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For more than a quarter-century, the stories have centered on children—phantom figures said to shimmer with an iridescent glow. Neighbors claim these spectral babes come into nearby homes on Beacon Hill, where they rummage through toy chests, scatter playthings across stairs, take porcelain dolls from glass cabinets, and set dogs a-snarling.
In 2001, one woman who lived near the cemetery told the Post-Intelligencer’s Jon Hahn that she had tried to sell her house several times, always in vain: “Everyone knows about the ghosts.”
But the strangeness of Comet Lodge, the historic cemetery on South Graham Street in Beacon Hill, runs deeper than tales of glowing children. For much of the 20th century, the burial ground was a place of concealment and confusion, where things grew tangled, hidden, and forgotten. Stories of Poltergeist-style desecrations still cling stubbornly to the site (“They moved the headstones, but they didn’t move the bodies!”). Yet the truth is stranger, sadder, and messier than the tales would have you believe.
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It’s possible to draw a straight line of progress (scare quotes implied) from the Denny Party’s arrival on November 13, 1851, to Lake View Cemetery, which usually gets top billing as Seattle’s pioneer burial ground. Lake View overlooks both sets of mountains, and its founder monuments (the Dennys, the Borens, etc.) are not far from the celebrity graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee. The cemetery is kept in tip-top shape, and in the springtime, cherry blossoms rain down a celebratory pink confetti.
But there are other tributaries of Seattle’s history, and one of them ends here, in this cemetery just off I-5. It began on September 14, 1851, when the Collins party landed at the mouth of the Duwamish River. Luther M. Collins, Jacob Mapel, Samuel Mapel, and others in their group are generally credited as the founders of Georgetown—which became a Seattle neighborhood in 1910—and, more broadly, of King County itself.
Samuel Mapel was the first white settler we know to have been buried on the land that became Comet Lodge, in 1880. His father, Jacob, followed a few years later, along with another member of their party, Henry Van Asselt. In burying their dead here, the settlers are often said to have been echoing the Duwamish, the first people on this land.
Standing at the edge of the cemetery on a golden September day, Ken Workman—a Duwamish Tribal Councilman and descendant of Chief Seattle—says his people likely had a relationship with the land that became the cemetery. “It’s in the right spot,” he notes. “Just down at the bottom of the hill, there were longhouses and camas fields, so there was a Duwamish population in the area. If we were going to bury somebody, this would fit all the criteria.” Though the Duwamish are best known for placing their dead in trees, Workman explains, they also practiced earth burial, especially after settlers arrived with their devastating diseases.
In the 19th century, fraternal orders provided settlers with social networks and insurance, including burial insurance. Washington Territory newspapers brimmed with reports of their activities, written with an avidity today reserved for social media influencers. In 1893, some of the Georgetown settlers, including the Mapels, formed Comet Lodge No. 139, a chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Two years later, the lodge opened a five-acre cemetery intended to serve the rapidly growing community forever.
Forever lasted barely a few decades. For perhaps a dozen years, burials were frequent, and the cemetery became home to many of Georgetown’s blue-collar dead, who labored in the mill, in the Rainier brewery, and at other jobs that fueled the young city. It also became the final resting place of Emma Rigby, one of the area’s first female doctors.
But the cemetery was difficult to reach, perched atop a steep hill. In 1959, P-I columnist Frank Lynch describes how “It was quite a trip from [Georgetown] to the upper west slope of Beacon Hill in the fading days of the last century. One man out of that time and place told us he remembered the funeral processions winding up the old road. The drivers stopping two, three times to blow the horses. Hot summer days and the clouds of dust.”
The long climb up the hill may have been part of why burials stopped at Comet Lodge around the 1910s. In 1908, the lodge sold the cemetery to Georgetown undertaker H.S. Noice (for $1), and in 1912, Noice sold the land to Dr. Hiram R. Corson (for $10). Around this time, the fraternal chapter went out of operation. And it is here that the murk began to settle over Comet Lodge Cemetery. It would sit there for the better part of a century.
