Kate Blood’s Grave at Riverside Cemetery in Appleton

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Riverside Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin has two reputations, and they do not overlap much. To the city that established it in 1870 it is a ninety acre burial ground holding the people who built the place: pioneers, clergy, families whose names are still on Appleton streets. To the people who arrive after dark with cameras, it is the home of Kate Blood, a headstone that folklore insists weeps blood by the light of a full moon. Only one of those reputations has paperwork behind it.

Riverside Cemetery at a Glance

• Location: North Owaissa Street, Appleton, Wisconsin
• Established: 1870
• Size: roughly ninety acres
• Founded by: Joseph Harriman
• Designed by: Captain N.M. Edwards
• First burial: Reverend T.W. Orbison
• Status: active, still accepting new burials
• Best known story: the Kate Blood grave

Ninety Acres Laid Out as a Park in 1870

Riverside was founded by Joseph Harriman and laid out to a design by Captain N.M. Edwards, and the intention behind it shows in the ground itself. This was not a plot of land fenced off and filled in as needed. It was planned as a landscape, a place people would want to walk through, and nineteenth century Appleton took it at its word: the cemetery became a favourite park as much as a burial ground, which was entirely normal for the era and increasingly rare in how it survives today.

The first person interred here was Reverend T.W. Orbison. After him came a long procession of the town’s founding generation, the people whose decisions determined where Appleton’s mills, churches and streets went. A stone entrance added over the decades gave the grounds the formal threshold they have now. Ninety acres is a great deal of cemetery, and much of what makes Riverside worth a visit has nothing to do with anything spectral. It is one of the more legible records of the city’s first century that you can walk through for free.

The Grave of Kate Blood

Ask anyone in the Fox Valley about Riverside and you will hear about Kate Blood before you hear about Reverend Orbison. Her grave is the single most visited spot in the cemetery and the reason a good number of people come at all.

The folklore around her is dark and, in the way of folklore, vague on specifics. The stories hold that Kate was mixed up in nefarious deeds, though the accounts that circulate do not agree on what those deeds were. The signature claim is that her tombstone seeps blood during a full moon. That belongs in the legend column and should stay there: it is the kind of story a memorable surname invites, and a headstone bearing the word Blood was always going to collect one. Nothing in the cemetery’s record substantiates any of it.

What is worth saying plainly is that Kate Blood was a real person buried in a real grave, and the legend attached to her was not her doing. Visitors who go looking for the stone should treat it as they would any other family plot at Riverside.

What Visitors Say Happens Among the Stones

Everything in this section is reported experience rather than documented event. No incident at Riverside has been offered up to explain any of it.

The accounts fall into three rough groups. The first involves children: visitors describe phantom children playing near the riverbank, seen at a distance and gone when approached. The second is the standard cemetery report, figures glimpsed among the monuments that dissolve into the night air before anyone gets close enough to make out a face.

The third group is the one people find harder to shrug off, because it is physical. Visitors have described being touched by something they could not see, and in the more emphatic accounts, pushed. Those reports are what keep paranormal investigators returning to the grounds, and they are also the hardest kind of claim to test: a dark, uneven, ninety acre landscape gives a nervous person plenty of ways to be startled and shoved by nothing at all. Report them as they stand, which is as things people say happened to them.

Visiting Riverside Cemetery in Appleton

This is an active cemetery. It continues to accept new burials, which means some of the families using it are grieving currently, and the difference between Riverside and an abandoned rural graveyard matters here. Daylight visits are the right approach. The grounds reward a slow walk, and the design by Captain N.M. Edwards is only visible in the light.

Practical courtesies: stay on the drives and paths where you can, do not lean on or make rubbings of headstones, leave nothing behind, and if you find the Kate Blood stone, look at it and move on. Appleton also uses the cemetery as a community and heritage space, so it is worth checking whether a scheduled walk or event coincides with your trip. A guided visit will teach you more about who is buried at Riverside than a night spent waiting for a stone to bleed.

See Riverside Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• Wikipedia: Riverside Cemetery

Address: 714 N. Owaissa Street

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