Published October 8, 2026 03:01AM
About our reporting: For this piece, the author—a writer on digital trends and the outdoors—spoke with fellow hikers and leaders of cemetery nature walks, reviewed sociological and ecological studies on urban greenspaces, and personally hiked a cemetery to experience the practice firsthand.
Picture it: You’re standing in the middle of a truly thriving ecosystem. Migratory birds alight on the oldest fir tree in a city’s sprawling dedicated greenspace. Mycelial networks fill the soil beneath your feet, whispering messages of warning across the expanse. You breathe in; you breathe out. The myriad stresses of the day begin to release as your hyperfocus is allowed to become fuzzy in the way that time spent outside allows.
Do you know where you are?
You’re standing in the Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland, Oregon. You’ve been hiking in a graveyard.
Over the summer, a New York Times op-ed made waves when its writer described their summer vacation of road-tripping to visit cemeteries with their family instead of a more traditional beach sojourn. Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, Efemmera Gendera and Thespis D.Light of Drag Me Outside, their science-rooted and drag-led nature walk group, reached new levels of followers when they posted a sign-up for their inaugural cemetery outing.
As a student of digital trends and the history of outdoor leisure time, I had to ask: What is going on with this? Is cemetery hiking a new thing? What weird sign of the times could this be?
And, obviously, I had to embark on a cemetery hike myself.
The History of Cemetery Hiking
If the idea of cemetery hiking feels like the latest eye-roll-inducing activity of a zeitgeist social media culture hopped up on pumpkin spice lattes and obsessing over #spookyseason, know this: people have been hanging out in cemeteries since at least the Victorian era. Although it would be anachronistic to describe the early leisure activities that happened in the so-called “garden cemeteries” as “hiking,” urban-dwelling Americans in the 19th century found respite, greenspace, and community within them, as they served as the first urban parks.
Put into chronological terms, it goes like this. The Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts—designed by horticulturalists—was consecrated in 1831, while Yellowstone wasn’t officially named a National Park until 1872. The first official garden cemetery predates the first official National Park.
Changing attitudes around death and dying, as well as evolving practices regarding burial, have distanced most contemporary Americans from the cemetery hangs that macabre-loving Victorians viewed as normal. And while there are manifold reasons for why that may be true, it’s a category error to regard outdoor leisure time spent among the dead as a cringe new trend.
The Psychological and Ecological Benefits of Hanging Out in Graveyards
And it’s not just history that positions cemeteries as a worthwhile site to spend time outside. A group of Norwegian social scientists published a 2017 paper on the psychological and “restorative” benefits of time spent in an Oslo cemetery. They discovered that site visitors found the cemeteries restorative in many of the same ways people find time spent in other kinds of greenspace, like forests. As someone who has spent peaceful time in cemeteries around the globe, including a languorous afternoon in Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery, which houses the likes of John Keats and Antonio Gramsci, I can attest to the mental peace it can bring as a busy city crackles and hums around its perimeter. It’s not so different from sitting in a greenspace with no headstones at all.
Looking beyond the immediate benefits to the human psyche, Drag Me Outside’s Gendera also encouraged me to consider the ecological benefits conferred by urban greenspace cemeteries, which offer refuge to migratory birds, urban predators, and all manner of trees, flowers, and fungi. Citing a 2019 meta-analysis published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, Gendera helped me see garden cemeteries through the eyes of all the non-human, urban-dwelling beings who may be able to flourish within them.
My Hike to the Franklin Ghost Town and Cemetery
As much as I would have enjoyed making the trip to Portland, Oregon, to join Gendera and D.Light on Drag Me Outside’s inaugural walk through the historic Lone Fir Cemetery, I found a legit cemetery hike that would keep me closer to home, traveling to Black Diamond, Washington, for the Franklin Ghost Town hike.
The hike, which takes you over the Green River Gorge Bridge and up a winding, blackberry-laden track to the old mining town, its 1,300-foot Mine Shaft #2, and its cemetery, is only 2.5 miles round-trip, but it provides stunning views of the Mt. Rainier area throughout. Along the way, I spoke to fellow pilgrims about what had drawn them to the hike that day. An 11-year-old girl named Maricela told me she was there in search of ghosts and had even heard a woman’s cries coming from a small hole in the ground, which is where she and I stood and chatted as we listened for additional sounds.
A family told me they find hiking in and to historic cemeteries peaceful and contemplative, and they appreciate the public greenspace they provide in the context of urban settings. The folks I met truly ran the gamut of the psychological, ecological, and historical frames of reference that a cemetery hike can offer.
As I trekked the mile up to the resting place of people I’d never known, I also thought about my own connections to the dead of that place. Although I’m not from Washington, I hail from a small former-mining community in West Virginia, not far from where one of the worst mining disasters in U.S. history—the Monongah Nos. 6 and 8 Explosion—claimed 362 lives in 1907. In 1894, 37 miners suffocated in a fire in Franklin. Time spent with the dead has a way of leveling time and space, and I felt that leveling as I looked at the timeworn wooden graves of Franklin folk from times past.
Most of the cemetery was impassable, covered by a blackberry thicket so unchecked it seems like it might take over the world if our AI overlords don’t do it first. However, even the blackberry seemed symbolic. Keats famously had his tombstone inscribed with the phrase “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” a truthful, if maudlin, reflection on the shallow dents any of us really make on this planet in the short amount of time we’re given to spend on it. Sitting among the quiet brambles, what to do with that short time is a worthy thought.
