Est. 1869 · Rural Garden Cemetery Movement · Garfield National Historic Landmark · Tiffany-Decorated Wade Memorial Chapel · Rockefeller / Ness / Stokes Burials
Lake View Cemetery was chartered in 1869 by a group of prominent Cleveland citizens who sought to establish a non-sectarian rural garden cemetery on the model of Mount Auburn in Boston and Spring Grove in Cincinnati. The site they selected — 285 acres of hilly woodland east of downtown Cleveland, with views toward Lake Erie — was designed as both a burial ground and a public landscape, with curving drives, landscaped plantings, and architecturally significant monuments.
The cemetery's most prominent feature is the James A. Garfield Memorial, an enormous Romanesque sandstone tower completed in 1890 to honor the assassinated 20th president of the United States. Garfield, who served less than a year before being mortally wounded by an assassin in July 1881, lies in state inside the memorial along with his wife. The structure features a 180-foot tower, terra-cotta tile mosaics, and stained-glass windows representing the states and territories of his lifetime.
Lake View also holds the Wade Memorial Chapel (1901), designed by Hubbell & Benes with a complete interior by Louis Comfort Tiffany — including a stained-glass window of 'Holy City' and mosaic walls. Among the cemetery's 100,000-plus burials are John D. Rockefeller, the Standard Oil founder who built much of his early fortune in Cleveland; Eliot Ness, the federal Prohibition agent of 'Untouchables' fame who later served as Cleveland's safety director; Mayor Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major American city; and dozens of other industrialists, jurists, and military figures.
The cemetery remains an active burial ground and a working public landscape. It has been included in the National Register of Historic Places, and the Garfield Memorial is a National Historic Landmark.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_View_Cemetery
- https://case.edu/ech/articles/l/lake-view-cemetery
- https://www.lakeviewcemetery.com/
- https://michaelkleen.com/2020/07/23/lake-view-cemetery-in-cleveland-ohio/
ApparitionsUnexplained lights at Garfield MemorialMoving tombstonesCold spotsDisembodied footsteps
Lake View Cemetery sits at the center of Cleveland's most enduring presidential ghost legend. According to multiple local sources — including the Second Sight Paranormal blog, the PANICd database, and the WKYC 'Is Lake View Cemetery haunted?' feature — visitors after dusk have reported unexplained lights inside and around the Garfield Memorial, the towering 1890 sandstone monument where the assassinated president lies in state.
The cemetery's most fanciful piece of folklore involves a midnight chess match between Garfield and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the two of them said to move tombstones like pieces across the cemetery grounds. Local writers note that this story — which has become the cemetery's signature legend — appears in 'most-haunted' lists across the region. Reports of repositioned grave markers at Lake View are real, but cemetery experts attribute them to frost heave, settling, and occasional vandalism rather than to the spectral chess game.
The most specific incident in the lore is the 1979 fire prediction. According to the Second Sight Paranormal account, an anonymous male caller phoned the Cleveland fire department, identified himself as 'Garfield,' and reported a fire on cemetery property. When the dispatcher noted that no fire had been reported there, the caller replied that the fire had not happened yet. Ten days later, the cemetery's maintenance building roof caught fire. The story has been told and retold in Cleveland ghost-tour materials for decades, but its primary source is local-history blog material rather than independently archived dispatch records.
Other reports from visitors include apparitions in Victorian dress near older sections, footsteps in empty mausoleum corridors, and unexplained cold spots near specific graves. Cemetery management neither promotes nor denies the lore, and Lake View remains an active, working burial ground first — paranormal interest is a secondary phenomenon attached to one of the most historically significant cemeteries in the Midwest.
Notable Entities
Apparition interpreted as President James A. GarfieldApparition interpreted as John D. Rockefeller
Media Appearances
- WKYC: 'GO-HIO Is Lake View Cemetery haunted?'
