St. Louis Cemetery Where History Meets the Haunted

It’s easy to understand why cemeteries would develop reputations for being haunted. Firstly, the dead are there. They are quiet places where your mind can fill in the calm with things that may not be there – or maybe, because of the quiet, you have the ability to actually hear things you normally can’t.

Entrance to Calvary Cemetery off of W. Florissant Ave. in St. Louis

In St. Louis, just off of Interstate 70, situated next to another equally large cemetery (Bellefontaine Cemetery) is Calvary cemetery. Historical figures are buried there, including – General William Tecumseh Sherman -- who burned his way from Atlanta to Savannah in his “March to the Sea” to demoralize the South at the end of the Civil War. Dred Scott is buried there. Scott famously, as a slave sued for his freedom in a case that went to the Supreme Court of the United States. Tennessee Williams' grave is also at Calvary. Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “The Glass Menagerie”.

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Calvary opened before the Civil War because of the cholera pandemic, and the paranormal stories have become local legend. Those stories include the “Ghost on the Hill” believed to be the image of a husband who is buried in the cemetery with his wife who died five years before him. He would traverse the hill to go visit her. There is also the “Blue Velvet Ghost”, a woman wearing a blue velvet dress was walking along the road by the cemetery in the rain was picked up by a local and driven home. The driver gave her his coat, and he forgot to get it back as she got out of the vehicle when he dropped her off. When he returned to the house the next day to get his coat, the woman who answered the door said the lady he was describing had been dead for years. And that she had been buried in that blue velvet dress…….