Cheesman Park looks like any other park. But wasn’t always a park…

Transcript

Host:

Cheesman Park looks like any other park.

Wide open grass, walking paths,
people laying out in the sun.

On most days, there’s absolutely nothing unusual about it.

But it wasn’t always a park.

Before the trees, before the pavilion,
before the city built around it.

This was a cemetery.

Thousands of people were buried there
and when the city decided to move them,
not all of them left.

Some were missed, some were mishandled.

Some were never meant to be found again.

Today, the park is still used the way it was intended.

But underneath it, that part never really changed.

Tonight, on the midnight drive,
we’re in a place where the past wasn’t fully moved,
just covered up.

If you walk through Cheesman Park during the day,
nothing immediately stands out.

It’s open, it’s well-kept.

Grass stretching out in wide, even sections.

Paths cut through in even lines.

People scattered across the space
in ways that feel familiar.

Walking dogs, reading, laying out in the sun,
reading, laying out in the sun.

It functions exactly the way a park is supposed to.

There’s no clear reason to think about what was there before.

And that’s part of it.

Because the space doesn’t carry obvious signs
of what it used to be.

There aren’t any markers.

There aren’t any headstones.

There is no visible indication that anything else
ever occupied the ground beneath it.

But long before it became Cheesman Park,
this land served a very different purpose.

In 1858, as the city of Denver was just beginning to take shape,
a large portion of land was set aside for burial.

It was called Mount Prospect Cemetery.

Later, it became known more simply as City Cemetery.

At the time, it made sense.

The city was growing quickly.

People were arriving faster
than systems could be built to support them.

Disease spread easily.

Accidents were common.

And like many frontier settlements,
death was a constant part of life.

The cemetery expanded to accommodate that.

It wasn’t a small plot.

Hundreds of acres,
organized but not evenly maintained.

Sections developed over time, not all at once.

And like much of the city itself,
it reflected the structure of the people living in it.

At the highest point of the land,
the wealthier residents were buried.

Larger plots, better markers, more permanent materials.

Below that, the middle class.

More modest graves.

Less elaborate, but still maintained.

And at the outer edges,
the sections that received the least attention.

Criminals.

Poppers.

Those without family.

Those without money.

Graves marked simply.

Or not at all.

Over time, the cemetery began to change.

Not in purpose, but in condition.

As the city continued to grow,
the space around it became more developed.

Roads pushed closer.

Homes approached nearby.

The cemetery, once on the edge of town,
became something closer to the center of town.

And with that shift came new problems.

Maintenance became inconsistent.

Some sections were cared for,
others were left to deteriorate.

Vegetation overgrew certain areas.

Markers were lost or damaged.

In some cases, graves were disturbed.

Not officially, just the result of time and neglect.

At the same time, disease continued to move through the population.

Outbreaks of illnesses like typhoid and smallpox
added pressure to a system that was already strained.

A hospital was established nearby.

It wasn’t a permanent facility,
it was more of a place to isolate the sick,
quarantine them.

And many of those who were brought there
didn’t ever leave.

When they died, they were buried quickly.

Sometimes in individual graves,
sometimes in larger groupings.

Mass graves used out of necessity.

There wasn’t always time for more.

As years passed, the cemetery became less controlled,
less maintained, and more difficult to manage
within a city that was still trying to define itself.

By the early 1870s, the federal government stepped in.

The land was declared federal property,
then sold to the city of Denver.

With that transfer came a decision.

The cemetery would be closed.

Not immediately removed, but vacated.

The city wanted the land for something else.

Something that better fit the direction it was moving in.

At the time, public parks were becoming more common.

Open spaces.

Places for people to gather, to move through,
to spend time in.

And this land, centrally located
and already cleared in many areas,
seemed like a perfect opportunity.

But there was a problem.

The cemetery wasn’t empty.

As a matter of fact, it held thousands of graves.

Some of them marked, some of them not.

Some of them maintained, many of them not.

And before anything new could be built there,
those graves would have to be dealt with.

Not just acknowledged, but moved.

Relocated.

Everybody taken out of the ground
and transferred somewhere else.

On paper, it sounds straightforward.

It’s a logistical process.

Something that could be handled systematically.

But in practice, it was anything but that.

Because there wasn’t a single complete record
of who was buried there.

Let alone where they’re buried there.

Some families had documentation, but many didn’t.

Some graves were clearly marked.

Others had already been lost to time.

And even in cases where information existed,
it didn’t always match what was found in the ground.

The longer the cemetery had been in use,
the more complicated it became.

