishes a walking-tour map for visitors.
Sources
Asheville Terrors, 828 News NOW, and the Beast of Bladenboro folklore project all tie Riverside Cemetery's hauntings to the April 6, 1865 Battle of Asheville, which took place less than a mile from the cemetery's eventual grounds. Reports describe shouting troops, the exchange of gunfire, and on at least one widely repeated occasion an entire Confederate unit appearing in phantom form and vanishing into the distance.
Visitors also describe the sound of cannon fire and marching soldiers carried on the air, particularly in foggy early-morning conditions. Translucent gray-uniformed figures are the most-reported apparitions, but additional accounts describe the laughter of children — attributed by tour operators to the cemetery's many child burials from 19th-century epidemics and accidents.
As with much Civil War battlefield-adjacent folklore, the named-soldier identifications rest on tour-operator tradition rather than verified investigation, and reports cluster around well-known walking-tour stops. The cemetery itself is operated as an active municipal burial ground, and the City of Asheville treats Riverside primarily as a historic landscape rather than a paranormal attraction.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk the 87-acre garden cemetery using the City of Asheville's self-guided map. Notable graves include novelist Thomas Wolfe, short-story writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), Governor and Senator Zebulon B. Vance, Senator Thomas L. Clingman, Confederate General R.B. Vance, and Isaac Dickson, the first African American on Asheville's school board.
Riverside is a stop on multiple Asheville haunted walking tours, where guides recount Confederate-soldier sightings tied to the nearby 1865 Battle of Asheville and the cemetery's broader paranormal lore.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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