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Around 1997, a man began knocking on doors near the cemetery, telling neighbors their houses had been built over the graves of children. By then, the place was so overgrown that many people had forgotten it was a cemetery at all—it appeared to be nothing but a tangle of wild brush, a repository for old car parts, a playground for rats. Whatever was happening there, it had a very bad aura. So it’s not surprising the stories took root.
It’s true that Hiram Corson, a prominent member of the community back in the early 20th century (you might know his avenue), had chopped the cemetery he then owned in half, selling the northern half off for development. After his death, the title to the cemetery passed to family members, then disappeared into a legal quagmire. The burial records were lost. By the late 1930s, the county had become the owner of the site through a tax foreclosure process, although they didn’t quite know what to do with it. In a 1948 letter to city council, the city treasurer and his deputy reported: “We have personally investigated the cemetery and found it to be in a deplorable condition. Graves were sunken, tombstones were scattered here and there, and the brush has overgrown everything with the exception of a few foot paths.”
That’s not to say there weren’t restoration attempts—to fight back against the vines, the gloom, and growing amounts of garbage. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’70s, people tried. But toward the end of the century, two big restoration attempts went badly wrong.
In the late 1980s, a Beacon Hill resident named Don Kipper claimed to have bought the cemetery from Corson’s descendants. He talked a good talk, saying he wanted to restore the place and add a garden to feed the neighborhood. But residents soon watched in horror as he brought in bulldozers that destroyed trees and graves. Kipper was acting without any government authority, and the state cemetery board eventually issued a cease-and-desist order. But by then, many of the headstones had been destroyed, nearly a century of history crunched in the maw of a giant machine. Kipper apologized, then vanished.
The blackberry vines moved in again. But Kipper’s destruction did have one big upside: It reminded the county that they owned a cemetery. So when a man named John Dickinson came forward in the late 1990s, saying he wanted to restore it, the county was willing to listen.
But Dickinson, too, went rogue, at least in the eyes of the local government, cutting down trees without permission, one of which reportedly fell and injured a county worker. The county issued a cease-and-desist, and eventually banned him from the site. Research (including Hahn’s column back in 2001) points to him as the one knocking on doors back in 1997, telling neighbors their houses were built atop baby graves.
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Is there any truth to those rumors?
Many cemeteries did have a “Babyland” for child burials, says Mikala Woodward, a curator at MOHAI and former director at Rainier Valley Historical Society (she’s leading a tour of the cemetery on October 18). And the section for child graves at Comet Lodge is often described as being in the northwest. Yet “it wouldn’t have been legal at the time to sell [the northern portion] for development if people had been buried there,” Woodward says. “So you tell me.”
Research by Andi MacDonald, once president of the Washington State Cemetery Association, and by Steve Sheppard with the Department of Neighborhoods in 1979, describes the northern half of the cemetery as almost certainly vacant when it was sold. So while it’s impossible to prove no one ever buried a baby beneath those houses, if we’re talking about settler ghosts, chances are they’re crawling over from the cemetery rather than coming up from the foundations.
However, some of the ghost stories predate Dickinson. They may date back to the early 20th century, when little kids played in the section with child graves, Woodward says. “The kids who came, they felt a connection to the kids who had died,” she says. “You know, our culture doesn’t let us really face death directly. So we have to do it through ghost stories.”
Today, the ghost stories help ensure we remember this place. Though it was restored more completely by the county around the turn of the last century, it only holds a fraction of the graves it once did. (Estimates hover around 100, out of 450 or so.) As soon as it began going to ruin, those with means moved their dead. The gravestones that still dot the site are placed decoratively, but have long since become unmoored from the plots they once marked.
On a bright fall afternoon, Comet Lodge looks peaceful—a humble patch of land with a hard-won dignity. The blackberries are kept to small, pretty tendrils, the rats long since banished. It’s not showy, but it is serene, and perhaps that’s what its founders would have wanted.
Yet perhaps the stories persist because something here resists silence. The ground will not forget its history, even if the living do. And so, when dusk settles over Beacon Hill, neighbors still glance toward the cemetery, wondering if the faint glow at their window belongs to headlights—or to the children who never quite left.
Former Rainier Valley Historical Society director Mikala Woodward is hosting a tour of Comet Lodge Cemetery Oct. 18. RSVP at rainiervalleyhistoricalsociety.org.