GREENWOOD CEMETERY
Cemetery — New Orleans, Louisiana
Status: Historic site · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/greenwood-cemetery-new-orleans-louisiana/

The City of the Dead’s firemen’s tumuli and the firemen’s ghost.

A cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana, Greenwood Cemetery is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The City of the Dead’s firemen’s tumuli and the firemen’s ghost. Its signature presence is Fireman — the figure the file’s accounts keep returning to. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.

Greenwood was the cemetery the firemen built. The Firemen's Charitable & Benevolent Association — New Orleans's volunteer companies, businessmen who fought fires for free — opened the 150-acre ground in 1852 as yellow fever filled Cypress Grove across the street, the city burying 8,000 dead in a single epidemic year. It was New Orleans's first above-ground cemetery built without walls — the tombs standing in open acreage like a city that forgot to fence itself.
The monuments map the city's loyalties — the 1887 Firemen's Monument at the entrance honoring the volunteers who died at their posts, the Elks' tumulus, and New Orleans's first Civil War memorial: the 1874 Confederate tomb where the Ladies Benevolent Association reinterred 600 soldiers moved out of the Union cemetery at Chalmette — a low mound topped by the infantryman resting on his rifle over busts of Lee, Jackson, Johnston, and Polk.
Greenwood holds the whole range of the city's dead — William Bruce Mumford, hanged in 1862 for tearing down the Union flag, among them. The 20,000-plus tombs along Canal Street carry the whole social register of the nineteenth century — society vaults, fire companies, fraternal mounds — the firemen's ground grown into one of the great cemetery cities of the dead.
Greenwood Cemetery is the archive's firemen file — the 1852 above-ground city the volunteer companies built during yellow fever, holding New Orleans's first Confederate memorial and 600 soldiers moved out of the Union ground.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Greenwood Cemetery is the archive's Firemen's file — the FCBA's 1852 wall-less necropolis on Canal Street, where the 1874 Confederate monument marks 600 reinterred dead and the firemen's own Gothic monument guards the gate.
A cemetery built without walls keeps its mounds — the file's suggestion being that Greenwood's hold is the tumulus: the earthen vaults and monuments of a city that buried its firemen and its soldiers in the same open ground.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] apparition: Reported a fireman’s figure and figures among the vaults. Cemeteries keep their stories in the stones; Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana has its version filed among them. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. Sources including 'Greenwood Cemetery (New Orleans)' keep the claim in circulation. Whatever walks there, it walks often enough to keep the reports coming.
  source: Greenwood Cemetery (New Orleans) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_Cemetery,_New_Orleans)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· [1852] Established 1852; the firemen’s monuments are the site’s signature. The burial ground's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The detail is preserved in 'Greenwood Cemetery (New Orleans)'. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Greenwood Cemetery (New Orleans) — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_Cemetery,_New_Orleans

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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/