Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify
Reported Phenomena
- Apparitions of workers
- Disembodied voices
- Unexplained laughter
- Whispers on the wind
Reported by visitors & local legend. Stories, not verified claims.
Look up from the plots at Keystone Cemetery and the four presidential faces are right there, a mile or so off through the pines. That sightline is the whole point of the place. This small burial ground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, listed on some maps as Mountain View Cemetery, holds men who spent years hanging off the granite that now looks back down at their headstones.
Quick orientation: a working municipal cemetery in the town of Keystone, in use since 1900, open to the public, with Mount Rushmore visible from the grounds. No admission, no tour guide, no gate keeper.
Patrick Hayes and an Eighteen Month Old Grave
The cemetery has been in operation since 1900 and was founded by Patrick F. Hayes. Its first burial was not an old settler or a mining casualty but Hayes’s own daughter, Catherine, who died at eighteen months old. That is the kind of detail that fixes a cemetery’s character early. Keystone in 1900 was a hard rock mining camp with the mortality profile to match, and the first name cut into stone there belonged to a toddler.
Everything that follows on these grounds sits on top of that beginning: three decades of camp life, then the arrival of a federal sculpture project that would rename the town’s entire reason for existing.
The Men Who Carved a Mountain, Buried Within Sight of It
Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927 and 1941, and many of the laborers who did the work are buried at Keystone Cemetery. They drilled, blasted and finished the four heads while suspended in bosun chairs over an open rock face, in weather that ranged from summer glare to Black Hills winter.
The detail most visitors get wrong is the death toll. There was not one. Despite the conditions, none of the roughly 400 workers on the project were killed carving the monument. What Keystone Cemetery holds, then, is not a disaster memorial. It is the ordinary long tail of a dangerous job done well: men who survived the mountain, went home, grew old in the town below it, and were buried on the slope facing their work.
The town’s connection to the monument runs deeper than labor. David N. Swanzey, a Keystone resident, is best remembered for his part in the naming of Mount Rushmore. His son Harold was one of the workers who helped carve the memorial, and Harold’s name can be found on the granite walls below the monument. Harold was killed in a car accident in Keystone on April 16, 1939, a year after his father’s death, with the carving still two years from completion.
Swanzey’s second wife was Caroline Celestia Ingalls, the younger sister of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. Carrie had worked as a typesetter for the De Smet News and other South Dakota papers before settling in Keystone in 1911; she married Swanzey, a widower, in 1912 and became stepmother to Mary and Harold. She died of complications of diabetes in Rapid City on June 2, 1946, at age 75. Worth stating plainly, because visitors sometimes come looking: Carrie is buried in the De Smet Cemetery, not at Keystone.
Apparitions in Work Clothes: What Visitors Report
Keystone Cemetery turns up regularly on lists of haunted places in South Dakota, and the reports are consistent enough to describe, though none of them are verified and none are documented by anything more than the accounts of the people who tell them.
- Apparitions identified by witnesses as former Mount Rushmore workers, usually seen among the stones rather than at the boundary
- Disembodied voices with no visible source
- Laughter, reported by more than one visitor
- Whispering that people describe as carried on the wind rather than spoken nearby
The identification of any figure as a carver is an interpretation, not evidence. A cemetery this closely tied to the monument invites visitors to read what they see through that lens. What is notable in the accounts is the tone: nothing here is described as hostile or frightening. The reported presences are consistently benign, apparently content to stay on a scenic hillside with a view most people pay to see. Take these as folklore attached to a real place, not as findings.
Visiting Keystone Cemetery
The cemetery remains open to the public and costs nothing to walk. It is quiet, small enough to cover in half an hour, and the Rushmore view alone justifies the detour from the highway traffic that funnels through Keystone in summer. Early morning and late afternoon are best for the light on the granite.
This is an active burial ground with local families still interring their dead, so the usual obligations apply: stay off the plots, do not touch or attempt to clean markers, take nothing, and keep noise down. If you come with recorders or cameras looking for the workers, do it with the same manners you would use at any funeral. The people buried here helped build a national monument, and the cemetery is one of the few places where you can stand at their graves and see exactly what they made.
See Keystone Cemetery for Yourself
Sources
- Frontier Women and Their Art: A chronological encyclopedia
- Laura Ingalls' younger sister lived in Keystone
- Find a Grave
- About The Ingalls Family | Little House on the Prairie
- Wikipedia: Carrie Ingalls
Address: Cemetery Road
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Keystone Cemetery located?
Keystone Cemetery is located at Cemetery Road.
Can you visit Keystone Cemetery?
Keystone Cemetery is open to the public. Always follow posted rules and respect private property.
Reader sightings
Nobody has reported anything here yet. If you have been, you would be the first.
Report your own visit to Keystone Cemetery: Where Mount Rushmore’s Carvers Rest
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