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Silver Souls | Silver Terraces Cemeteries, Virginia City, Nevada · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Silver Terra Cemeteries, located in Virginia City, Nevada.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:30
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:31
Kristin: It's not a descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: When we think of Western cemeteries, we think of tombstone, desert patches of graves surrounded by old worn iron fences.
0:42
Kristin: No elaborate markers, no Victorian gothic splendor, no garden cemetery ambition.
0:48
Kristin: Just the dead and the dry ground they were put in.
0:51
Kristin: But Silver Terrace is something else entirely.
0:55
Kristin: Lush gardens against the stark sandy hills of the Nevada desert marked a startling contrast in its heyday.
1:02
Kristin: Even today, the fragments of what was still impressed anyone willing to walk its grounds.
1:07
Kristin: What was built here on a rolling hillside on the northeast edge of Virginia City, Nevada, was not a frontier afterthought.
1:14
Kristin: It was a statement.
1:16
Kristin: To understand why, though, you have to understand what Virginia City was and what it cost to build.
1:22
Kristin: In 1859, a group of prospectors working the eastern slope of Mount Davidson in Nevada Territory made a discovery that would reshape the American West.
1:31
Kristin: The ore they pulled from the ground was not just laced with gold, but with a heavy blue-gray material that had been frustrating miners for months.
1:40
Kristin: That material was silver, and what lay beneath the Nevada hillside would become known as the Comstock Lodi, the richest silver strike in United States history.
1:48
Kristin: What followed was a transformation that defied the landscape itself.
1:53
Kristin: Where there had been nothing, Virginia City appeared.
1:56
Kristin: Within a decade, a full city had clawed its way up the side of a mountain at over 6,000 feet, complete with churches, hotels, newspapers, theaters, and a population that would swell to nearly 25,000 souls at its peak in the mid-1870s.
2:11
Kristin: The wealth flowing out of the Comstock financed the Union during the Civil War, helped fund the construction of San Francisco, and bankrolled the state of Nevada's very admission to the Union in 1864.
2:24
Kristin: But Virginia City was now built by the men who owned the mines.
2:27
Kristin: It was built by the men who worked them, and by the wave of immigrants, tradespeople, and the entrepreneurs who followed them.
2:34
Kristin: They came from Ireland and Cornwall, from Switzerland and China, and from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, they came chasing silver, or chasing the men who chased silver, opening saloons and clothing stores, or furniture shops and law offices.
2:49
Kristin: They organized fraternal lodges and civic associations, built churches and fire companies, and in doing so transported the entire social architecture of the Eastern world onto a bare Nevada mountainside.
3:02
Kristin: And when they died, as people did with the alarming frequency at the time, they needed a graveyard to hold them.
3:08
Kristin: The need was obvious almost immediately.
3:11
Kristin: Life on the Comstock was brutal and short.
3:14
Kristin: Miners worked at depths of 2,000 feet in tunnels, flooded with water hot enough to scald.
3:20
Kristin: Havens, explosions, and fires were not exceptional events, but occupational certainties.
3:26
Kristin: Diseased also moved fast through the crowded mountain city with limited sanitation.
3:31
Kristin: The average resident of Virginia City didn't live past their 30s.
3:35
Kristin: Before an official cemetery was even established, smaller burial plots had already sprung up across the hillside surrounding Virginia City, scattered and informal, struggling to keep pace with the dead.
3:47
Kristin: In 1867, the city consolidated those efforts into something permanent.
3:52
Kristin: On a stretch of rolling hills on the northeast edge of the city, Silver Terrace Cemeteries took shape.
3:58
Kristin: The name is plural, though, for a reason.
4:00
Kristin: Silver Terrace is not one cemetery, but a collection of 11 distinct plots, each claimed by a specific civic, fraternal, or religious organization.
4:10
Kristin: The Masons, the Knights of Batthias, the Pacific Coast Pioneers, the Improved Order of Redmen, the XM Firemen, in the Roman Catholic Church.
4:21
Kristin: The social stratifications that govern life in Virginia City followed as residents into death, drawn in fence lines and stone across the Nevada hillside.
4:30
Kristin: There is one conspicuous absence in that hierarchy, Virginia City's Chinese population, which at its peak represented roughly one in ten residents, but whom built the infrastructure of the Comstock from the outside.
4:43
Kristin: The miners' unions barred them from working underground, so they ran the laundries, the kitchens, the woodcutting operations, and the domestic labor that kept the city functioning.
4:54
Kristin: They built one of the largest Chinatowns in the Intermountain West on the hillside below the mine headframes.
