Stacy Conradt
Four Cemeteries That Were “Relocated”
by Stacy Conradt - October 25, 2011 - 12:04 AM

You’re familiar with the scenario from your favorite horror movies: when a family moves into a house inconveniently built on top of a graveyard, ghostly shenanigans and otherworldly horrors ensue. But it’s not just a plot in Poltergeist – cemeteries are relocated more frequently than you might think. We like to think that the bodies make the move along with their headstones, but as you’ll see, that’s not always the case.

1. Are the New Orleans Saints getting penalized by beings other than the refs? When ground was broken for the Superdome back in 1971, crews brought up bones by the backhoe-full. It didn’t take long to determine that they had discovered what was left of the Girod Street Cemetery (pictured), an above-ground burial ground for victims of Yellow Fever and cholera. Though the cemetery was deconsecrated in 1957, not every body buried there was moved. If someone didn’t claim their long-dead relatives, the deceased were just were just left there, coffins and all. Needless to say, many people chalked up the Saints’ losing streak to spirits that were angry about their remains being unceremoniously dug up to make way for a football field. At least two voodoo priestesses tried to remove the so-called curse; so did a nun. None of those attempts worked, but apparently something finally did since the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.

2. When the Eisenhower Expressway was built in the late ‘50s, at least 2,000 graves were moved from three different cemeteries in Forest Park, Illinois, to make way.

3. It’s not scheduled to open until 2016, but when the Shanghai Disney Resort does admit its first guests, they might find a real ghost or two lurking in the Haunted Mansion. Hundreds of tombs had to be moved to make way for Mickey’s latest home; families with deceased loved ones being relocated received 300 yuan (about $47) per body. As far as we know, everything was properly moved… I suppose time will tell.

4. Back in about 1843, part of Chicago’s famous Lincoln Park was actually a cemetery. Concerned about cholera, city officials decided to relocate the dead – including about 4,000 Confederate soldiers – to a less central location that might protect the living from disease. When work began on a parking garage in Lincoln Park in 1998, at least 80 bodies were discovered, making it pretty clear that not all of the cemetery’s residents had found their way to the new digs on the south side of Chicago. At least one tomb is obviously still there; you can find the mausoleum of innkeeper Ira Couch located behind the Chicago History Museum.

Do you know of any other relocations that may not have actually been completed? Let us know about it in the comments.

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Comments (23)

  1. The ghost tour guides in Edinburgh say that there used to be a cemetery next to St. Giles’ and that the graves were never moved. In old town San Diego, they widened a road into a cemetery and have gold markers in the road marking the gravesite.

    posted by nobody on 10-25-2011 at 12:34 am

  2. Look up Cheeseman Park in Denver. It used to be the City Cemetery. The man hired to move the bodies found he could make more money by dividing up the bodies. There are still many (parts of) people buried there. The Botanical Gardens next to Cheeseman was also the old Catholic Cemetery of Denver.

    posted by David on 10-25-2011 at 1:29 am

  3. One issue that contributed to the delay in expanding O’Hare Airport in Chicago was a lawsuit over moving a cemetery. The dead folk lost.

    posted by Rich on 10-25-2011 at 2:14 am

  4. In Crosby, TX (NE of Houston) there was suppsedly a subdivision built on a cemetery. I grew not far from there & heard stories about it when I was a kid and dated a girl when I wad older that lived there, she had some pretty freaky stories to tell.

    posted by indotexan on 10-25-2011 at 2:36 am

  5. When I was young, there was a cemetery in a spot where the town held the annual county fair. It was weird sitting on a tombstone, eating cotton candy. But that went on for years. They eventually moved all the gravestones and what remains, uh, remained. I heard that for some graves, all they found were coffin hinges. Years later, the new high school was built on that ground, and the fair was moved elsewhere.

    posted by Miss Cellania on 10-25-2011 at 6:10 am

  6. Cheeseman Park – Denver, CO
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesman_Park,_Denver

    posted by molli on 10-25-2011 at 6:23 am

  7. The parks I played baseball in as a kid used to be one large cemetery. A road had been built between the two fields, and eventually the town had to remove the road as they couldn’t actually “fix” it because it was known that not all the bodies had been moved. (Someone had even taken a lot of the old headstones and made little “statues” out of them – it was weird really)

    posted by Michelle on 10-25-2011 at 6:58 am

  8. Intresting that about 4,000 confederate soldiers were relocated in 1843 about 20 years prior to their death. Also intresting that these sons of the south were buried in a nothern state.

    posted by steve on 10-25-2011 at 6:59 am

  9. I don’t know of a relocation, but the college I went to was across the street from a large sprawling cemetery. One of my professors always used to talk about what would happen when “they” decided that was valuable real estate that could be used for something else.

    posted by Jenn on 10-25-2011 at 7:51 am

  10. Ft. Leavenworth, Ks. The General’s quarters & an office building are built on a former burial ground. They moved the bodies in the 1850′s-60′s. One legend has it that a General’s wife dug up a skull while gardening about a hundred years later.

    posted by Emily on 10-25-2011 at 8:02 am

  11. The Chicago cemetery may have been associated with Camp Douglas, a Civil War prison. Columbus had Camp Chase, and we still have about 2200 Confederate POWs buried here.

