In Honor of Halloween!!

When I was little and we lived in Denver, we lived a few blocks away from Cheesman park. One year I had a Halloween party and my parents decided to take us on a "ghost walk" around Cheesman park. Basically it was dark and a bunch of little girls in costumes walked to the park and were scared out of our minds before we even got there...mostly having to do with the story below. I do remember though, some poor biker, coming around a corner and scaring us, we all shrieked at the top of our lungs and he fell off his bike! Poor guy never knew what was coming.

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_7324470

Eerie past haunts Cheesman Park
STUDENTS TACKLE ARCHAEOLOGY CORPSE-WORK
By Allison Sherry The Denver Post

Professor Lawrence Conyers has found some pretty fascinating stuff in this world with his ground-penetrating radar machine - a Christian church in Tunisia, a buried Mayan farming village in El Salvador, Roman temples in Jordan.

And, this month, a child's coffin 4 feet below the ground in Cheesman Park.

At the request of a cable television show called "Scariest Places on Earth" a few years ago, University of Denver professor Conyers lugged the machine to the park for a staged stunt.
Now he uses the park - a former graveyard - and its interesting subterranean activity to teach archaeology students how to map grave sites.

"My students want to dig it up, and I said 'No way,"' said Conyers, one of the world's leading experts in ground-penetrating radar, which he compares to a CT scan of the ground. "People put them in the ground for a reason, they shouldn't be dug out. They should be left here."
Cheesman Park's botched transition more than 100 years ago from graveyard to gathering place makes the sprawling lawn a great classroom for Conyers' students and, according to many paranormal types, angrily haunted.

"Our outlook on this is that cemeteries normally aren't haunted, there is no reason for them to be," said Bryan Bonner, an investigator for the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society. "At Cheesman, there was desecration."

Bonner and other paranormal investigators have done about six investigations in houses around Cheesman in the last 10 years.

In 1858, when Gen. William Larimer claim-jumped land from the Arapaho Indians to create Denver, he put the city's cemetery in a field where the current Cheesman and Congress parks and the Denver Botanic Gardens are. The cemetery, called Prospect Hill, had Protestant, Jewish and Catholic burial areas, as well as a section for Denver's Chinese population.

But in the next 30 or so years, the cemetery fell into disrepair. It was weedy and ugly, cattle were grazing there, and some of Denver's more affluent residents decided that they wanted the bodies moved. One of Colorado's senators persuaded Congress to allow the site to be converted to a park.

An undertaker, E.P. McGovern, was hired to exhume the bodies from the lower park and move them to Riverside and Fairmount cemeteries. For every casket delivered to Riverside, McGovern received $1.90.

News reports at the time said McGovern was cutting up bodies and putting them in more than one coffin to get more money. Some of his workers were taking "souvenirs" from the grave sites.
Eventually, the whole mess was stopped. McGovern's contract was yanked, and the city graded and leveled the land and created a park. Historians guess 1,000 bodies are probably still buried there.

A jawbone was recently found in the park, Bonner said.

The first thing Conyers, who says he approaches investigations purely scientifically, notices along the lower road of Denver's historic park is lumpy depressions in the land.
The topsoil covering graveyards often appears bumpy because of collapsed wooden caskets, Conyers said. Even in the places where bodies were exhumed, refilling the hole with different soil can cause pits in the land.

In Conyers' archaeology work, he looks for any kind of change in the sediment beneath the ground as evidence something is going on down there.

The Cheesman exercise is purely educational. In his professional work, Conyers has studied sediment on Grand Mesa for evidence of climate change, and will go to Wyoming next year to try and find the rest of a woolly mammoth a scientist unearthed.

The small coffin he found near a sprinkler pipe in Cheesman, between the lower road and the white pavilion, is probably made of lead, Conyers said, because it hasn't deteriorated.
DU alumna Jessica Gabriel, who is helping Conyers investigate the park, said she may "swing by" Cheesman tonight to celebrate Halloween.

"But I don't think I'll go out of my way," she said.