5:00
Kristin: And when they died, they were not buried at Silver Terrace at all.
5:04
Kristin: They had their own separate ground.
5:06
Kristin: Apart from the fraternal orders, the civic organizations, and the church plots, as they had been a part in life, they were also in debt.
5:14
Kristin: The fire that destroyed Virginia City's Chinatown in the 1870s sadly erased much of what the community had built above ground, and the cemetery is only what remains today.
5:25
Kristin: What they built here, though, was not Boot Hill, not a dusty afterthought at the edge of a rough town.
5:32
Kristin: The founders of Silver Terrace had a grander ambition.
5:36
Kristin: Locusts and elm trees lined the pass.
5:38
Kristin: Imported flowers and shrubs added color against the desert.
5:42
Kristin: A gravity-fed irrigation system kept the grounds alive.
5:46
Kristin: White picket fences divided the sections cleanly.
5:49
Kristin: Headstones arrived cut from Italian marble.
5:53
Kristin: Tails survive of Japanese cherry blossom trees blooming improbably against the high desert sky.
5:59
Kristin: In a place that had no business being lush, Silver Terrace was.
6:03
Kristin: Time in the Nevada Desert, though, were patient adversaries.
6:06
Kristin: The irrigation system that once kept Silver Terrace green and lush fell into disuse.
6:12
Kristin: As the silver ran out on the population bled away.
6:15
Kristin: The elm and locust trees withered, the cherry blossoms, if they ever truly bloomed here, are long gone.
6:22
Kristin: What the desert wanted back, the desert took.
6:24
Kristin: What remains today is something the founders of Silver Terrace wouldn't recognize.
6:29
Kristin: The manicured park they envisioned has surrendered to sagebrush and rocky earth.
6:34
Kristin: The white picket fences that once divided the sections cleanly are now mostly rotted or collapsed, replaced in places by bleached skeletons of dead trees lying where they fell.
6:45
Kristin: Wide paths still connect the different plots, but they've grown tributaries, narrow informal footpaths worn by the slow trickle of curious feet.
6:53
Kristin: The gravity-fed green is gone.
6:56
Kristin: What Girlshare now grows on the desert's terms, not anyone else's.
7:00
Kristin: In its current state, Silver Terrace looks exactly like what a Virginia City Cemetery perhaps always should have looked like.
7:06
Kristin: Sandy hills studded with sage brush, iron fences gone to rust, headstones tilting into the rocky ground.
7:14
Kristin: The boot hill aesthetic that the original founder specifically rejected has arrived anyway, delivered not by neglect of intention, but by the sheer indifference of time.
7:24
Kristin: The ambition remains invisible in the bones of the place, in the Victorian ironwork, the marble stones, and the ghost of a formal layout still legible beneath the encroachable shrub.
7:36
Kristin: But the desert has made its argument, and the desert is winning.
7:40
Kristin: Out of the 4,000 people within the grounds, only 1,300 markers remain.
7:46
Kristin: Giving visitors an idea how time hasn't just changed the landscape, but also the graves.
7:52
Kristin: The view, though, at least hasn't changed.
7:54
Kristin: Looking toward the town and the twin spires of St.
7:56
Kristin: Mary and the Mountains and St.
7:58
Kristin: Paul the Prospector, they still rise against the sky.
8:02
Kristin: Beneath them sits Virginia City itself, all of it under the shadow of Mount Davidson.
8:07
Kristin: To the southeast, the Virginia Range rolls out dry and ruggedly beautiful, and directly to the south, visible among the graves, stands the collar mine, one of the excavations that put every person buried here on the ground in the first place.
8:20
Kristin: The headstones of Silver Terrace, though, tell the story of the Comstock more honestly than any history book.
8:27
Kristin: Walk the grounds long enough and the pattern emerges.
8:30
Kristin: Young men, Cornish names, Irish names, with causes of death that read like a catalog of industrial violence.
8:37
Kristin: James C.
8:38
Kristin: Fay was 23 years old when the Gooden Curry mine killed him.
8:42
Kristin: Born in Cornwall, England in 1850, he had come to America in the late 1860s the way so many Cornish miners did.
8:49
Kristin: Following the ore, trading one hole in the ground for another on the other side of the world.
8:54
Kristin: The Comstock's mines, though, went deeper than many at the time, making this mining location even more dangerous than mining was already to begin with.
9:03
Kristin: When the ceilings came down on James Frey, his body was never recovered.
9:08
Kristin: Though stone bearing his name in Silver Terrace is not a grave marker in any traditional sense.
9:13
Kristin: It's a memorial to a man the mountain kept.
