Welcome back!
Things are pretty crazy right now with Covid-19, and I've been feeling cooped up already. I decided to talk about Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. A location that I was fortunate enough to explore this whole pandemic.
Bellefontaine, like any cemetery, was built out of necessity. It was 1879, and the city of St. Louis was booming. This also meant that people were dying at an unsanitary rate. We are talking about 4,000 corpses. There are so many bodies that people started getting sick because of the rotting corpses. It was pretty bad.
Thus, on April 27, 1850, the first body was buried in Bellefontaine. The months to follow were dedicated to moving bodies from cemeteries all around St. Louis.
Currently, there are over 87,000 people buried here. A few to note are the Lemps, William Clark, Buschs family, Anheusers family, and various union and confederate soldiers.
And that's it. I thought there would be a lot more to this location- some legends, ghosts, anything. Growing up, I heard that the place was haunted, and apparitions could be seen at night; I couldn't find any stories like that. I found a few youtube videos about people investigation the cemetery but nothing significate. One thing is for sure about this location is it does have a creepy feel to it.
-Tye
Always Cite Those Sources:
“Bellefontaine Cemetery.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Feb. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefontaine_Cemetery.
Hahn, Valerie Schremp. “Eternally St. Louis: Final Resting Places of Local Legends.” STLtoday.com, 8 Oct. 2018, www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/eternally-st-louis-final-resting-places-of-local-legends/collection_8fbdd1ce-7f52-5b03-958d-90c4a966d4f9.html#11.
Comments