The site commonly called the Indian Burial Pit (or Salina Burial Pit) lies on private land roughly four to five miles east of Salina in Saline County, Kansas, near the former route of U.S. Highway 40. It is a prehistoric communal burial ground associated with the Smoky Hill Phase of the Central Plains Village tradition (approximately 1000–1350 CE). The people who used the site are ancestral to the Pawnee, Wichita, and Arikara nations. Bones were first noted in 1873 when a farmer named Benjamin Marlin was digging a dugout. In 1936, amateur excavators Guy and Mabel Whiteford (with their son JayDee) uncovered a pit containing the remains of more than 140–145 individuals, many in flexed positions, along with pottery, tools, corn, beans, and other funerary objects. The Whitefords arranged to display the skeletons in situ under a building and charged admission (initially 50 cents). The attraction operated for decades as a roadside tourist stop and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Beginning in the 1970s, Native American groups, particularly the Pawnee, objected to the public display of ancestral remains. Kansas purchased the quarter-acre site in 1989–1990. In 1990, representatives of the Arikara, Wichita, and Pawnee nations conducted a reburial ceremony; the remains were covered with blankets and shawls, the pit was filled with sand, capped with concrete, and the surface was returned to grass. The location is now protected under Kansas unmarked-burial laws and is no longer open to the public.
Reported Hauntings and Folklore
Local folklore connected to the broader Saline River valley includes the 1879 story of a spirit named Takaluma who appeared to a cowboy and asked that his father’s skull (exhumed by a farmer) be returned to its resting place; the account appears in Kansas folklore collections. Separate family stories describe an apparition warning settlers not to plow a pasture containing ancestral burials. During the years the pit was a tourist attraction, promoters sometimes emphasized unusually tall skeletons (one contemporary account mentioned a roughly seven-foot individual). Modern online retellings occasionally link the site to later unexplained events in Salina, but these are not supported by contemporary documentation. After the 1990 reburial, no substantial body of visitor or staff reports of ongoing paranormal activity has been published. The stories remain regional folklore rather than the product of controlled investigation.
Relevant links
Kansas Memory: Roadside sign postcard
Wikipedia: Whiteford (Price) Archeological Site
Hutchinson News: “Whatever happened to the Indian burial grounds exhibit East of Salina?”
Kansas Historical Society: Indian Burial Pit materials