9:16
Kristin: Two men who had arrived together from County Luth Ironlow also shared a similar fate.
9:21
Kristin: Eugene Monaghan and Anthony Adams made the crossing together, bound for Virginia City and whatever Comstock might still offer to young Irishmen willing to go underground.
9:31
Kristin: Eugene went first to Silver Terraces.
9:34
Kristin: He died in a mining accident in the Ofer mine.
9:37
Kristin: Six months later, Anthony Adams died in the exact same mine, the same darkness, the same rock, the same outcome, only six months apart.
9:46
Kristin: They had faced, as one account put it, the certainty of uncertainty in the wild new land, and they had found it together.
9:53
Kristin: The mines claimed their share, but Virginia City extracted its tolls in other ways too.
9:59
Kristin: And the civilian stones at Silver Terraces carry their own particular weight.
10:03
Kristin: Helen Milney was just 19 years old when she married John Hampton.
10:07
Kristin: She had come from Bayview, Massachusetts, a world away from the Nevada Desert.
10:11
Kristin: When John opened a business in Virginia City in the late 1860s, she had followed him here.
10:17
Kristin: They built a life on the Comstock the way most people did.
10:20
Kristin: Quietly, practically, outside the mythology of silver strikes and frontier adventure.
10:26
Kristin: But Virginia City was not a gentle place for those who never even went underground.
10:30
Kristin: The Hamptons lost two sons before those boys had learned to speak.
10:34
Kristin: Frank was 14 months old.
10:36
Kristin: Wally was two years and 11 months.
10:39
Kristin: Their small stones still stand at silver terraces side by side, marking the particular grief that Frontier Medicine couldn't prevent, and Frontier Life couldn't spare anyone from facing.
10:49
Kristin: Helen and John survived the Comstock, only to die elsewhere together in tragedy.
10:54
Kristin: In 1888, they were aboard a vessel in San Francisco Bay, when it collided in a heavy fog with another ship near Alcatraz.
11:02
Kristin: Both were killed.
11:04
Kristin: They thankfully were survived by a son and daughter.
11:07
Kristin: The family plot at Silver Terraces holds all of them now.
11:10
Kristin: The parents beside the two small boys they buried 20 years before.
11:15
Kristin: Some stories have tragedies far from the mining events, but just as mournful and grim, in a more mental capacity.
11:22
Kristin: Harriet James wanted one thing from her husband.
11:25
Kristin: She wanted him to give up wrestling, but he didn't.
11:28
Kristin: What followed is recorded only in the coldest terms available to a cemetery record.
11:33
Kristin: Harriet took her own life restryctnine and was buried in the Oddfellow section of Silver Terraces.
11:39
Kristin: The particulars of what drove her here, whether desperation or despair or something that had nothing to do with wrestling at all, went with her into the ground.
11:48
Kristin: In the Catholic cemetery, a stone marks the Crawley family plot.
11:52
Kristin: Matthew Crawley had come from County Cork, Ireland, and was one of the thousand Irish immigrants who built their lives around the Comstock.
12:00
Kristin: He and his wife Hannah had one son, Aloysha's Crawley, who died on July 17 in 1872.
12:08
Kristin: He was killed by a rattlesnake bite.
12:10
Kristin: The Crawleys had crossed an ocean and built a life in the Nevada Desert, and the desert answered them in the most indifferent way it knew how, cruelly taking their son's life with poisonous venom.
12:22
Kristin: Silver Terraces, though, like many other burial grounds of its time, set aside its own ground for the men who fought Virginia City's fires.
12:30
Kristin: And in a town that burned as regularly as this one did, that section earned its population.
12:36
Kristin: Virginia City was a tinderbox by design.
12:39
Kristin: Wooden buildings packed tight on a mountainside, lit by open flame, heated by wood stoves, and fed by the constant wind that moved through the high desert without obstruction.
12:49
Kristin: The city burned catastrophically in 1875, a fire that consumed much of Sea Street and left hundreds homeless.
12:57
Kristin: The firefighters who would work these hills were not volunteers in any casual sense.
13:02
Kristin: They were in the last line between functioning city and ash.
13:06
Kristin: One of the men entrusted with that burden was George Hanbridge.
13:10
Kristin: Hanbridge came from New York and worked his way up to chief of the Virginia City Fire Department.
13:15
Kristin: He didn't, though, die in a fire.
13:17
Kristin: He broke his neck in a fall in the Virginia City Gasworks, the kind of death that arrives without drama or warning.
13:24
Kristin: Away from the thing the man had spent his life preparing to face, he was survived by his wife and children.
13:30
Kristin: A few steps away rests another man whose path wound through fire, carrying him elsewhere.
