Elmwood Cemetery Apparitions

Elmwood Cemetery covers forty-three acres at Truman Road and Van Brunt Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. Opened September 8, 1872, it is the city’s first rural cemetery and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Enigma Atlas counts more than 30,000 people buried in those acres, among them William S. Gregory, the first mayor of the Town of Kansas; Colonel Elijah Milton McGee, mayor in 1870; and Leannah Loveall Kearns, who kept a house under the name Annie Chambers. Wikipedia adds Jacob Loose, the Hydrox cookie maker, who has a mausoleum there. Elmwood ran as a private business for its first quarter century, until June 7, 1896, when a group of lot owners raised the purchase price by subscription, bought the grounds and incorporated the Elmwood Cemetery Society. The society still runs the cemetery as a non-profit, entirely volunteer-run organization.

Lee Prosser, in “Missouri Hauntings” (Schiffer, 2009), reported that orbs and unexplainable shadows are often witnessed at the cemetery’s edge of vision. Prosser’s Missouri Hauntings states: “Walking through Elmwood Cemetery is like walking through an active landmine of spirits.” KCUR quoted Prosser in a 2022 article on haunted Kansas City cemeteries, reporting that he said orbs and unexplainable shadows are often witnessed at Elmwood just beyond human vision.

KMBC’s ghost story concerns Father Henry D. Jardine, an Episcopal priest in the late 1800s, who was temporarily buried in Elmwood and whose ghost some say still walks the grounds. Born in Canada around 1841, Jardine served a two-year prison term as a teenager for his role in a robbery before finding religion and becoming an Episcopal priest in 1875. Appointed rector of St. Luke’s Mission in Kansas City in 1879, he renamed it St. Mary’s and introduced Anglo-Catholic rituals including candles, incense, altar boys, formal confession, which created friction among parishioners accustomed to simpler services.

The controversy escalated in June 1885 when The Kansas City Times published articles exposing Jardine’s criminal past and alleging immoral conduct with female parishioners during private confessions. In September 1885, an ecclesiastical court found him guilty of inappropriate behavior and habitual chloroform use, recommending his removal from priestly functions.

Jardine traveled to St. Louis in January 1886 to appeal. Father George C. Betts discovered Jardine dead in Trinity Church’s sacristy: a handkerchief covered his face, a chloroform bottle lay nearby, and an iron penitential chain, welded by Jardine as an act of eternal penance, was fastened around his waist. The Bishop ruled the death a suicide, barring burial in consecrated ground. Supporters claimed trial stress caused an accidental lethal dose.

The Kansas City Public Library says his remains were quietly moved to Elmwood in 1890. The sources disagree on how long he stayed: KMBC says it took 14 years for friends to clear his name so he could be reburied elsewhere, while the library dates his move to consecrated ground at Forest Hill Cemetery to 1921.

Some people say Jardine’s ghost still walks the grounds of Elmwood, confused about where he truly belongs, as a frustrated spirit attempting to prove he was wrongly accused. KMBC reported in 2020 that people say you can hear more than the wind whistling through the trees at Elmwood, and that the cemetery is home to other, lesser-known spirits too.

Enigma Atlas says “everything published about ghosts at Elmwood goes back to one sentence in one paperback,” Lee Prosser’s Missouri Hauntings, and that “the Society keeps quiet.” Enigma Atlas counted 2,557 words on the seven main pages of elmwoodcemeterykc.org, captured in 2026, and says “the words ghost, haunt, spirit, paranormal and angel appear zero times.”

Today, Elmwood remains a working cemetery with roughly ten burials per year and about five hundred available lots. Enigma Atlas says the Society opens the grounds free of charge seven days a week and closes them before dark, and its free walking tour starts at the Armour Chapel at 10 a.m. on the third Saturday of the month. The Society’s tour page announces the tours for March through October, though the six dates it lists for 2026 run from May to October.