Hollywood Cemetery
Richmond, Virginia, United States
Richmonds 1847 garden cemetery of presidents and Confederate dead, and home of the Richmond Vampire legend anchored to a real 1925 tunnel collapse.
Hollywood Cemetery is a large Victorian garden cemetery on the James River hills, holding two American presidents, Jefferson Davis, thousands of Confederate soldiers, and Richmond's nineteenth-century self-image in marble. Its esoteric afterlife is the Richmond Vampire legend, born from the 1925 Church Hill tunnel collapse that killed several workers and sent the city's newspapers and folklore into a spiral; a figure glimpsed at the collapsed tunnel's mouth grew, in retelling, into a vampire supposedly entombed at Hollywood's gothic mausoleums.
Scholars have traced the legend through the actual tragedy, and that layering, real industrial disaster plus decades of retelling plus a monumental landscape, is the case study in how urban legend builds on top of fact. The cemetery itself is actively managed and visited continuously.
Visiting
412 S Cherry St, Richmond; open daily with posted hours; see hollywoodcemetery.org. The tunnel collapse story is told at the Church Hill site.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elks_Rest_(Hollywood_Cemetery,)_Richmond,_Va_-_(16836096351).jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories