BENTON AVENUE CEMETERY
Cemetery — 1975 N. Benton Ave., Helena, Montana
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/benton-avenue-cemetery-helena-montana/

Cemetery with apparition folklore.

A cemetery in Helena, Montana, Benton Avenue Cemetery is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Cemetery with apparition folklore. HauntHunt files it with haunted locations. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Girl in yellow. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

Benton Avenue is Helena's pioneer ground — the cemetery the county laid out in 1870 on the valley's south end, which took the dead of the gold camp when the original City Cemetery was dug up for Central School in 1875. John Kinna the first mayor is here, Lewis Reeder of Reeder's Alley, Edwin Toole the governor's brother, and the markers that still read 'M.T.' — Montana Territory — because the graves predate the state.
The cemetery was the Protestant and nonsectarian ground; the Catholics had Oakes Street, the Jews had Home of Peace, and Benton Avenue took the Masons and the indigent and the children the epidemics took. It was Helena's main burying ground until Forestvale opened in 1890, and by 1966 it was a tangle of weeds that Lucy Baker and the volunteers spent decades reclaiming.
The file keeps Benton Avenue: the 1870 founding, the reinterred pioneers, the M.T. stones, and the pioneer cemetery the volunteers saved.
Benton Avenue is the archive's pioneer file — the territorial graves, the gold-camp reinterments, and the cemetery the capital forgot and reclaimed.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Benton Avenue is the archive's pioneer file — Helena's 1870 ground, the territorial dead, and the 1966 rescue.
A cemetery displaced by a school keeps its pioneers — the file's suggestion being that Benton's hold is the layering: the moved graves, the M.T. markers, and the community that pulled its founders out of the weeds.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: Southwest Montana recounts a girl wearing yellow. The figure answers to Girl in yellow in the retellings. The burial ground at Helena is exactly the setting the account needs — old graves, older grief, and a story that won't settle. 'Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. It is the sighting the place is known for, and it hasn't stopped.
  source: Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places (https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/haunted-places/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Southwest Montana’s Haunted Places — Southwest Montana
  https://southwestmt.com/ghosts/haunted-places/

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/