Space for another 225 graves will become available July 3. Those graves, in the historic part of the cemetery, will be the first major availability of plots in years, said Nikki Bown, a spokeswoman for Salt Lake City's public services department.

"If you go right now and try to buy places, it's up to the very top, and there's not as much history in the top," Bown said. The new section will allow families to buy groups of graves next to each other in the older part of the cemetery. Previously, families would have to split up graves — two in one spot, two up the hill and so on.

The cemetery is the resting place of 11 presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as politicians and pioneers, such as the first woman doctor in the state, Romania Pratt Penrose. But the area is also a favorite spot for runners and walkers, including Steve Mecham, chairman of the Greater Avenues Community Council.

"It may sound a little ghoulish, but I love the cemetery," Mecham said. "There are a lot of places that are sort of tucked away. They're very quiet, and those places are so quiet that you can get away from everything else."

Mecham, who found the graves of his great-great-grandfather and great-grandmother in the cemetery 20 years ago or so, said the neighborhood location and upright headstones give the cemetery an appeal beyond history, as do the creepy stories that have been handed down about the place.

One story involves a wayward grave digger, John Baptiste, who was caught stripping corpses of jewelry, trinkets and clothing. Early Utah officials arrested Baptiste when they found boxes of loot from more than 300 graves in his two-room cabin, and he was banished to Fremont Island in the Great Salt Lake in 1862. He was not heard from again.

But sexton Mark Smith refuses to acknowledge any hauntings in his cemetery.

"Cemeteries are for the living, and I'll preach this forever," Smith said. "Hollywood's given them a bad name. But we have 250 acres of trees and animals that make a gorgeous area for those to pay respects."

Smith is a gregarious man who likes to have country music blaring from a stereo in his office on the corner of Fourth Avenue and N Street. He can tick off the names of trees in the cemetery — spruce, cedar, elm, tulip, bristle-cone pine, white pine, giant sequoia — as easily as he can give the names of famous burials.

"People always ask who is the more notable person buried here," Smith said. "I always tell them my great-grandfather. It's not (about) the most important person. It's just how you perceive it."

Jergensen, who buried his first wife in the cemetery in 1999, said the perception of the cemetery both as burial ground and as neighborhood open space will eventually work in its favor.

"Whether or not we have family members or friends who are buried there, it's still a community place," Jergensen said. "It still honors what our community has been and will be because of who is buried there.

"As a community we have a responsibility for the long-term preservation of that history." he added. "What that amounts to, or what that leads to in the future in terms of funding for what will be an ever-increasing amount of costs has yet to be seen. But it's a discussion that we are going to have in the next year or two."

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E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com