Bellevue Memorial Cemetery -- a.k.a. The Witches' Circle

Sheridan has its share of urban legends but one of the most enigmatic involves the strange circle of stone pillars by the Sheridan Municipal Cemetery. Keep going West on Huntington Street past the Ash Street turnoff and you’ll run smack dab into a gravel path circling a clutch of stone pillars facing the Big Horn mountains. Click on the images to enlarge.

Longtime Sheridan residents know the structure as the ‘Circle of Light’, with younger generations preferring the ominous ‘Witches’ Circle’ with stories of spooky goings-on during the twilight hours.

Properly known as Bellevue Memorial Park, its developers conceived it as a for-profit cemetery. George G. and G.W. Carroll spearheaded the project in the late 1920s, with Mrs. Goelet Gallatin, who designed the structure, overseeing its construction.

Bellevue opened in 1930, according to one of Charles Popovich’s books on Sheridan area history. The cemetery offered 225 plots and serves as final resting place for several souls. Some were moved to Sheridan Municipal after Bellevue’s closure, and new graves have been added in the years since.

Mounting difficulties maintaining the park coupled with the financial drought of the Great Depression caused Bellevue’s closure after just five short years of business, thrusting the Carrolls into foreclosure limbo. According to a 2012 Sheridan Press article, the park found renewed life when Boy Scouts spruced up the area in the early 1980s after it was mapped by the Sheridan Genealogical Society.

Set on one of Sheridan’s highest points, the pillars represent an ancient astronomical calendar built on a site important to Native Americans, concluded then Sheridan resident, O.B. Williams, an Army Corps of Engineers retiree, in a 1984 Billings Gazette interview. Williams devoted years of his life researching the circle, which he called The Sun Temple of Osiris, describing it as a “replica” of many similar structures throughout the world honoring the Egyptian sun god, Osiris, and his wife, Isis.

While he did not find a concrete connection between ancient myth and Gallatin’s or the Carrolls’ intended purpose, Williams claimed that the structure served as “a sun calendar device dividing the year” into summer and winter. Looking at the black and white picture below of the structure upon its completion, it’s easy to get drawn into the mystery of the so-called Witches’ Circle.

Whether the Circle of Light’s purpose lies in Ancient Egypt sun worship, witches’ rituals, or simply the aesthetic taste of the Carrolls and Goelet Gallatin, what tantalizes is the mystery itself.

Will any sleuths take up the call, maybe one day discovering the Circle of Light’s definitive origins? If that’s you, or you’re just interested in learning more about this strange piece of Sheridan’s past, stop by the Fulmer Library’s Wyoming Room, which houses the research used for this post— and so much more!

Click here to go to the library's post.