Oak Hill Cemetery, Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Tillie Legend and the Record

Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is best known to ghost-story websites for “Tillie,” a girl said to carry a candle through the graves at night. This is a different place from the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington, DC, which has its own entry on this site. The Cedar Rapids story is a short one, because the cemetery itself says it began as a prank.

What the record shows

The cemetery was laid out in 1853 by Gabriel Carpenter, according to the cemetery’s newsletter. According to its history page, graves from the old Village (Washington) Cemetery were moved there beginning in 1856. It later became a nonprofit lot-owners’ association, and it is still active. It is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Oak Hill Cemetery Historic District (reference number 13000243).

The legend

In the usual telling, Tillie was a young Czech girl who died while her parents were passing through town. She carries a flickering candle at night and tries to pull visitors into a mausoleum. Some versions say she is buried in a potter’s field behind an iron fence, and a few call her a witch.

The cemetery’s Fall 2007 newsletter answers this directly. It says no one has come forward with a first-person account of seeing Tillie, and that the story has been traced to a worker in the 1960s or early 1970s who made it up to scare a gullible co-worker. The cemetery asked for any written reference to Tillie from before 1960 and reported that none had been found. A 2022 Cedar Rapids Gazette article by the History Center’s curator likewise says the story was traced to a groundskeeper’s prank.

The setting does not match the tale either. The “potter’s field” belongs to City Cemetery, a separate city-run cemetery next door, which, according to the 2007 newsletter, is reached through Oak Hill. According to the newsletter, no mausoleums stand near it, the oldest mausoleums at Oak Hill date to the 1890s, and the iron fence was never in Oak Hill. The Gazette reports that a child with the same name from a Cedar Rapids family died in the 1890s and is buried in City Cemetery. The cemetery asks that she be left to rest in peace, so no further detail is given here.

Visiting

Oak Hill Cemetery is at 1705 Mt. Vernon Rd. SE, Cedar Rapids. It lists gate hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekends. The office is open weekdays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and on weekends by appointment. The phone number is 319-362-8452. The cemetery posts a notice that unauthorized persons may not be on the property between sunset and sunrise, and its 2007 newsletter says extra steps are taken on Halloween to prevent after-dark visits. Please visit during the day, keep voices low and treat it as the burial ground it is.

FAQ

Is Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids haunted?

No haunting is documented. The cemetery says it has found no evidence of one, and the Tillie story is traced to a prank.

Can visitors look for Tillie’s grave?

No. The cemetery says staff do not know the location with certainty and prefer to let her rest, and the story’s setting does not match Oak Hill. Visitors should not search for the grave.

More haunted cemeteries: For another Iowa entry, see Sunset View Cemetery in Washta. The Midwest category also includes Rochester Cemetery in Topeka, Kansas.

Sources

• Oak Hill Cemetery Association, “Oak Leaves,” Fall 2007 (the Tillie newsletter, PDF)
• The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), Tara Templeman, “History behind the Tillie ‘hauntings’ in Cedar Rapids, Marion,” September 20, 2022
• Oak Hill Cemetery, history page
• Oak Hill Cemetery, Visitor Information
• NPGallery record, Oak Hill Cemetery Historic District (reference 13000243)