Nevada is on almost everyone’s mind this week due to the election. But this got me thinking; what haunted places are there in the state of Nevada? Today we will take a look into the haunted history of the Goldfield Historic Cemetery.
Boomtown
Today, Goldfield is considered a living ghost town but was once a boomtown for the search of gold. Gold was first discovered in 1902 which made the town rich for almost two decades. But with any boomtown in the west, eventually the gold ran out and the mining companies moved away. The most prominent years of gold mining were between 1902-1919 which leaves us with around 17 years of deaths which made for an interesting cemetery.
The original location of the cemetery was right in the center of town, but with the population growing rapidly to around 20,000 people, the first sight of a cemetery while getting off the train was not a good look for Goldfield. The town decided to relocated the burial grounds further away. They dug up the remains of the dead and moved them during the night.
Modern Day
Today, there are around 1,200 people that are buried in the cemetery which means there’s more dead than alive people in Goldfield. Almost all the headstones are made out of crudely shaped stone with some having the cause of death and date labeled on them. Volunteers help keep the tombstones labeled by painting the dates red with many marked as miner or unknown. One of the most famous tombstone is of the Unknown man who died from eating Library paste. While this seems like a ridiculous way to die, there was a lot of hunger within the town and he thought eating toxic library paste was better than eating nothing at all.
I think this would be a great site for a paranormal investigation, but it should be noted that this is still used for the modern day people living here as their burial site. I think you could get some interesting paranormal finds at this historic American cemetery.
November 8, 2020 at 2:16 am
This is a really interesting post! I think it should be common practice to put a person’s cause of death on their tombstone. I go to a cemetery somewhat frequently to visit a friend there, and I look around at the names on the other tombstones when I walk through the cemetery. I’m a curious person, and I think it would be interesting to learn a little bit about the people buried there by knowing their cause of death. Thanks for sharing!
November 11, 2020 at 5:41 am
It’s a eerie feeling knowing that there’s more dead people in a town than there are alive. It makes me really think about how true that is for other towns as well. The red paint adds a bit of spookiness to the area and I’m sure that may be done intentionally to help increase tourism to the area. This was an amazingly well written blog post and I found the library paste situation to be both humorous and terrifying. Like you mentioned, picking poison over starvation is such a drastic decision and sometimes desperate times really do call for the most desperate measures. Thank you for your post!
November 11, 2020 at 11:34 pm
I like that you played on the hype surrounding Nevada for this week’s blog post. Normally when people think of Nevada, Las Vegas is the only thing that really comes to mind. I didn’t know that the gold-miners were as rampant as they were in Nevada, so that was interesting to find out. I think that a lot of places that used to be so full of life, and now are largely unoccupied are frightening. It almost says something about the nature of humanity. On a different note, I had to google library paste to find out exactly what it was. As it turns out, it does contain flour, so maybe this guy was on to something.
November 12, 2020 at 8:28 pm
This is so interesting (and this website is very pleasing to the eye by the way) and I love how you incorporated Nevada in this weeks post because of the election.This is super informational and interesting. Nice post!!
June 21, 2021 at 7:42 am
awesome