    Columbus also had the North Graveyard, which North Market was built over, and part of was uncovered in 2001 during a sewer project.

    And a very large cemetery is right across from Riverside Methodist Hospital. Only a section of State Route 315 known as the Hospital Curve separates them. I think you can manage your own jokes about this one.

    posted by Laurel on 10-25-2011 at 10:29 am

  12. Toronto’s upscale Yorkville district is built on the site of a 19th century village, complete with a “Potter’s field” where numerous intransigents were buried. When the village was absorbed into Toronto, the bodies were supposed to have been moved but many weren’t. Building excavations in the area still turn up the occasional skeleton.

    posted by Romeo Vitelli on 10-25-2011 at 12:14 pm

  13. Actually, most of the bodies moved from Lincoln Park in Chicago were relocated much further north and northwest of the city, to places like Rosehill, Graceland, Wunders, etc., not south. Some even went to new cemeteries that a few years later were themselves demolished and the bodies had to be moved a second time.

    posted by Leyla on 10-25-2011 at 12:19 pm

  14. In Conway, SC (near Myrtle Beach) one of the local churches decided to pave over their cemetery so their parking lot would be bigger (this was many years ago, maybe in the 60s/70s). They supposedly tried to contact my Grandmother and Great Grandmother about this, so they could claim some family members. Well long story short, my Grandmother and Great Grandmother got there from out of town and found several family member tomb stones laying up against the church, and their caskets paved over. Needless to say Grandma is still pretty heated over that. We joke that hopefully their souls are haunting that church and parking lot!

    posted by Bailey on 10-25-2011 at 1:05 pm

  15. Makes a good argument for creamation

    posted by Da'Guy on 10-25-2011 at 2:19 pm

  16. Also, on Cheeseman Park in Denver, the original site was an actual Native American burial ground. Then the white folks decided it would be a good idea to bury their dead only three feet below ground as to not disturb the orginal inhabitants. Which is still causing bones to be found after a hard rainfall. Just went on a haunted tour of the park with the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society and it was awesome!!

    posted by Kim on 10-25-2011 at 2:31 pm

  17. 7,500 bodies in 34 cemeteries were relocated when the towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott and Greenwich (Massachusetts) were flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir back in the 1930s.

    In the 1999 a dive team at Quabbin discovered stacks of tombstones, a mausoleum (where the bodies would be stored during winter until the ground thawed enough to dig graves) and the family plot of the Underwoods.

    The footage of the dive was included in the documentary ‘Under Quabbin’.

    posted by Pali on 10-25-2011 at 2:51 pm

  18. Although the Lincoln Park Cemetery was begun in 1843, it wasn’t demolished until the 1864, by which time, the 4,000 Confederates who had died at Camp Douglas had been buried there.

    During the removal of graves, the body of James Curtiss, the 11th and 13th mayor of Chicago was lost.

    While Ira Couch’s mauseleum is still in Lincoln Park, other graves have been discovered over the years during construction projects.

    posted by Steven on 10-25-2011 at 3:41 pm

  19. It’s great to be alive in Colma.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colma,_Ca

    posted by Andrew on 10-25-2011 at 5:25 pm

  20. Nearly all of the cemeteries in San Francisco were move to Colma after the 1906 earthquake and fire. The only ones that remain are the one in The Presidio and the one alongside Misson Dolores.

    posted by Discordia on 10-25-2011 at 6:46 pm

  21. Kinzua was a small town near Warren, PA. Due to the city of Warren flooding so often, they decided to place a dam upstream. They relocated all living members of Kinzua (pronounced “Kin-zoo)and *most* of the deceased ones, including some Native American remains. Kinzua is actually a very interesting tale, there are still houses intact under the water!

    posted by Samantha on 10-25-2011 at 11:00 pm

  22. i was about to say Cheesman Park in Denver, but i was beaten to it by a few people! bones are still occasionally found there, as recent as March of this year:

    http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-human-remains-found-at-denvers-cheesman-parkagain-20110301,0,3106467.story

    posted by Cat MacKinnon on 10-26-2011 at 2:08 am

  23. The Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris is the most famous moved cemetery.

    Millions of bones were removed from internment (a dozen coffins deep!) in the heart of Paris to… well, they lined them up in abandoned quarries under the city. These are the infamous Catacombs of Paris, open to the public.

    posted by Andrew on 10-26-2011 at 6:36 am

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