Crystal Valley Cemetery

The story

Most graveyards keep their occupants where they put them, but Manitou Springs has a habit of losing track of the dead. In 1891, a young pianist named Emma Crawford died of tuberculosis after seeking the town's mineral spring cure. Her fiancé and eleven pallbearers hauled her coffin up 7,200-foot Red Mountain to satisfy her dying wish, but by 1929, spring rain and erosion tore the summit apart and sent her pine box sliding straight down the granite slope into town. Her bones sat inside City Hall for two years until a former pallbearer finally reburied her in Crystal Valley Cemetery in an unmarked plot—which didn't get a formal memorial stone until 2004.

Terraced up a steep hillside behind cast-iron gates and greenstone posts, Crystal Valley has served as Manitou’s official burial ground since 1882. If you weave through the stone retaining walls, you’ll find a Civil War general and Manitou’s first female mayor, but the real standout is Theresa Kenny. In the 1930s, the Austrian immigrant decided not to trust anyone else with her final resting place: she built and stuccoed her own mausoleum while she was still alive, then set up a rocking chair alongside the finished structure to sit and enjoy the view before moving in permanently in 1943.

Oddly enough, the city doesn't administer its own historic cemetery walking tours from the grounds. If you want a guide to navigate the terraces and explain who is actually buried where, you have to book your summer tour through Miramont Castle—the nine-architecture-style Victorian mansion down the road. You didn't hear it from us, but it's best to visit right before dusk, when mountain shadows cross the terraces and local deer wander in past the iron gate.