Layers of burial, shifts in landscape,
changes in how the space had been used over time.

All of it made the process harder to define,
harder to control.

Still, the decision had to be made.

The cemetery would be cleared.

The land would be repurposed.

And the people buried there would be moved.

Or at least, that was the plan.

Because what came next wasn’t just a matter of relocation,
it was a process that would expose
how little control the city actually had
over what had been done there.

And how easily something like this could go wrong.

Not all at once, not in a single moment, but gradually.

Through decisions that seemed very small at the time.

Through shortcuts.

Through assumptions that no one would notice.

Until eventually, there was absolutely no clean and easy way to fix it.

And no clear way to undo what had already been done there.

Because once something like this starts, it doesn’t stay contained.

It spreads through every part of the process.

Until the original goal, clearing the land,
becomes something else entirely.

Something harder to define and much harder to finish.

And by the time anyone realized that,
it was already too late to handle it in a way that it was supposed to be handled.

Which is where the next part of the story begins.

Not with what the city planned to do,
but with how that plan was actually carried out.

And what was left behind.

When it didn’t go the way anyone expected.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

I’ll tell you what, I used to work with a couple of guys who,
before they were working the job with me,
they dug holes, they dug plots for a cemetery here in the Des Moines area.

And the stories these guys would tell were just unfathomable.

They were unbelievable because the plots were so tight together,
that if the calculations were just a little bit off in the instructions that they were given,
they would find themselves literally digging into a casket that was unmarked.

It was the craziest thing.

Some people think that this kind of stuff like,
oh yeah, you just relocate the cemetery.

But man, if there aren’t solid records that are being kept
for the entire duration of the cemetery’s life,
then all it takes is a landscaping decision from the people who own the land.

And then all of a sudden everything is just moved,
or more dirt is just piled on top of everything that’s there.

And you have bodies that are just lost.

What a wild thing to consider,
especially the cemetery that ended up in the middle of a city as big as Denver.

By the time the city moved forward with the plan to clear the cemetery,
the process had already become more complicated than anybody wanted to admit.

On paper it was simple.

Each body would be exhumed, placed into a new coffin,
and relocated to another cemetery outside the city.

Families were given the opportunity to claim their relatives
to arrange for proper reburial, but many didn’t.

Some had already left the area.

Some couldn’t afford it.

Some had no idea their relatives were even buried there,
which meant the responsibility fell to the city.

And the city passed that responsibility to a single contractor,
an undertaker called E.

P.

McGovern.

He was given a contract to remove the remaining bodies.

His terms were clear.

For each body exhumed and placed into a coffin, he would be paid $1.

90.

A fixed rate per coffin, not per grave, not per person accounted for, per coffin.

At first, the work appeared to move forward, as expected.

Crews entered the cemetery, graves were opened,
remains were collected, boxes were filled and transported out.

From a distance, it looked like progress,
the kind of slow methodical work you’d expect from a project like this.

But the details didn’t hold, because the system itself had a flaw.

And once that flaw was recognized, it became something that could be used.

If payment is tied to the number of coffins,
then the size of those coffins matters, very much.

And if the goal shifts from properly relocating remains
to maximizing the number of units being paid for, then the process changes.

Shortcuts.

Adjustments that seem very minor in the moment,
filled into something else over time.

Instead of using full-size coffins, smaller ones began to appear.

Child-size boxes.

Cheaper, easier to handle, faster to fill.

And in order to make remains fit into those smaller spaces, they were altered.

Not preserved.

Not handled with care.

Cut.

Broken down.

Reduced.

In some cases, more than one set of remains placed into a single box.

In others, parts separated entirely.

What had once been a structured burial ground began to turn into something unrecognizable.

A process focused not on accuracy, but on efficiency.

And for a time, it continued that way.

Quietly, without any interruption.

Because from the outside, it still looked like work was being done.

It looked like progress!
Graves were being opened, coffins were being removed, the land was slowly being cleared.

Until someone took a closer look.

The details began to surface.

Graves that didn’t match their records.

Remains that didn’t align with what was supposed to be there.

Boxes that were too small for what they were meant to hold.

And then, eventually, the conditions of the site itself.

Open graves, left exposed.

Fragments of coffins scattered across the ground.

Clothing and burial materials torn and discarded.

Pieces of what had once been whole bodies left behind in the process.

A report from the time described it in a way that’s very difficult to ignore.

Graves along the edge of the cemetery were found in a state that sickened and horrified those who saw them.

Broken coffins, tattered shrouds, fragments of clothing.

All trampled into the ground as if they were merely debris.

Not remains, certainly not people.

