Houston's 1871 garden-style cemetery and final resting place of Howard Hughes Jr., Republic of Texas president Anson Jones, and Gene Tierney, with more than 150 years of accumulated ghost-tour and paranormal-investigator reports.
2525 Washington Avenue, Houston, TX 77007
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free admission to the cemetery grounds during daylight hours. The cemetery is a working private nonprofit cemetery; respectful visitation only.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved cemetery drives with some grass and rolling terrain
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1871 · Houston's first professionally designed cemetery (1871) · Significant nineteenth-century American garden-cemetery example · Final resting place of Howard Hughes Jr., Anson Jones, and Gene Tierney · Confederate soldiers' section
Glenwood Cemetery was developed in 1871 on rolling land west of downtown Houston, becoming the first cemetery in the city laid out in the garden-cemetery style — a design tradition rooted in Boston's Mount Auburn (1831) that treated the cemetery as a contemplative landscape rather than a strictly utilitarian burial ground. The first burial occurred in 1872. By 1874, Glenwood was operating as a weekend recreational destination served by a mule-drawn street railway running west on Washington Road.
The cemetery is the final resting place of an extraordinary roster of Houston's economic and political leadership. Howard Hughes Jr. and several Sharp-Hughes Tool Company family members are buried at Glenwood, as are founders and early investors in Texaco and Humble Oil. Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas, has a family plot here. Other notable burials include Hollywood actress Gene Tierney, Texas governors William P. Hobby and Ross S. Sterling, philanthropist George R. Brown, and the founding president and first architect of Rice University.
A Confederate soldiers' section reflects the cemetery's nineteenth-century origins. The cemetery is administered by the nonprofit Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, and is a recognized contributing historic site in the city.
Sources
Glenwood is one of the most-investigated cemeteries in the Houston region. The published paranormal accounts converge on several recurring strands. First, general visitor reports of apparitions and shadow figures — generally encountered during daylight hours, not after dark, since the cemetery is closed at night. Second, paranormal-investigator reports of elevated electromagnetic readings concentrated near the Confederate section, the children's graves, and the oldest sections housing the city's earliest pioneers. Third, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) collected by ghost-tour operators in which the captured voices use older Texas accents and vocabulary.
Two specific legends recur. The first involves a former cemetery caretaker said to have been murdered, with the case never officially solved; published ghost-tour and paranormal accounts repeat the claim but the underlying historical incident is not independently documented in mainstream sources, so the underlying murder should be treated as folklore. The second describes a tall thin figure in 1940s-era attire reported near the Howard Hughes Jr. family plot.
The cemetery itself, administered as a nonprofit historic property, does not market itself as a paranormal venue; the lore reaches the public via Ghost City Tours, the Hollow Hill paranormal blog, PaperCity Magazine's cemetery feature, and the US Ghost Adventures top-ten Houston list.
Notable Entities
Walk the garden-style grounds of Houston's oldest professionally designed cemetery during daylight hours. Notable graves include Howard Hughes Jr., Anson Jones (last president of the Republic of Texas), Gene Tierney, William P. Hobby, and George R. Brown, plus a Confederate soldiers' section. Respectful visitation expected.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Forest Park, IL
Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, grew from two adjacent cemeteries — German Waldheim (established 1873) and Forest Home (1876) — which merged in February 1969. The 220-acre site was chosen as a non-denominational burial ground, a policy that made it the only Chicago-area cemetery willing to accept the bodies of the Haymarket defendants in 1887.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPSugar Land, TX
The Old Imperial Farm Cemetery was established in 1912 to bury prisoners who died at the Imperial State Prison Farm, which operated on the site of a former sugar plantation using the post-Civil War convict lease system. In 2018, construction crews building the new Lakeview Elementary School campus in Sugar Land unearthed 95 additional unmarked graves. Forensic analysis determined the remains were predominantly African American men and boys, some as young as 14 years old, who died under the convict lease program in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The city designated the original cemetery as a memorial park in 2006.
Houston, TX
Founders Memorial Cemetery at 1217 W Dallas Street is Houston's oldest surviving burial ground, established in 1836 by Augustus and John Allen, the brothers who founded Houston that same year. They donated the land for use as a public cemetery shortly after platting the city. The cemetery holds more than 800 cholera victims from the epidemic waves that struck Houston in the late 1830s and 1840s, as well as a number of signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and other figures from the Republic of Texas period.