Silver Cliff Cemetery is a town burial ground about half a mile south of State Highway 96 on Mill Street, in Silver Cliff. Silver Cliff and Westcliffe sit side by side in the Wet Mountain Valley, in Custer County. There is no town called Custer City. The county name is what people usually mean. The cemetery opened in the early 1880s, during the silver boom that built Silver Cliff. The town still owns it, and plots are still sold. It is split between a Catholic section and a Protestant section called Cross of the Assumption Cemetery.
The haunting, if it is one, is not a person. It is the lights.
The local story says miners taking a shortcut through the cemetery on the way back to town saw blue-white balls moving among the stones. The tale is usually set in the 1880s. The first written account researchers have pinned down is later: a 1956 Wet Mountain Tribune piece, “Silver Cliff Cemetery Ghosts Carrying Own Lights at Night,” about young people in a car who said they saw lights dancing on the graves. The story went national in the August 1969 National Geographic (Volume 136, Number 2). Writer Edward Linehan was told he would see something strange if he went at night. He wrote that dim, round spots of blue-white light glowed among the graves, and that they seemed to dodge when approached. The town’s own page still cites that article.
Explanations on offer do not agree. Some callers treat the lights as spirits of miners. Others point to ordinary causes: headlights or ranch lights reflected off polished stones, a trick of dark-adapted eyes, phosphenes from eye movement, or a swamp-light effect even though this valley is dry. Investigator Karen Stollznow has argued the “dancing” fits how the eye invents motion in low light. Rocky Mountain Paranormal has noted that the 1880s origin is oral, not documented. None of that stops people from parking on Mill Street after dark.
What visitors report is consistent in shape if not in cause: small blue or white spots, low to the ground, that seem to hop from stone to stone and disappear when you walk toward them. They are not reported every night. Cloudy, moonless nights are the ones people recommend. A phone flashlight washes them out, which is also what you would expect if the effect is faint and at the edge of vision.
The cemetery is still a working burial ground, about 40 percent full by the town’s count. Plots are 10 by 12 feet. The town lists them at $500 for Custer County residents and $1,500 for others. Daytime visits are the respectful default. If you go at night, stay on the road and the paths, kill the headlights only if you can do it safely, and leave if a family is there. The Sangre de Cristo range is the western wall of the valley. The lights, whatever they are, are the reason the cemetery is famous. The stones are the reason it exists.
Relevant links
- Town of Silver Cliff: cemetery page — location, the 1969 article, and plot information
- Silver Cliff Cemetery, Wikipedia — the two sections and the light reports
- Atlas Obscura on the ghost lights — the 1956 newspaper account versus the later legend
- Denver Gazette: ghost lights — Linehan’s night visit and the local debate