Emma Crawford's Grave

Emma Crawford, a pianist from Massachusetts, moved to Manitou Springs at twenty-five hoping the mountain air would ease her tuberculosis; it didn't, and she died on December 4, 1891, at twenty-eight. She had asked to be buried at the summit of Red Mountain, and was, but construction of the Red Mountain Incline disturbed the grave in the early 1900s, and a 1929 rainstorm washed her coffin and remains down the mountainside. Two boys hiking the trail found her skull and a nameplate that August; her remains sat in the basement of Manitou Springs' city hall until 1932, when she was reinterred here, where a memorial stone was added in 2004. Manitou Springs now holds the Emma Crawford Coffin Races each October in her memory. Local telling holds that her spirit still walks Red Mountain, though the historical society that maintains her memorial has asked that she be allowed to rest rather than be treated only as a ghost story.