Three private family mausoleums that stay locked to the public all year at Crown Hill Cemetery will swing open for a few hours on September 2, part of a 163rd anniversary celebration that also includes the premiere of a new documentary filmed on the grounds. Tickets for the evening, called Behind Closed Doors, cost $125 per person and include food, beverages, and an open bar, running from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The event marks the third year Crown Hill Cemetery and Arboretum has hosted Behind Closed Doors, according to WISH-TV. Visitors will get access to selected private family mausoleums typically closed to the public, inspecting internal artwork and learning about the architecture and family histories tied to each site. Crown Hill contains roughly 80 private family mausoleums in total, and the cemetery keeps them locked year-round outside of this event.
Guided tours during the evening will last 30 minutes each and highlight notable locations around the Gothic Chapel, with sessions scheduled for 6 p.m., 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on September 2. The chapel itself, a Victorian Gothic structure designed by architect D.A. Bohlen in 1875, has long served as a gathering point for tours at Crown Hill. Admission to Behind Closed Doors is restricted to guests ages 21 and older, and tickets must be purchased online before the event.
A Documentary Born From Cemetery Soundscapes
The evening's centerpiece is the premiere of “The Resting Place,” an original documentary developed by artists in Crown Hill's Artist-in-Residence program over nearly two years. The film combines stop-motion photography with an original musical soundtrack composed using sounds recorded on the cemetery grounds, and it will screen three times during the evening at 5:45 p.m., 6:45 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. After its premiere, the film will be submitted to various film festivals.
David Rieck, president of Crown Hill Cemetery and Foundation, said Behind Closed Doors gives people a behind-the-scenes look at the cemetery. Rieck also said that “The Resting Place” uses stop-motion photography and music composed from sounds of Crown Hill, tying the anniversary celebration directly to the site's own physical and acoustic history. The Artist-in-Residence program behind the film features local artists Jessica Dunn and Michael Moskaliuk, who separately host public audio looping workshops and solstice audiovisual concerts using sounds captured on cemetery grounds, according to the Crown Hill Foundation.
A Civil War-Era Landmark Still Growing
Crown Hill Cemetery was dedicated on June 1, 1864, and covers 555 acres, making it the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the United States, according to Discover Indiana. It was founded as a rural landscape cemetery to replace the overcrowded Greenlawn Cemetery in downtown Indianapolis. The first burial there took place just one day after dedication, on June 2, 1864, for Lucy Ann Seaton, a 21-year-old wife of a Union army captain who died of tuberculosis, per the Discover Indiana account.
More than 200,000 people are buried at Crown Hill today, including U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, three U.S. vice presidents, 11 Indiana governors, poet James Whitcomb Riley, industrialist Eli Lilly, and bank robber John Dillinger, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Riley's tomb sits atop Strawberry Hill, the highest natural hill in Marion County, offering a view of the downtown Indianapolis skyline that inspired the cemetery's own name.
The grounds also hold significant military history. In 1866 the federal government established the 1.4-acre Crown Hill National Cemetery within the property to relocate 707 Union soldiers from Greenlawn Cemetery, and a separate Confederate plot was added in 1931 for more than 1,600 prisoners of war who died at Camp Morton, per the same federal account. Crown Hill Cemetery and its internal national military cemetery were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Still an Active Burial Ground
Despite its age and more than 200,000 existing graves, Crown Hill remains an active cemetery and public park, with 25 miles of internal paved roads and enough remaining land capacity for roughly another 200 years of interments, according to Visit Indiana. The Crown Hill Foundation, which organizes Behind Closed Doors and other public programming, also runs a Speaker Series covering topics like 19th-century post-mortem photography, obituary evolution, and landscape conservation as part of its broader preservation mission.
Proceeds from the anniversary event support the foundation's ongoing preservation and outreach work at the historic site. For a cemetery that has quietly absorbed Indianapolis's growth for more than a century and a half, the September 2 open house offers a rare chance to step past locked doors that stay shut the other 364 days of the year.
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