Photos by Billie Winter

Cari Simson first heard the rumor in the early 2000s.

Amid the dark, comfortable bars of Georgetown, and in other places where the neighborhood’s old-timers gathered, there were stories about a cemetery. It was a place that didn’t last, the old-timers said—a place where one day, all the bodies were dug up, and the ashes dumped into the nearby Duwamish River.

Simson, a local environmental consultant, producer, and mixed media artist, was intrigued by the stories. She’d spent years producing the annual Georgetown Haunted History Tour, and this elusive cemetery would have been a natural addition. But she didn’t start researching them in depth until 2022, after she met a kindred spirit.

Elke Hautala is a filmmaker, performer, and visual anthropologist. In 2022, she had undertaken a project on the challenges surrounding the Duwamish River, an often-forgotten waterway that was once home to rich wetlands and is today a Superfund site. That project brought her to Simson, who was helping to run a trash pickup via kayak on the river. The pair went out on the water together, and right away, they bonded over a shared love of cemeteries and ghost stories.

“Even during the deepest, darkest, dumbest days of the pandemic, we found joy through graveyards and picking up trash,” Simson says.

Today, Simson and Hautala produce and host a podcast called Invisible Histories, devoted to local stories that are rarely, if ever, told. Recent guests have included Cynthia Brothers of Vanishing Seattle and Taha Ebrahimi, author of the book Street Trees of Seattle. But the first season focused on that cemetery in Georgetown—which, it turns out, was much more than a rumor.

The old-timers were right: There was a burial ground in the neighborhood (and not just Comet Lodge, now cut off from Georgetown by I-5 and ripe with its own strange lore). The Duwamish Cemetery was established in the 1870s as King County’s potter’s field, a place to bury the indigent or unclaimed dead. Located two blocks southwest of Corson Avenue South and East Marginal Way South at the site of what’s now Seattle Boiler Works, it was a “burying place of unfortunates,” a large, overgrown “city of the dead,” as The Seattle Times put it in 1904.

There were two common ways to end up at the potter’s field, according to Simson and Hautala. One was dying at the King County Poor Farm, which bordered the cemetery. Established in 1877, it was a working farm located where the South Seattle College Georgetown campus is now. If you were too poor or sick to take care of yourself in the late 19th century, that’s where the county sent you. Another route to the cemetery was dying at the nearby King County Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium.

Those weren’t the only paths to the cemetery. “If you dropped dead in the middle of the city with no identification,” Hautala told me on an early March Zoom call, the potter’s field would likely be your last stop. The same was true if no one came forward to claim your body or pay burial expenses, no matter how you had died. Turnaround was quick at local morgues—bodies unclaimed for only two or three days were sent to the potter’s field.

That meant all kinds of folks ended up at this lonely, windy plot of land. Hautala describes one man whose naval buddies came and tried to dig him up after he was buried there by mistake. “We have to think about how news [traveled],” she told me. “It’s not like we had cell phones to call and say, ‘So-and-so hasn’t shown up for dinner.’”

Their podcast tells the stories of some of those buried at the potter’s field, including a formerly enslaved man named James Carter, and Thomas Blanck, who’s been called the “Jesse James of the Pacific Northwest.” One group that’s rarely at the potter’s field: women. The place was so stigmatized, staggering under the weight of that era’s criminalization of the poor, that the community often raised funds to bury women and children just about anywhere else.

The Duwamish Cemetery ran for fewer than 50 years, never to be replaced. In the early 1910s, King County moved to straighten and deepen the Duwamish River, which once flowed through about a dozen channels in its delta and down winding curves whose banks supported the Duwamish people for millennia. A straighter, deeper river surrounded by more solid land was much better for development, the county’s planners argued, and by 1912, the potter’s field was seen as in the way.

“From a colonizer or patriarchal perspective, it was useless land,” Simson says.

County commissioners made plans to exhume the cemetery’s 3,260 bodies and cremate them on-site. But by the time the job was given to Georgetown mortician C. E. Noice, only 39 days were left to complete the work before dredging was set to begin. The rush meant burning about 85 bodies a day at a crematorium equipped to handle about four. Bodies were supposed to be burned individually, with their resulting ashes placed in individual urns. That’s not what happened.

A state investigation, prompted by reporting from the progressive newspaper The Seattle Star, found that bodies had been burned together, that ashes frequently commingled, and that they were raked to the floor of the crematorium before being divided haphazardly into individual receptacles. A subsequent grand jury investigation confirmed the findings, noting that the individually labeled urns were little more than fiction. What happened to the ashes was “beyond understanding,” in the words of the state auditor. Yet no punishment or actions came of the investigation.

Afterwards, the ashes vanished.

No one knows exactly what happened to them, but Simson and Hautala say they were probably spread in the potato fields or, yes, dumped in the river. “We didn’t find evidence that the county set aside any other land for the future potter’s field, and the ashes were never reinterred anywhere else, as far as we can tell,” Simson says.

While this may seem like nothing but a sad story from a more benighted era, Simson and Hautala link it to issues the city and county face today. “There is a connection we want to make to people being invisible, living on the margins and dying, especially of overdoses nowadays, right here in King County today,” Hautala says. The pair recently attended one of monthly silent witnessing vigils organized by the Women in Black, which works to remember unhoused people who have died outside, in public places, or by violence in King County. In March, the vigil honored 25 people whose lives ended under such circumstances. (And while the county no longer has a potter’s field, the King County Indigent Remains Program now buries those who die unclaimed or without means in a special ceremony that happens every few years at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Renton.)

Ultimately, Simson and Hautala would love to see some kind of memorial at the former site of the potter’s field. That could be as simple as a plaque or as a high-tech project involving augmented reality. It may even encompass fixing up the street by the river and creating a community space with support services. “Maybe that’s the best way to honor these people who were on the margins,” Hautala says.

Part of the challenge is figuring out how to remember people who are unnamed—only 855 of the Duwamish cemetery dead have names, thanks to a brush fire around 1910 that destroyed many of the burial ground’s markers.

The pair say they are happy to hear from the public about creative ideas for a memorial. In the meantime, they’re planning an immersive walking tour of related sites for May 2 and 3. While the details were still being confirmed at press time, the tour will likely include the old sites of the poor farm, crematory, and potter’s field, with theatrical and audio-visual elements.

Their goal is always to humanize, they say. “These are 3,260 people who were mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters, you know,” Hautala says.

Invisible Histories hosts the "Lost" Potter's Field Immersive Walking Tour May 2–3 at 6:30 pm. Tickets available here.