13:36
Kristin: William Mullen had fought fires in San Francisco before coming to Virginia City, where he left the profession and worked as a bartender until a stroke killed him.
13:45
Kristin: He might have faded into the anonymous ranks of Silver Terrace's forgotten dead, had it not been for what happened nearly a century after his burial.
13:54
Kristin: During a restoration of the firemen section in the 1980s, someone thought to contact the San Francisco Fire Department.
14:01
Kristin: The message was simple.
14:02
Kristin: One of yours is buried in Nevada.
14:05
Kristin: Would you like to take care of him?
14:07
Kristin: San Francisco answered.
14:08
Kristin: The department hired a craftsman to provide Mullen with a new grave marker.
14:12
Kristin: A San Francisco firefighter named Bill O'Neill donated the wrought iron fencing from his own home, had it cut and welded to fit the dimensions of Mullen's plot.
14:22
Kristin: It's the only gravesite in Silver Terraces whose fence incorporates the pattern of California grapes.
14:27
Kristin: A city that had long since moved on remembered one of its own and made the trip to say so.
14:32
Kristin: But not everyone the firemen claimed as their own made it into this ground.
14:36
Kristin: Julia Boulevett had come to Virginia City in 1863, and both alive the respectable women of the town refused to acknowledge.
14:44
Kristin: She worked independently, kept her own house on D Street, and somewhere along the way earned the genuine affection of the men from the Virginia Engine Company No.
14:53
Kristin: 1, who made her an honorary member of the department.
14:57
Kristin: On the night of January 19, 1867, she was robbed and murdered in her home.
15:03
Kristin: She was 34 years old.
15:05
Kristin: The firemen wanted to bury her in their section at Silver Terraces.
15:09
Kristin: The women of Virginia City, though, said no.
15:12
Kristin: So the department gave her a funeral they could.
15:15
Kristin: Beneath the mournful notes of the Metropolitan Brass Band, 60 members of the fire department marched through the streets.
15:22
Kristin: Behind a silver-handled mahogany casket, sixteen carriages followed in their wake as the procession climbed toward Flowery Hill Cemetery, passing the fine homes above the city where curtains remained drawn and doors stayed shut.
15:37
Kristin: She was buried on a solitary hillside with a simple plank of wood that bore her name, Julia.
15:43
Kristin: Her grave, though, has since been lost, but the men who carried her coffin marched beside her hearse, and mourned her passing remain here, and so does her memory.
15:54
Kristin: The men who settled Virginia City, though, carry their wars with them.
15:57
Kristin: The Constock boom years overlapped almost perfectly with the aftermath of the Civil War, and many of the men who came west had already survived something before they ever went underground or opened a shop on Sea Street.
16:09
Kristin: Peter Kai Ching had served for the company of the 2nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Inventory, though the war hadn't asked much of him beyond a single skirmish at Hoa's Run against Stonewall Jackson's forces in what is now West Virginia.
16:23
Kristin: After the fighting ended, he married a woman named Katie Pop, opened a clothing store, and in 1868 brought Katie west of Virginia City, where he established King's Clothing Store on Sea Street.
16:35
Kristin: He was 46 when Cancer took him, and his wife outlived him by 10 years.
16:41
Kristin: The symbol carved into Peter's headstone identifies him as a Freemason, one more organization that followed its members from the east all the way to the Nevada mountainside.
16:51
Kristin: The war, though, touched men differently.
16:54
Kristin: Some carried home stories of great battles, others returned with lives that seemed almost untouched by the conflict, only to find their futures waiting somewhere far from the places where they had enlisted.
17:05
Kristin: Captain Kirby had come further and seen more.
17:09
Kristin: Born in New York, he had made his way to Ohio, where he joined the 19th Ohio Infantry, one of the Union regiments that saw sustained action through the Western theater of the war.
17:20
Kristin: At some point, after the fighting, he became a doctor.
17:23
Kristin: He ended up in Virginia City, as many men of his generation did, following whatever current carried them westward after the war had finished with him.
17:31
Kristin: Kirby's journey west was hardly unique.
17:34
Kristin: The Comstock had been a gathering place for veterans from every corner of the Union, men who had marched beneath different banners, but eventually found themselves sharing the same dusty streets beneath Mount Davidson.
17:46
Kristin: James Park had served for the 83rd New York Infantry.
17:49
Kristin: According to the regiment's own history, Parks was likely present at Gettysburg, three days in July of 1863 that left nearly 50,000 men dead, wounded, or missing across the Pennsylvania farmland.
