Washington Park Cemetery as this old graveyard is now known has been around for more them a century. It has had many names but it has been on the move since the first bodies were burred there. In the mid-1800’s the city of St. Louis was the nations second city, fast growing and wide open. It had 2 cemeteries, Calvary, the Catholic cemetery and Bellfountaine Cemetery for the Protestants. The city had a lot of transients and travelers that had the unfortunate habit of dying in town without any relatives to clam them. These inconsiderate individuals usually had no funds to pay for there final residence 6 feet under, so the City had to dispose of them by burring them on a plot of land three miles west of the city in a local potters field. The local African-American population was denied the opportunity to use the other cemeteries because of Jim Crow laws soon adapted the area for there local cemetery and
It just so happened that this small peace of land would become a desired peace of real estate in the coming century. In the 1920’s St Louis had become a force in the aircraft manufacturing business and small companies had sprung up north of the little potters field. They needed a place to take off and land on their planes (like the Curtis Robin) so they paved over a section of the still unnamed potters field leaving the African-American cemetery now called Washington Park, at the end of one of the runways. This collection of runways soon became Lambert Field. Lambert International is still the regions primary airport.
In the 50’s Interstate 70 was to be built through the city of St Louis and Washington Park sat on the best right of way for the highway. The cemetery was quietly moved to the north.
In the 1970’s I-170 an interstate bypass was needed to help traffic flow around the city. Engineers determined that Washington Park lay in the only viable path so again the cemetery was uprooted and replanted to the west where it sat in the approach to both primary runways of Lambert International. Since the land no longer had easy road access it fell into disuse and neglect. Vandals regularly raided it and defaced the headstones, and relatives of the deceased complaints regularly went ignored. The City of St Louis clamed that security for the site was the responsibility of the airport authority. The airport clamed they had no resources to defend a graveyard, besides the cemetery itself now technically lay in land owned by the city of Berkley MO, a suburb of St Louis. Berkley clamed that they never licensed a cemetery in the location the license for the cemetery is held by the city of St Louis. Thus no one took care of it.
In the 1990’s St Louis decided it needed a light rail system and they wanted it to go to the airport, and the only way to get there was to go through Washington Park. This time since a lawsuit between the state and an Indian tribe over artifacts found in an Indian burial site the law in Missouri requires that the land be surveyed and every grave be accounted for and relocated and logged with very precise GPS co-ordinance.
Unfortunately when excavations started most of the bodies were missing. A few were found but more then 90% were missing. The ones that were found were not in the places they were supposed to be. So when the cemetery was moved again most of the headstones were moved without bodies associated with them and the bodies that were interned marked by the closest headstones in a haphazard way.
So as you can see the permanent residents of Washington Park cemetery have not been left to “rest in peace.” There are many stories about hauntings that I have heard about this place and I will post them all here but to understand many of the stories you need to hear the background. That is why I am posting this here today.
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