Boot Hill Cemetery in Haunted Nevada

The mining town was erected in 1864 to extract the newly discovered silver that lay beneath it. The massacres that led to it being abandoned in these early years was a harbinger of what was to come. Nonetheless, a second effort was made in 1868, and within a decade, the now newly named town of Pioche was booming. Unfortunately, the silver that drew all the prospectors and gunmen in turned them against each other just as easily. A whole 72 men died violent deaths at the hands of others before the first natural death happened in the settlement. This propensity toward violence, like the Indian raids that came before, would not end any time soon. In the state census year between 1871 and 1872, almost 60 percent of all the homicides in the entire state of Nevada happened at Pioche and its mines.

The Boot Hill Cemetery was established to manage the steady supply of corpses. A high number of these graves are unmarked, though whether the reason behind this was because the grave diggers could not identify the dead men they were burying or because they did not want to immortalize their memories is unclear. The graves at Boot Hill Cemetery that are marked often include epitaphs that describe just how the person buried there died. Tales of wanton violence that would normally seem like they were straight out of a classic western film adorn many of these graves. The name of the cemetery is taken from the fact that most of the dead were buried with their boots on. The combination of this and their untimely, violent deaths has led to many a restless spirit at Boot Hill Cemetery.