Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainBellingham's main cemetery, established 1887; home to the 'Death Bed' and 'Angel Eyes' monuments and their local legends.
1420 Woburn St, Bellingham, WA 98229
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Active municipal cemetery; free to visit during posted daylight hours. It is a working cemetery, not a tourist attraction — visit respectfully.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved interior roads with grass and some sloped sections; the older monument areas have uneven ground.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1887 · Established 1887 as the Whatcom City Cemetery; renamed Bay View in 1902 · Burial place of many Bellingham Bay pioneer families · Home to the landmark 'Death Bed' (Gaudette) and 'Angel Eyes' (Bland) monuments
Bayview Cemetery dates to 1887, when the town of Whatcom — one of the four settlements that later consolidated into Bellingham — set aside ten acres for a public burial ground originally called the Whatcom City Cemetery. According to WhatcomTalk's history of the grounds, it was renamed Bay View in 1902 and expanded over the following decades, reaching well over two hundred acres.
The cemetery holds many of the families who built the Bellingham Bay communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and several of its monuments have become local landmarks in their own right. The 'Death Bed,' a Parthenon-style tomb, marks the grave of Edmund L. Gaudette, a wealthy lumberman who held roughly a thousand acres of Whatcom County timberland and died in 1916; one side of the tomb sits empty because his second wife was buried in Seattle after a legal dispute.
Nearby, the statue locals call 'Angel Eyes' stands over the plot of pioneer William H. Bland, who was active in Bellingham real estate and insurance. Bland commissioned the monument for his first wife, Hattie, who died in the 1910 tuberculosis epidemic; Bland himself died in 1936 after financial losses during the Depression. WhatcomTalk's account treats the ghost stories attached to both monuments as folklore layered over the documented family histories.
Sources
Bayview Cemetery's best-known legends attach to two of its monuments. The Gaudette tomb, a small Greek-temple structure with a flat slab between its columns, is locally called the 'Death Bed.' The story holds that anyone who lies down on the slab will lose years from their life — a folklore detail often tied to the empty, unused half of the tomb, where Edmund Gaudette's second wife was never buried.
The second is the Bland family statue, nicknamed 'Angel Eyes.' Local accounts claim its eyes weep blood or glow in the dark, and that a spirit connected to the monument wanders the cemetery at night. Beyond the two monuments, visitors and local paranormal groups report seeing floating figures among the older headstones and feeling sudden cold spots.
Local historians, including WhatcomTalk, are candid that these are urban-legend archetypes grafted onto the real and often sad histories of the families buried there, rather than documented hauntings. The cemetery is active and open only in daylight, so the legends are best appreciated as part of Bellingham's storytelling tradition during a respectful daytime visit.
Notable Entities
Walk the cemetery's older sections during daylight to see the Greek-temple 'Death Bed' tomb of lumberman Edmund Gaudette and the 'Angel Eyes' monument over the Bland family plot. It is an active cemetery, so keep to the roads and pathways and be respectful of mourners and graves.
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