18:04
Kristin: Whatever Parks carried out of that field, he brought with him to Virginia City, where he lived out the rest of his life among the sage brush and silver dust of the Nevada High Desert.
18:14
Kristin: Not every veteran in Silver Terraces belonged to the generation that fought at Gettysburg and Shiloh.
18:20
Kristin: As the 19th century drew toward its close, a younger generation would answer a different call to war.
18:25
Kristin: Cecil Laughrin had not fought in the Civil War.
18:28
Kristin: He was a Virginia City native, born in the Comstock rather than drawn to it.
18:33
Kristin: And his war was the Spanish-American conflict of 1898.
18:37
Kristin: He enlisted with a Nevada battalion, served in Cuba, and came home honorably discharged.
18:43
Kristin: He was just 19 years old.
18:45
Kristin: On January 19th, the year after his return, Cecil fell from a horizontal bar in the National Guard Hall and broke something the doctors couldn't fix.
18:54
Kristin: He became paralyzed.
18:56
Kristin: They had no hope from the moment he fell, the local paper reported.
19:00
Kristin: The death came as a relief to poor Cecil.
19:03
Kristin: The Territory Enterprise remembered him as a young man who had had more friends than almost anyone in the city, who was generous to a fault, and always willing to share whatever he had.
19:13
Kristin: He left behind a mother and two brothers.
19:16
Kristin: He was still just 19 years old, wore the least clear footprints in his cemetery.
19:22
Kristin: Service records survive.
19:24
Kristin: Battles have names.
19:25
Kristin: History remembers them.
19:27
Kristin: Other lives, though, are harder to trace.
19:30
Kristin: They linger in fragments scattered through old newspapers, fading records, and weathered stone.
19:36
Kristin: And then there's Lavinia Lannon.
19:38
Kristin: Her husband John ran a furniture store on B Street, a practical man in a practical tree.
19:44
Kristin: And by all accounts, they kept a respectable household in Virginia City.
19:48
Kristin: But for nine years, Lavinia opened that household to something else entirely.
19:53
Kristin: She held spiritual circles in her home, seances by standards of the day, gatherings where the living sat together in hope of reaching the dead.
20:02
Kristin: The Comstock had given Virginia City no shortage of the dead to reach.
20:07
Kristin: Whether anyone answered isn't recorded, though.
20:10
Kristin: Lavinia died in 1888, apparently from heart failure.
20:14
Kristin: Her body worn down by the edema her doctors called dropsy.
20:18
Kristin: She is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Silver Terraces, in the same consecrated ground where the church interred its miners and merchants, with grieving Irish immigrants.
20:28
Kristin: Whatever the church made of her nine years of spiritual circles, it kept her close in the end.
20:34
Kristin: There is something fitting about closing with Lavinia.
20:37
Kristin: Silver Terraces is full of people who came to Virginia City chasing something.
20:42
Kristin: Silver stability, a fresh start after a war or a life tied to someone else's ambition.
20:48
Kristin: Lavinia spent nine years trying to reach to the boundary that every person buried on this hillside had already crossed.
20:55
Kristin: Now she rests on the other side of it, in the hard Nevada ground, under the same indifferent sky.
21:01
Kristin: And perhaps she found what she's looking for.
21:03
Kristin: Silver Terrace remains open to visitors year-round from sunrise to sunset, and admission is free.
21:09
Kristin: The Comstock Cemetery Foundation, the prophet that has worked for decades to preserve and restore these grounds, offers a self-guided tour with 29 stops, developed with the help of a local Eagle Scout project.
21:23
Kristin: Every fall, actors from the Funtime Theater walk the grounds in period costumes for voices of the past.
21:29
Kristin: A living history tour that gives the dead of Silver Terraces back their voices for an evening.
21:35
Kristin: The cemetery qualified for a Save the America's Treasures grant through the National Park Service, and restoration continues.
21:43
Kristin: Donations are accepted at the gate, and the Foundation has found perhaps the most fitting fundraising vehicle for the American West, Cemetery Dinn, a locally made spirit and the official gin of Virginia City, who donates one dollar from every bottle sold to preservation efforts at Silver Terraces.
22:01
Kristin: If you ever find yourself on that Nevada hillside, walking the paths between the iron fences and tilting stones, take your time.
22:09
Kristin: Bring water as there's very little shade, and the desert sun doesn't negotiate, but linger if you can.
22:15
Kristin: The people buried here crossed oceans and continents for a chance at something.
22:20
Kristin: The least we can do is remember their names.
22:23
Kristin: For now, the stories of Silver Terrace's cemetery slid back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
22:31
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Silver Terrace's cemeteries, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
22:39
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.