Spare Ribs??
I have mentioned before I grew up across from one of my favorite “parks”. The Robinson Memorial Cemetary. Yep, right outside my childhood bedroom window I used to be able to see the tree-lined groves of Section B of the grounds.
Established in 1935, it has changed a lot over the decades, but I still find it a place of calm, and beauty. We used to spend time going and saying “Hello” to Harold T. McGillivray the first adult burial, and the unknown baby in the unmarked grave in row 14 (1936)
I wish I could say I don’t know anyone else there, but I do! I spend time over in the section called Hemlock Grove and walking the paths. It's a beautiful space.
I have stories, we have seen and heard things! But never anything to give chills. Respect the dead and they respect you.
However, There’s a place in Kingston, Ont, where the past claws at the surface.
A place where the ground beneath your feet is not just dirt and grass, but a mass grave of the forgotten.
Locals call it Skeleton Park, and once you know its history, you'll understand why.
What is now a peaceful, tree-lined park was once a cemetery—a resting place for those who died penniless, nameless, and in the grip of disease. Between 1813 and 1865, nearly 10,000 bodies were buried here: victims of cholera outbreaks, Irish and Scottish immigrants who perished in poverty, and countless souls whose names have long since faded from memory.
By the late 1800s, environmental decay had set in, headstones were toppled, graves were overgrown, and the City of Kingston decided the land would be better suited as a park.
Families were told to come to claim the bodies of their loved ones, but only a handful ever did. The rest, thousands of them were left where they lay, buried under shallow earth, too close to the surface.
When the city turned the graveyard into a public park, they simply paved over the dead. Bones never meant to see the light of day became the park’s foundation, its secrets buried in plain sight.
In the 1950s, children playing in the park unearthed human skulls, while using the ancient gravestones as bases for their games.
Imagine their terror when their hands brushed against bone, or when they found teeth mixed with the soil.
Even today, when workers dig into the park’s earth, they sometimes find fragments of coffins, bones, and pieces of lives long extinguished.
For decades, people have whispered about strange occurrences in Skeleton Park. At night, shadows flit between the trees too fast, too silent to be living.
Visitors have reported hearing voices in the wind, cold and unintelligible. Sometimes, you can feel eyes watching you, though when you turn around, the park is empty.
It’s never really empty.
They say the dead walk the grounds after sundown with restless spirits, torn from their graves, searching for something. Maybe it’s peace. Maybe it’s vengeance. What is certain is this: they are not gone. They are not forgotten, not by the land, and certainly not by those who know what lies beneath.
McBurney Park may look like any other public space in the daylight, but once night falls, It’s as if the earth itself is holding its breath, waiting for you to make the mistake of wandering too far into the dark, too close to the graves.
So, next time you find yourself in Skeleton Park, pay close attention. The dead are still there beneath the grass, behind the trees, just out of sight.
Now a days there is even a full on Free Multi Day Music and Arts Festival in the Park held annually
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