On the surface, it looks like an ordinary park. Below ground level, it’s the stuff out of horror movies. A child swinging or running across the playground, skipping between light and shadows, tracked by a brooding presence. If you visit Trollwood Park in Fargo, North Dakota, you might get more than the playground experience that you bargained for. From potter’s field and mental asylum to a modern playground, Trollwood park has its share of ghostly history. You just might not want to linger near the willow tree after dark.
The History
If you visit Trollwood Park today, it’s a 28-acre park with normal playground things like swings and slides. It has gazebos, a frisbee course, and picnic areas. But it wasn’t always a park.
Back in the early 1900s, the ground served as a graveyard for poor people who couldn’t afford proper graves. Most of these graves came from patients in the Cass County Hospital that once stood on the grounds. Founded in 1895, the Cass County Hospital and Farm offered physical and mental services to the elderly, disabled, or people with mental health issues who could not afford regular medical care. These individuals lived in the hospital until their deaths. The combined hospital and gardens existed until 1947. Then the place became a nursing home called Golden Acres Haven after the end of World War II until 1973. During the 1970s, the grounds turned into the Trollwood Performing Arts School and later became part of the Fargo Parks District. When the city turned the former hospital and asylum grounds into a park, they dug up 300 unmarked graves and reburied them at another site. Unfortunately, some traces of the dead stayed in the ground. Eroding soil revealed a nasty surprise when one person stumbled over a human bone jutting out of the ground. You can still see a willow tree with a stone titled “County Cemetery #2”.
The Haunting
With its spooky history, it’s no surprise that Trollwood Park has its share of paranormal sightings. The most famous ghost, a woman dressed in a long, dark, blue 19th-century-style dress, dances to soundless music around a willow tree near the grave marker stone. She can seem so real that people think it’s a performance. Then the woman vanishes in front of their eyes. It’s said that the woman in blue haunts the area where the old, neglected cemetery lay. Visitors get a creeping sense that someone is following them. Some hear disembodied voices around them. Others feel an invisible finger tap their shoulder. When they turn around, there’s no one there. Despite its sunny peace during the day, Trollwood Park isn’t a place where most people want to go at night. As the sun goes down, shadows creep across the vast park, and lingering spirits emerge from the darkness.
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