Mount Moriah Cemetery

Mount Moriah holds more than 3,000 graves on the plateau overlooking Deadwood Gulch — the city counts roughly 3,400 — among them Martha 'Calamity Jane' Canary, buried beside Hickok in 1903 per her reported request; sheriff and first Deadwood mayor Seth Bullock; preacher Henry Weston 'Preacher' Smith, killed on the road to Crook City in August 1876; madam Dora DuFran; and prospector Potato Creek Johnny. The cemetery also preserves sections for Deadwood's Chinese and Jewish dead — though most Chinese burials were later exhumed for return to China, and only a handful remain.

The earlier graveyard is the file's quieter complication. Ingelside's unmarked and unknown graves were never fully accounted for when the bodies came up the mountain; the historical record notes that Deadwood gardeners and remodelers still turn up human bones left over from the Ingelside days. The town is, in the most literal sense available, built over its own first cemetery.

The cemetery's passenger list covers the camp's whole economy: lawmen and madams, miners and children, a pet parrot buried with Madame DuFran's household, and a Potter's Field for the ones nobody claimed. The first recorded Chinese burial on the hill was September 1, 1878; over the following fifty years roughly thirty-three Chinese residents were interred there, most later disinterred for return home — three graves remain.

The haunting claims are exactly the ones a cemetery with this register would attract: reported figures at the Hickok and Canary graves, sightings attributed to Wild Bill and Calamity Jane themselves, and the usual apparition reports that paranormal literature attaches to famous graves. None of it is tied to a specific dated event or a named witness account that predates the tourism — the sightings are modern souvenirs, filed nightly, signed by nobody.

The more interesting documented claim is archaeological rather than spectral — the bones surfacing in Deadwood basements and garden plots, a reminder that the unmarked dead of Ingelside never entirely consented to the move. If the town has a haunting with a paper trail, it is that one.

Tourism literature has floated the hillside ghosts for years; what the file can certify is simpler. People keep arriving at the graves of two people who were famous when they died and leaving coins, whiskey, and poker chips, which is its own form of persistent visitation.

Mount Moriah is an active city cemetery and Deadwood's principal historic attraction above the gaming halls — a visitor center, an interpretive video, and a marked trail through the sections, with death statistics from 1875 to 1900 posted for anyone who wants the ledger. Wild Bill's grave draws the traffic; the potters' field sections and the remaining Chinese graves carry the heavier history. The file keeps the sightings as reports: the documentation on this hillside is good enough that the dead here do not need embellishment.