Older Than Springfield: Ball Cemetery and Its Angry Man

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

Ball Cemetery sits on a rise of old farmland outside Springfield, Nebraska, and it is older than the town it belongs to. The burial ground began as a private family plot on scattered agricultural land, and the earliest legible tombstone marks a grave from 1869. Springfield itself was not formally recognised until 1873. That four year gap is the single most useful thing to know about the place: the graves came first, and the town grew up around them.

A Burial Ground That Outdates Springfield

The town was established in 1873 by Army Captain J.D. Spearman, whose plan for the settlement leaned heavily on the railway development then pushing across the region. Towns in that era lived or died on where the track went, and Spearman was betting on proximity. What survives of that gamble in written form is patchy. What survives in stone is not. The markers at Ball Cemetery hold some of the oldest surviving records of who was actually living and dying in this stretch of Sarpy County before there was a town name to attach to them.

That is worth stressing, because the cemetery is far better known for its ghost stories than for its documentary value. The two are not the same thing. The 1869 date and the 1873 founding are matters of record. Almost everything else attached to the site’s reputation belongs to the category of reported experience, repeated by visitors, and it should be read that way.

Rattlesnake Pete and the Named Dead

Among the burials here is a man remembered as “Rattlesnake Pete,” described in local accounts as an associate of Buffalo Bill. The nickname has done a lot of work over the years, and it is the sort of detail that attaches itself to a small rural cemetery and refuses to leave. Whether the association with Buffalo Bill was close or incidental is not something the cemetery itself can settle, but the name is the one visitors arrive already knowing.

What Visitors Report at Ball Cemetery

The claims made about this ground fall into a few consistent shapes, which is usually a sign that a story has been passed hand to hand rather than independently arrived at. That does not make the experiences insincere. It does mean they should be described as accounts rather than as events.

• Marks on belongings. Visitors have described finding unexplained markings on items they carried into the cemetery.
• Figures in photographs. Shapes and forms said to appear in images taken on the grounds that were not seen at the time the shutter fired.
• A woman’s voice in the trees. Reported as a sound moving through the treeline, sometimes accompanied by a tug at clothing and a laugh that stops abruptly.
• Physical contact. The most repeated and least pleasant claim, discussed below.

The Tall Angry Man

The story that gives Ball Cemetery its harder reputation involves a presence described as a tall man, hostile rather than mournful. Unlike the woman in the trees, who is characterised as playful in most tellings, this figure is associated with aggression. Visitors have claimed to be shoved or struck, and some have reported discovering bruises after they had already left the grounds.

There is no verified incident behind this. Bruises are easy to acquire on uneven, poorly lit rural ground, and a cemetery visited at night by people who already expect something unpleasant is fertile territory for a story that grows in the retelling. Still, the consistency of the description, a tall man, angry rather than sad, is what has kept it circulating rather than fading into general spookiness.

Visiting Ball Cemetery Without Making Things Worse

This is a working burial ground with real families interred in it, not an attraction. It is small, rural, and easily damaged. Anyone going should treat it as they would any other cemetery: daylight hours, stay on established paths, touch nothing, leave nothing, take nothing. Do not lean on or clean markers, several of which are approaching two centuries of weathering.

Ball Cemetery rewards a quiet visit for its history alone. The 1869 stone is a genuine artefact of Nebraska before Springfield existed. Whether anything else is present is a question the ground has never answered in a way that can be checked.

See Ball Cemetery for Yourself

Sources

• Nebraska (official)
• Robert Ball Anderson (U.S. National Park Service)
• gilderlehrman.org
• jstor.org
• Wikipedia: Robert Ball Anderson

Address: 20999 S 176th St

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