Just something in the way of the work being done.

Once that became visible, the process couldn’t continue unnoticed.

The story broke.

Public reaction followed.

What was being treated as a logistical project became something else entirely.

A full-on scandal.

The kind that doesn’t just raise questions about what was done, but about how it was allowed to happen in the first place.

Needless to say, work was halted.

The contract stopped.

And just like that, the process ended.

Not because it was finished, but because it couldn’t continue the way it had been going.

And that left the city in a position it hadn’t planned for.

Thousands of graves had been opened.

Some remains had been moved.

Some had been altered.

Some had been left incomplete.

And many had not been touched at all.

There was no clean way to restart the process.

No clear way to undo what had already been done.

And certainly no path forward that didn’t involve starting over entirely, which wasn’t going to happen.

So the project didn’t continue.

It didn’t get corrected.

It didn’t get completed.

It just stopped.

The land was left in a state that didn’t match its intended use.

Not fully a cemetery anymore, but not cleared enough to become something else.

It was an in-between space.

Defined more by what hadn’t been finished than by what had been accomplished.

And over time, that became the reality the city moved forward with.

The decision wasn’t to fix it or to complete the removal properly.

It was to just move on.

To take on what had been done and build over it.

To reshape the space into something new without fully addressing what was still there.

Because by that point, the cost of doing it correctly, financially, logistically, and publicly was higher than the cost of leaving it as it was.

So the process ended where it stood.

With bodies partially moved and partially accounted for and partially left behind.

Not in one place, not in one section, but scattered throughout.

Across the entire space.

In ways that no longer matched any record, any map, any system that could be followed.

And that’s what the park was eventually built on.

Not a cleared space, not a completed transition, but a process that had been interrupted, left unfinished, and then literally covered over.

Which means that what exists there now isn’t just the result of what the city intended to do.

It’s also the result of everything that wasn’t completed.

Everything that wasn’t corrected.

Everything that was left exactly where it ended up.

When the work stopped.

And that part never changed.

Even after the crews left, the disturbance didn’t fully settle.

The ground itself had been opened, shifted, and rearranged in ways that couldn’t simply be reversed.

What remained wasn’t just what had been buried, but what had been uncovered and never properly put back.

And once a place reaches that point, there isn’t really a clean way to return it to what it was before.

What in the world do you make of all this?
Let us know in the comment section below wherever you’re listening.

If you’d like, reach out to us at the Midnight Drive, 402-610-2836.

By the time the city made the decision to move forward, the hardest part had already passed.

Not the physical work.

That all stopped.

What remained was something quieter.

Easier to manage.

At least on the surface.

The land was still there.

The graves.

Some emptied, some not.

Still beneath the land.

But the decision had been made.

The space would become something else.

Construction began in stages.

Not immediately.

Not all at once.

But gradually.

And the site shifted.

Open ground was levelled.

Pathways were introduced.

Sections of the land were reshaped to fit a new purpose.

A park.

Something open.

Something usable.

Something that could sit at the center of a growing city without carrying the weight of what had been there before.

Or at least, without showing it.

By the early 1900s, the transformation was complete.

The cemetery was gone.

At least in the way people could see.

In its place, a wide open park.

Grass.

Trees.

Even a pavilion built to give the space some structure.

Something to gather around.

Something that made the area feel intentional.

Finished.

As if the transition had been a very easy transition.

As if everything behind it and beneath it had been accounted for.

But it hadn’t.

Not fully.

Not even close.

Because the work that had been left incomplete, stayed incomplete.

There was no second effort to correct it.

No return to Finnish would have been started.

The land was simply repurposed.

And everything that remained stayed exactly where it was.

Over time, the city grew around it.

Neighborhoods expanded.

Buildings rose up nearby.

The park became part of daily life.

People walked through it.

Spent time in it.

Used it the way that it had been designed to be used.

And for most, there was absolutely no reason to think about what was beneath their feet.

The space didn’t demand it.

It didn’t present itself that way.

It functioned normally.

Which is what made it easier to accept.

Because when a place works the way it’s supposed to, when a place looks like it’s supposed to,
there’s no immediate reason to question how or why it got there.

But every now and then, something interrupts that.

It’s not a dramatic interruption.

Not in a way that changes the space entirely or would completely shift your perception on the space.

It’s just enough to remind people of what’s literally underneath the surface.

Construction progajacks tend to be where it happens most often.

Anytime the ground is opened again, anytime the surface is broken,
what’s beneath it has a way of revealing itself.

In the early 2010s, during the installation of an irrigation system,
workers began digging into sections of the park.

