THE GHOSTY INHABITANTS OF CHEESMAN PARK

Full disclosure: I’m a cold-blooded skeptic. I don’t believe in supernatural entities such as poltergeists, phantoms, or truthful politicians.

So when it comes to the abundant ghost sightings in Cheesman Park, I’ve always adhered to a maxim made famous by the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

But where hard evidence is lacking, stories abound. Many Denver denizens believe the spirits of the dead regularly stroll through Cheesman Park.

The Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society’s website hosts several personal narratives of unearthly encounters including misty apparitions winding through the trees at night, cold spots in the park that give people the chills, and mysterious voices that inquire from the darkness, “What are you doing here? Leave me in thy peace!”

I’ll acknowledge that these claims of sullen specters scaring park visitors have some historical merit, complete with grisly details.

Long before Denver was a sprawling metropolis with overpriced apartments, Cheesman Park (along with Congress Park and the Denver Botanic Gardens) were all part of an Arapahoe Indian burial ground.

In 1858, General William Larimer converted those same grounds into Prospect Hill Cemetery, the only cemetery in Denver at the time. It was divided into isolated burial sections such as Calvary Cemetery for Catholics. In 1873, the entire area was rebranded as Denver City Cemetery.

It wasn’t until 1890 that those same grounds were declared a public park. Three years later, the city hired undertaker E.P. McGovern to relocate more than 4,000 graves from present-day Cheesman Park to Riverside Cemetery.

McGovern was contracted $1.90 for every grave he relocated, but allegations soon surfaced that he and his workers broke apart the skeletons, shoving the remains of each corpse into several smaller caskets to turn a larger profit.

The city fired McGovern and erected the park before all the bodies were moved. It’s difficult to know for sure how many remain, though some estimates run as high as 2,000 corpses.

Personally, I find it grimly fascinating that when the LGBT community gathers every summer for the Pride Parade on park grounds, many are literally treading upon the bones of the dead.

And those dead continue to resurface. In 2010, city workers who were digging trenches for an irrigation system near Cheesman Park’s iconic pavilion unearthed four skeletal remains, all of them dated at more than a century old.

But do these desecrated dead haunt the living?

I live near Cheesman Park and have wandered through the grounds on many a moonlit night, complete with eerie fog hovering silently above the grass. But I’ve never bumped into a 19th century Denver resident (at least that I’m aware of). I’ve never heard mysterious voices or walked through cold spots that gave me goosebumps.

Not that I’m opposed to the possibility of an encounter with a talking cadaver. Nothing would make my frequent nightly sojourns more intriguing than trying to explain to an apparition of the 1800s that his or her former gravesite is now used for hookups on Grindr.

And if that conversation ever happens, I promise to first take a picture of my spectral acquaintance and post it online. After all, such an extraordinary claim would require extraordinary evidence.