Spooky Cemetery in 360° Panorama - Virginia City, Nevada

Happy Halloween, e'erbody! Above is a 360° image of a graveyard taken at the Silver Terrace Cemetery located on a windswept hillside of Virginia City, Nevada.

Virginia City, a former boomtown once famous for the Comstock Lode and the television show "Bonanza", is today probably more infamous as one of the most haunted towns in America. Practically every saloon, hotel and business along its picturesque streets offered glimpses into its colorful history of ghosts. 

Whether Virginia City is really haunted or just a marketing plan developed by the city's chamber of commerce I can't really be sure, but a lot of ghost hunters swear this place is the real deal.

Intrigued, I trudged up to the local cemetery to see if I could capture an image of a spirit -- whether it be a supernatural orb or a perhaps even a full apparition like the ones I'd seen as a girl at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  

What I found instead was a stunningly photographic old graveyard, built in the 1860s, by a number of fraternal, civic, immigrant and religious groups including the Masons, Pacific Coast Pioneers, Knights of Pythias, Firemen, Wilson and Brown, Improved Order of Redmen, and Roman Catholics.  

This image features the final resting place of Mr. Solomon Noel and his wife Catherine L. Noel (nee Mofett) and a soulful search on the Interwebs resulted in the following information about the couple:

Solomon Noel
Birth: Jun. 16, 1837 Alsace, France
Death: Sep. 22, 1895 Virginia City. Storey County, Nevada, USA

Born in Alsace, France in 1837 the son of a well to do government banker. He later married Miss Catherine Mofett (Date unknown). They fled France during the Franco-Prussan war of 1870-71 as their city was occupied by the Germans. They came to America in the 1870 and settled in Virginia City, Nevada where Solomon was an investment broker and owned parts of many of the local mines in the area. He died Sept. 22nd 1895 of heart failure at age 58.

Catherine L. Noel (nee Mofett)
Birth: Apr. 5, 1848 Bourgogne, France
Death: May 20, 1896 Virginia City, Storey County, Nevada, USA

Born in Bourgogne, France in 1848. Later she met and married Solomon Noel, a banker. They fled France during the Franco-Prussan War of 1870-71 and came to America settling in Virginia City NV where Solomon open a investment company. Solomon died in 1895 and Catherine followed him a year later dying of complications from diabetes on May 20th 1896 at age 48. She was laid to rest next to her husband in what today is one of the biggest monuments in the Virginia City Cemeteries.

Burial: Silver Terrace Cemeteries,Virginia City, Storey County, Nevada, USA
Plot: Odd Fellows Section 

The Gould and Curry Mill  (1867)
Virginia City, Nevada by Timothy O'Sullivan

I have to confess, I was inspired to go sepia in the post-processing of this panorama after seeing a series of images from Timothy O'Sullivan, an American photographer who carted a covered wagon dark room around the Wild West on behalf of the U.S. government in the late 1800s.

The Silver Terrace Cemeteries are located at the end of North E St., northeast of the C St. business district in Virginia City. The cemeteries are open to the public daily, but close at dusk except on Halloween when the site is monitored for 24 hours in an effort to prevent vandalism.

I've got a couple more images from the Silver Terrace Cemetery that I've put up as photospheres on Google Maps.  Go check them out and have a spook-tacular Halloween!