Routine work.

Planned.

Controlled.

Until it wasn’t.

Fragments of coffins appeared.

Then bone.

Not in one place, not in a single contained area, but scattered.

Separate.

Unconnected to any clear rhyme or reason.

The work stopped.

Immediately.

Because once something like that is found, there’s no continuing as if it isn’t there.

The remains were documented, collected, and moved properly this time.

Handled the way they were supposed to be handled in the first place.

And then they were reburied elsewhere.

But that process didn’t clear the park.

It just addressed what had been uncovered in that particular moment.

What had been disturbed by that specific project.

Everything else, everything else remained.

And those discoveries were not isolated incidents.

They’ve happened before.

They’ve happened since.

Not constantly, and not in a way that interrupts the park’s daily use, but often enough that the pattern is understood to be a pattern.

The ground hasn’t been emptied.

It hasn’t been cleared.

It hasn’t been fully resolved.

It’s just been covered up.

And that’s something the city acknowledges, even if it isn’t always part of the conversation.

Can you imagine being part of that meeting with the construction crews?
Oh yeah, something that typically happens here is you might dig up a body.

We got a process for that.

I fill out a form.

It’s a little bureaucratic, but we’re doing it the right way now.

How bizarre is that?
Just a little clause in your contract.

That’ll happen.

Estimates suggest that thousands of bodies still remain beneath the park.

Thousands.

Not in organized rows, not in mapped sections, but in the same scattered, incomplete state they were left in when the original work stopped.

Which means that the park isn’t built on what used to be a cemetery.

It’s built on a cemetery that was never fully removed.

And that distinction matters a lot because it changes the way the space exists.

Not visibly, not in a way that affects how people use it, but in the way that it holds its history.

Most places that transition from one purpose to another go through a kind of closure, a clear break.

The old function ends, the new one begins, and the two don’t overlap at all.

Cheesman Park doesn’t have that clean division.

The past wasn’t fully separated from the present.

It was layered.

One place directly over the other.

Literally.

Without fully resolving what came before.

And that kind of transition leaves something behind.

Not something you can point to directly.

Not something that presents itself very clearly.

It’s just an awareness.

A detail that doesn’t fully align.

People who spend time in the park sometimes describe it in simple terms.

A feeling of unease.

It’s not constant.

It’s not overwhelming.

It’s not haunted.

It’s just weird when you start to think about it.

It just presents itself in certain moments, at certain times of day.

Usually it’s when the park is quieter, when there’s less movement and there’s less distraction.

Some mention their dogs reacting differently.

Stopping in areas where there’s nothing visible.

Refusing to move forward or focusing on something that isn’t there.

Others describe a heaviness.

Not physical, just a shift in the way that the space feels.

As if something about it doesn’t fully settle.

There are also more specific accounts.

People hearing sounds that don’t carry clearly.

Voices that don’t resolve into words.

Movement at the edge of perception.

Figures that don’t stay long enough to confirm.

But those accounts aren’t what define the space.

It’s all hearsay.

They’re not what makes it what it is.

Because reality, underneath it all, is already enough.

It doesn’t need to be interpreted.

It doesn’t need to be embellished.

It doesn’t need to be expanded into something else.

It just exists on its own.

It’s a place where something was started, handled very poorly,
and then left unfinished and then literally covered up.

And that’s what separates it from everything else that we’ve talked about this week.

It’s not about what might be there.

It’s not about what people think they experience.

It’s not about any of that.

It’s not about perception.

It’s about what is already known.

What is already documented.

What has already been uncovered more than once.

And what still hasn’t been fully addressed.

Because the park functions the way it was intended to.

People use it.

People enjoy it.

People move through it without thinking about any of this.

And that’s what allows it to exist the way that it does.

Normal on the surface, unresolved underneath.

Two realities occupying the same space,
without ever fully separating from each other.

Some wild stuff.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Please leave us a comment below.

So, you’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

By the time you leave Cheesman Park,
nothing obvious has happened.

There’s no single moment that you can point to.

No clear experience that stands out above everything else.

It functions the way a park is supposed to.

People move through it.

Spend time in it.

Leave it the same way they would leave any other open space in the city.

And that’s what makes it easy to overlook.

Because there’s nothing about the surface that asks you to think any further.

No markers.

No reminders.

Nothing that forces the history into the present.

You have to bring that with you.

Or learn it afterward.

Once you do, the space itself doesn’t change.

But the way that you understand it does.

You start to notice things just a little differently.

The way certain areas feel quieter than they should.

The way the ground itself seems more settled in some places,
and less in others.

