Haunted place · Texas, United States

Olivewood Cemetery

Updated November 202610 sources How to visit

9 archive documents

Houston's first Black cemetery inside city limits (1875), resting place of freed slaves, where one investigator claims she filmed the ghost of Mary White.

The story

Olivewood Cemetery covers roughly six acres beside White Oak Bayou, just northwest of downtown Houston, where the historic First and Sixth wards meet. It is a small place with an outsized place in the city's history. Many of the people buried here had been born into slavery, and others were among the first generation of Black Houstonians to build lives, churches and businesses in freedom.

The ground was used for burials before it became a formal cemetery: enslaved people had been laid to rest here. In 1875 the land was purchased by a group led by Richard Brock, who became Houston's first Black alderman, and it opened as a burial ground for the city's Black Methodists; Wikipedia dates the first interments under the new arrangement to 1877. When the site was platted, it became the first African American cemetery inside Houston's city limits, and it is often described as the city's first incorporated Black cemetery.

Brock rests here among other leaders of 19th-century Black Houston. They include the Reverend Elias Dibble, who was the founding pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church, his fellow minister the Reverend Wade H. Logan, and the blacksmith James Kyle. The grounds were laid out with more than 700 family plots along an oval drive that once began at an ornamental gate. Because Olivewood served the comfortable and the very poor alike, its markers range from elaborate Victorian monuments to plain, handmade stones. One weathered marker, photographed in 2010, honors the Rev. A. F. Jackson, born in 1844, and states bluntly that he was "murdered at Dallas, Tex." in December 1889. Burials continued into the 1960s.

Then came decades of neglect. Undergrowth swallowed graves, ground sank, and a ghost-hunting website quoted by the Houston Press in 2008 described garbage, syringes and overgrowth. In 2003 the nonprofit Descendants of Olivewood was formed to take over guardianship and, in Wikipedia's words, "to protect its historical significance." The cemetery was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, yet by 2010 floodwater and vandals still threatened part of it. That year, from January to May, an Eagle Scout project put in more than 300 hours clearing about 4,500 square feet of brush and, with a genealogist, documented about 80 percent of the burials. In 2013 an online memorial database of some 3,800 entries, built largely from death certificates and centered on deaths between 1910 and 1940, was published on Find a Grave.

In July 2021 the National Trust for Historic Preservation chose Olivewood as one of 40 sites and organizations sharing $3 million from its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. That money paid for a master drainage plan to limit the flooding and erosion worsened by commercial development nearby. In April 2026 a draft nomination to the National Register of Historic Places was presented to the City of Houston; Wikipedia reports the cemetery as listed that year, though the final listing has not been confirmed by a National Park Service source.

The legend

Olivewood's ghost lore is slender, and it is best told with care. City Savvy, a newsletter the City of Houston once published, mentioned unexplained sightings, shadows and odd movement among the graves after dark. None of those reports names a witness or gives a date.

The one named ghost comes from Cathi Bunn, an independent paranormal investigator who began visiting the cemetery in 1999, the earliest dated paranormal interest on record. Bunn says that at midnight one moonlit night she caught on videotape the ghost of Mary White floating over her own grave marker; a photo attributed to the ghost hunters shows what looks like fog. Wikipedia repeats the claim almost as fact, but it is Bunn's own account and has never been independently examined. Another group, writing on a website called Ghastly Ghost Hunter, later said it had met a spirit that introduced herself as Mary White, a claim known only secondhand through the Houston Press.

The real Mary White can be found in the cemetery's own burial records. According to the Descendants of Olivewood, she was born in 1802 and died on September 19, 1887, and lies in plot 2. The ghost stories consistently say she was buried in 1888, a small but telling slip that suggests they were not built on the records.

Skeptical voices are easy to find. In 2008 the Houston Press columnist Richard Connelly poked fun at the fuzzy "haunted" write-ups and at what the ghost hunters claimed, then turned the attention to the cemetery's preservation. The writer Cristan Williams spent Halloween night 2004 among the graves and saw nothing more supernatural than two large field mice; she cites the Houston historian Louis Aulbach, who stays "skeptical" and believes people simply expect cemeteries to be haunted. In 2015, editors from PaperCity magazine made a night visit and saw only an unexplained flashing "orb" on a car's backup camera near the entrance, admitting they were not troubled by ghosts.

The haunted reputation seems to have grown during the years when Olivewood was overgrown and abandoned, which is a pattern seen at many neglected burial grounds. We found no television investigation here. The descendants' organization concentrates on care and history rather than ghosts, and visitors should keep in mind that the people buried here, Mary White included, have living families.

What remains today

The oval drive and the family plots survive, scattered with a mix of carved Victorian monuments and modest handmade markers, some still being recovered from vegetation by volunteers. The location beside the bayou makes flooding and erosion a constant danger, which is why the 2021 grant went to drainage planning. Olivewood is a Historic Texas Cemetery under the guardianship of the Descendants of Olivewood, and its National Register nomination was in progress in 2026.

Visiting

Olivewood is not a public park. The Descendants of Olivewood give tour and contact details on their website; contact them before going. The group leads guided history tours for schools, churches and other groups and holds volunteer cleanup days, a good way to see the cemetery and help preserve it at the same time. We found no ghost tours, and we advise against night visits or ghost hunting at what is first of all a heritage site for a living descendant community.

If you go, walk carefully, do not touch, lean on or rub fragile stones, and take nothing away. Genealogists can search the Find a Grave memorial database and the descendants' own burial records online before arranging a visit.

The ghosts

Ghostly lady

Mary White

Said to be Mary White (born 1802, died September 19, 1887), buried in plot 2 per cemetery records

Investigator Cathi Bunn says she videotaped Mary White's ghost hovering over her headstone one moonlit midnight; a photo attributed to the ghost hunters shows what looks like fog. Another ghost-hunting group later claimed a spirit gave her name. The claims are unverified, and the legend gives her burial as 1888 although cemetery records say 1887.

Apparitions
Photographs

First reported: 1999 or later. Reported by: Cathi Bunn; Ghastly Ghost Hunter website (via Houston Press, 2008)

Shadow figure

Night shapes of Olivewood

A former City of Houston newsletter mentioned sightings, shadows and strange movement in the cemetery after dark. No witness or identity is attached to these reports.