El Paso's Boot Hill — 60,000 Burials, Ghost Tours, and Phantom Sounds
3700 East Yandell Drive, El Paso, TX 79903
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
General cemetery access is free. Ghost tours through Ghosts915 have a separate admission — check ghosts915.org for current pricing.
Access
Limited Access
Desert cemetery with paved and unpaved paths; uneven ground in older sections
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1856 · Buffalo Soldiers · Old West History · El Paso Heritage · Civil War Veterans · Frontier Medicine · Texas Ranger History
Concordia Cemetery began as a family burial plot on ranch land owned by Don Hugh Stephenson and his wife, Doña Juana Ascarate Stephenson. The first burial occurred in 1856. What started as a private family ground expanded to become the primary community cemetery for El Paso through the most volatile and varied decades of the American Southwest.
The cemetery's population reflects El Paso's position at a crossroads of military power, commercial ambition, and epidemic disease. Buffalo Soldiers from the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry served at Fort Bliss from 1866 to 1901; their graves form a documented section of Concordia's military acreage. Confederate and Union veterans lie within the same grounds. Texas Rangers and Spanish-American War veterans are represented. Outlaws, lawmen, merchants, and frontier families are buried throughout.
Disease claimed some of the cemetery's youngest occupants. A section of children's graves holds the victims of a smallpox epidemic associated with the Mormon community's 1912 arrival in El Paso; the Reverend Joseph Tays, an Episcopal missionary, contracted smallpox after conducting a funeral for a smallpox victim and died shortly after. A later influenza epidemic in the early twentieth century claimed additional child victims, filling out the children's section with small headstones.
At 60,000 burials, Concordia is one of the most densely occupied historic cemeteries in the Southwest. It is maintained by the Concordia Heritage Association and recognized as one of the most historically significant 'Boot Hill' style cemeteries in the American West.
Sources
The most specific and frequently repeated account from Concordia Cemetery involves the children's section: at two in the morning, visitors have reported the sound of children playing and laughing, with no children present. The children interred there died primarily in epidemic — smallpox and influenza — and the sounds reportedly track the area of their graves.
A related account emerged after a maintenance crew trimmed the trees in the children's section. For months afterward, visitors reported hearing children crying or lamenting at night. Whether this is coincidence, suggestion, or something that genuinely tracks the disturbance is not resolvable from the accounts alone, but the correlation was observed and noted by locals who monitor the cemetery's reputation closely.
Cavalry sounds — hoofbeats — have been reported separately, associated with the Buffalo Soldiers and cavalry veterans buried in the military sections. Indistinct human conversation, present enough to be recognized as speech but not intelligible as words, rounds out the auditory phenomena described by visitors.
Tour guides employed by Ghosts915 have reported seeing shadow figures moving between headstones, and a figure described as a woman in white has been encountered near the older sections of the cemetery. The ghost tour infrastructure exists through El Paso's official visitor platform, which gives the accounts an unusual degree of civic legitimacy.
Concordia Cemetery holds 60,000 burials across sections organized by era, ethnicity, and military service. The children's section — where scores of smallpox and influenza victims were buried — is the most frequently cited location for paranormal phenomena. Notable grave markers include those of Buffalo Soldiers, Texas Rangers, Confederate veterans, and outlaws.
Ghosts915 operates dedicated ghost tours of Concordia Cemetery through El Paso's official tourism infrastructure. Tours explore the cemetery's layered history — Old West outlaws, epidemic victims, cavalry soldiers — and the paranormal accounts attached to its most historically active sections.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Madison, IN
Springdale Cemetery is Madison's oldest still-active municipal cemetery, established in 1839 after the Third Street Cemetery (now John Paul Park) was abandoned. It straddles W 5th Street between Vine and Cragmont and includes Civil War veterans, African American burials from the historic Georgetown neighborhood, and early-20th-century Jewish community members.
Cambridge, MA
Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, dedicated in 1831, is the first rural-style cemetery in the United States. Founded by Dr. Jacob Bigelow and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society on 72 acres, it broke with the Colonial-era model of dense urban churchyards and inspired more than 175 rural cemeteries across the country over the following four decades.
Pittsburgh, PA
Allegheny Cemetery was chartered on April 24, 1844, by forty prominent Pittsburgh citizens and is the fourth-oldest incorporated public cemetery in the United States. The 300-acre grounds, the oldest suburban cemetery west of the Alleghenies, contain approximately 120,000 burials, including songwriter Stephen Foster, banking-family patriarch Thomas Mellon, and Negro Leagues star Josh Gibson.