History and culture - Mountains
The faint lights of Silver Cliff Cemetery
For decades visitors have reported faint bluish-white lights drifting among the headstones at Silver Cliff Cemetery, a piece of Wet Mountain Valley folklore with a likely down-to-earth cause.
Published June 10, 2026 - Last verified June 15, 2026
Drive about half a mile south of Highway 96 in Silver Cliff, down Mill Street, and you reach the town cemetery. By day it is an ordinary, well-kept burial ground in the Wet Mountain Valley. After dark it has a quieter reputation: people have reported faint, bluish-white spots of light that seem to hover and drift among the headstones, never quite where you point a flashlight.
The story has been told for a long time. A 1956 account in the local Wet Mountain Tribune described young people seeing eerie lights among the stones. In 1969, a National Geographic writer came to look for himself and wrote that he saw dim, round, blue-white spots glowing among the graves. The town’s own page calls the cemetery famous for its “dancing blue lights.”
What causes them is unsettled, but the calm explanation is appealing on its own. This valley sits between two mountain ranges and has some of the darkest skies in Colorado, certified as an International Dark Sky Community in 2015. In that deep darkness, faint reflections of starlight or distant town lights off the headstones may be enough to read as floating orbs.
It is still an active cemetery, so go quietly and respectfully, stay on the roads, and leave it as you found it. For hours, location, and rules, check the Town of Silver Cliff’s cemetery page.