Columbus's 1848 Rural Cemetery, Ohio's Second-Largest
1000 Greenlawn Ave, Columbus, OH 43223
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to enter during daylight hours; guided ghost tours offered seasonally for a fee.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved drives across 360 acres of sloped lawn and woodland
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1848 · Ohio's Second-Largest Cemetery · Rural Cemetery Movement · Notable Ohioan Burials
Columbus's earlier cemeteries — the 1799 Franklinton burying ground, the 1812 North Graveyard, and the 1841 East Graveyard — had reached capacity by the 1840s. In 1848, a group of civic leaders incorporated the Green Lawn Cemetery Association and selected 80 acres on the southwest edge of the city as a non-sectarian rural-style burying ground, in the Mount Auburn tradition adapted to the Ohio landscape.
The cemetery opened on July 7, 1849, in the middle of a cholera epidemic. The first burial was a child named Leonora Perry; the second was Dr. Benjamin Gard, who contracted cholera while treating prisoners at the Ohio Penitentiary. Green Lawn expanded steadily through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its current 360 acres.
The Huntington Chapel and mausoleum, designed by architect Frank L. Packard and dedicated in 1902, is the cemetery's primary architectural landmark. Other notable structures include the Hayden Mausoleum, the gatehouse, and a substantial collection of Victorian and early-twentieth-century private mausolea. Notable interments include author James Thurber, World War I fighter ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, five Ohio governors, five Medal of Honor recipients, and Dr. James H. Snook — an OSU veterinary professor and Olympic shooting champion convicted of murder in 1929 and executed on February 28, 1930, in one of the city's most-publicized criminal cases.
Sources
Green Lawn's most-told paranormal narrative concerns the Hayden Mausoleum. Local tradition collected by the Ohio Exploration Society and reproduced on multiple Columbus ghost-tour itineraries holds that knocking on the mausoleum door at night will produce a knock from inside. Visitors describe the experience in informal accounts collected over decades; no scientific investigation has documented the phenomenon, but the tradition is sufficiently established to be regularly featured in regional reporting and on the cemetery's own programmed evening tours.
The Huntington Chapel and its surrounding plots are the focus of standard cemetery-folklore reports: cold spots, figures glimpsed at dusk, and occasional unsourced footsteps on the chapel's stone floor. The grave of Dr. James H. Snook — an OSU professor of veterinary medicine convicted in 1929 and electrocuted on February 28, 1930 for the murder of Theora Hix, a student with whom he had had an affair — sits in a particularly quiet section of the older grounds and draws true-crime visitors more than paranormal investigators.
Green Lawn does not endorse the paranormal accounts as fact, but the cemetery's nonprofit programming office incorporates the lore into seasonal evening walking tours that draw substantial attendance each October.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Drive or walk 360 acres of rolling lawn and Victorian funerary architecture, including the 1902 Huntington Chapel designed by Frank L. Packard. Notable graves include author James Thurber, World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, and five governors of Ohio.
The cemetery's nonprofit programming office runs seasonal evening ghost-history tours and architectural-history walks, particularly around October. Tours visit the Hayden Mausoleum, the Huntington Chapel, and Dr. Snook's grave.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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