Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainVirginia's oldest continuously used public cemetery holds 2,700 Civil War dead and a surviving smallpox quarantine ward from 1845.
401 Taylor St, Lynchburg, VA 24501
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Grounds open free; candlelit haunted history tours are ticketed — see website
Access
Wheelchair OK
Gently rolling cemetery grounds with paved paths; Pest House interior has limited accessibility
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1806 · Oldest continuously used public cemetery in Virginia · Over 2,700 Civil War soldier burials · Surviving antebellum smallpox quarantine hospital · Enslaved and free Black burial sections dating to 1806
Old City Cemetery was laid out in 1806 on a hillside south of Lynchburg's downtown, predating by a decade many of the city's defining institutions. From the outset it served the full social spectrum of the antebellum South: a section for free Black residents, a section for enslaved people whose owners paid burial fees, and plots for the city's white middle class. By the time of the Civil War it had become one of the largest cemeteries in central Virginia.
When the war reached Lynchburg in the 1860s, the city became a major hospital hub for Confederate wounded. Soldiers from both armies—an unusual circumstance—were buried in the cemetery's military sections. The total exceeds 2,700 soldiers, Union and Confederate, making it one of the most significant Civil War burial grounds in the state. The American Battlefield Trust has documented the cemetery as a heritage site of national importance.
On the cemetery grounds stands the Pest House, a small wooden structure dating to approximately 1845 that served as Lynchburg's smallpox quarantine facility. During the Civil War it housed soldiers with contagious diseases, and 102 of them died there. A monument on the grounds marks their graves. The building survived demolition efforts in the 20th century and was restored as a medical museum, operated today by the Lynchburg Historical Foundation through the Old City Cemetery organization. It is one of the only surviving antebellum pest house structures in the United States.
The cemetery's enslaved burial sections have received increasing scholarly attention. Many of those interred were not named in contemporary records, and ongoing research attempts to reconstruct their identities from church records, estate inventories, and oral histories.
Sources
The Old City Cemetery's paranormal reputation rests less on specific ghost stories than on the weight of what actually happened here. A building where more than a hundred soldiers died of smallpox in isolation from their families, surrounded by the graves of thousands of others killed in a war within living memory — that history needs no dramatization.
The cemetery has offered candlelit haunted history tours seasonally, drawing visitors specifically for the combination of documented dark history and evening atmosphere. Travel writers who visit note that the grounds have a quality — the scale of loss, the ages on the stones, the unmarked sections — that produces a response more visceral than any theatrical haunted attraction. Whether specific apparitions or phenomena have been reported by investigators is not well documented in primary sources; the site's draw is its verified history.
The Pest House in particular, still standing after 180 years, functions as a tangible memorial to death by disease. Visitors can see the structure where men were brought to die in quarantine during a war that had already taken everything from them.
Explore 26 acres of Virginia's oldest public cemetery, including sections for enslaved African Americans, over 2,700 Civil War soldiers from both sides, and graves predating the Revolution. The Pest House Medical Museum building is viewable on the grounds.
Evening lantern-lit tours through the cemetery focus on the Civil War dead, the smallpox quarantine history of the Pest House, and the stories of those buried in the enslaved persons' sections. Offered seasonally; check website for schedule.
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Atlanta, GA
Historic Oakland Cemetery was chartered in 1850 as the six-acre 'Atlanta Cemetery,' renamed Oakland in 1872, and expanded to 48 acres. Approximately 70,000 people are interred, including roughly 6,900 Confederate soldiers (3,000 unidentified), four Confederate generals, six Georgia governors, 27 Atlanta mayors, Margaret Mitchell, golfer Bobby Jones, and Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first African American mayor. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 28, 1976.
Ferndale, CA
Established in 1868 on a steep hillside above Ferndale's Eel River Valley, the cemetery served the Victorian dairy-farming and lumber community through its founding generations. Its moss-covered stonework and rhododendron canopy drew the production crew for Stephen King's 1979 Salem's Lot miniseries, which used the site as the fictional Harmony Hill Cemetery.
Aerial survey · USDA NAIPGalveston, TX
The Broadway Cemetery complex in Galveston encompasses seven distinct historic burial grounds established between 1839 and 1939, collectively containing an estimated 36,000 or more burials. The complex includes sections dedicated to victims of the 1900 Great Storm — the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, which killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in Galveston — as well as yellow fever epidemic victims, Confederate deserters executed by firing squad, and a documented 1894 murder case involving a woman who poisoned her four children.