Prairie Home Cemetery

* **Location**: Along 8th St South, between 7th and 9th Avenues S in Moorhead  MN, UCAS  56560, across 8th from Concordia College.
* **Background Count:**Local conditions vary, but Prairie Home Cemetery generally maintains a 1-2 rating higher background count than the surrounding environment.
* **Access:**Although Prairie Home Cemetery is technically property of the Red River Cemetery Association, the City of Moorhead has deemed it to be a 'Class B Watch Site' and Knight Errant Astral Security restricts access to the cemetery except to qualified persons. Permission usually originates with either City of Moorhead or Principia, which keeps a special watch on it and provides magical back up for KEAS.

Prairie Home Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota.

The cemetery was founded in 1875 by the Rev. Oscar Elmer, a Presbyterian minister who was the first ordained member of Christian clergy in Fargo–Moorhead. Rev. Elmer's brother John had drowned in the Red River of the North  while visiting from New York in 1874. The condition of John Elmer's body when it was recovered meant that it could not be shipped back East, as was the usual custom, but had to be buried immediately in a makeshift grave. The following spring, Rev. Elmer organized a cemetery association, which formally created the Prairie Home Cemetery. John Elmer's body was then moved to the new cemetery.

By 1929 the Prairie Home Cemetery Association merged with the Riverside Cemetery Association, which had organized a cemetery across the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota in 1884.

In 1974 public radio host Garrison Keillor  used the cemetery's name for the title of his long-running radio program *A Prairie Home Companion,*which ran from 1974 to 2016.

Being across the street from a college full of impressionable students and given the amount of history that the place had, it was almost inevitable that stories of ghosts and hauntings would accumulate to the Prairie Home Cemetery even before the Awakening. There is still a fierce debate among researchers whether the weight of the legends and beliefs in the astral brought about what happened next or if those beliefs were caused by the taint the place already possessed (\*warning: Do NOT get into this with any of the local magic professors unless you've already scheduled your whole night to debating Unified Magical Theory).

With the Awakening , specifically the Great Ghost Dance, the forces of magic seemed to close in on Moorhead, especially Concordia's campus, with the rising flood waters of the Red swallowing up the town from the west and from the east, the dead began to rise from their graves, century-old skeletons charged with power, physically glowing with magic and grief and memory. These terrifying apparitions terrified Moorhead, defying the Moorhead police department and pursuing the living. The risen dead seemed to be working on ancient memories, seeking out buildings that were no longer there, doggedly pursuing ends a hundred years and more had rendered irrelevant if not wholly incomprehensible and they seemed to desire to take all the trappings of life from the living, trying to wear clothes (or skin) or valuable objects (charged with personal significance) they took from them, draining those they touched of heat and health and life.

It was only the combined efforts of a group of newly-awakened mages organized by Concordia (the first incarnations of the Principia and the Pontoppidan Order ) using the power inherent in Concordia's campus (which it turned out had been laid out as a magical symbol) to drive the dead back to their graves and cast the first version of the ward laid over the Prairie Home (which is renewed annually over Homecoming by Principia). However, even so, occasionally when the mana levels are particularly high (especially during Mana Storms), sometimes the wards waver and one or more of them will stalk the living once more, craving the existance they have lost...

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