Subtle differences that don’t mean anything on their own,
but feel like they should.

And that’s where the park holds onto something.

Not visibly.

Not in a way that interrupts what’s happening above it.

But in the way it resists feeling completely neutral.

Because neutrality usually comes from resolution.

From something having a clear beginning and a clear end.

A process that was completed.

A transition that was finished.

This place doesn’t have any of that.

It has a beginning.

It has an attempted transition.

A botched transition.

And consequently doesn’t have a clean ending.

It stops right in the middle.

And then continues forward anyways.

And that kind of interruption leaves a trace.

Not something you can measure.

It’s just something you notice once you know where to look.

There are people who spend time in the park regularly.

They live nearby.

They walk through it often.

And even they describe moments where the space feels different.

Usually when it’s quieter, early in the morning, or late at night.

There’s less movement.

Less noise.

Less to anchor the experience in the present.

That’s when the stillness changes.

Not in volume, but in quality.

A kind of heaviness that’s not physical.

It’s just a sense that the space is holding more than what we can see.

Some describe it as feeling of being watched.

Not directly.

Not in a way that suggests anything is actually there.

It’s just awareness.

We’ve talked about that sense of being watched several times on the show.

A sense that the space itself is more active than it appears.

Others describe the complete opposite.

A feeling of absence, like something that should be there, isn’t.

There’s a gap.

Not in the physical layout, but in the way the space resolves.

Both descriptions point to the exact same thing.

A lack of completion.

There’s a void.

Something that didn’t fully settle.

And that’s where the difference between this place and the others become clear.

Let’s recap.

At Gold Camp Road, people went looking for something.

They created the conditions.

They waited.

They tested the space.

In the San Luis Valley, people observed.

They watched.

And then they interpreted what they saw.

In St. Elmo, the environment created the feeling.

The layouts.

The structure.

The absence of activity in a place that still looks functional, but here.

None of that.

None of that is necessary.

The reality underneath the park is already enough.

You don’t need to wait.

You don’t need to look for anything.

You just have to understand what happened there.

Because once you do, the question isn’t whether something is there.

It’s how something like that was left the way that it is.

How a process like that was allowed to stop where it did.

And how the decision was made to go ahead and move forward anyway.

To build something new.

Without fully resolving what came before.

It’s the epitome of cutting corners.

That’s where the unease comes from.

Not from the idea of something unseen.

It’s not ghosts.

Nothing like that.

It’s from the knowledge of something unresolved.

And that’s harder to dismiss.

Because it doesn’t rely on interpretation.

The facts are there.

The documentation is there.

It doesn’t rely on any type of belief.

It’s tied to literal documented events.

To decisions that were made.

To actions that were taken and then not completed.

And then decisions to keep moving forward.

Without finishing up any of it.

That’s the heaviness the space carries with it.

It’s not as a story.

It’s not as a rumor.

But as part of the literal foundation of the park.

And that’s what stays with people.

Not a sighting.

Not a sound.

Just the awareness the ground beneath them isn’t what it appears to be.

That it holds something much older.

Something that wasn’t fully moved.

Something that still exists in the exact place it was left.

And that awareness doesn’t create fear.

It creates something a little more subtle than fear.

It’s more difficult to define.

It’s more of a hesitation.

A moment where the space doesn’t feel as simple as it should.

Where the present and the past don’t feel fully separate.

Once that thought enters, it doesn’t leave easily.

If ever.

Because it doesn’t resolve.

There’s no follow-up.

There’s no conclusion that brings it to a clear end.

Just the understanding that it remains the way that it is.

Unfinished.

Covered up.

But not gone.

And that’s where the episode settles.

Not on what might be there.

We talked about what’s there.

It’s about what never fully left.

Because in a place like this, you don’t need anything to reveal itself.

You just need to know where you’re standing.

And what’s still there.

Even if you can’t see it.

Even if you never would have thought about it at all.

If no one had ever told you.

Because once you know, it’s difficult to go back to seeing it the same way again.

It’s not because anything changed.

But because something about it never did.

And that’s enough to make a place like this feel different.

Even when everything on the surface tells you it shouldn’t.

Even when nothing happens at all.

Because sometimes, sometimes what stays with you isn’t the experience.

It’s the realization and the fact that there’s no way to undo it once you have it.

That you’ve been standing in a place like that without even knowing it.

And now you do.

And that’s where it ends.

Not with an answer.

Not with a question.

Just with the understanding that some places don’t need anything.

Some places don’t need anything else added to them.

To feel the way they do.

They already have enough.

And they always did.