Hidden Cemeteries & Forgotten Burial Grounds

Neighbourhood: Various · Address: Various — see each cemetery · Hours: Necropolis: daily dawn to dusk. St. James: daily. Mount Pleasant: daily 8am–8pm · Price Range: Free · Editorial status: Not yet verified

Why Visit

Toronto's cemeteries double as peaceful urban green spaces with haunting Gothic architecture and celebrity graves scattered among towering old-growth trees. They’re a quiet lens into the city’s strange, sometimes macabre past.

What Makes It Unique

These burial sites are surprisingly central yet almost invisible: Potter’s Field lies beneath Yorkville’s chic sidewalks, and Necropolis feels like it’s in the 19th century despite its downtown location. The elaborate mausoleums, tangled gravestones, and design details (like the Necropolis’s rainbow windows) set them apart from parks or historic sites you’d expect in the core.

If you want one of the strangest, most quietly fascinating walks in downtown Toronto, go looking for the rivers that aren’t there anymore. Garrison Creek and Taddle Creek used to run openly through what’s now some of the city’s busiest neighbourhoods, long before roads, houses, and campus buildings covered everything over. By the late 19th and early 20th century, both creeks had been pushed into culverts and folded into the sewer system as Toronto expanded. You can’t see the water now, but once you know the routes, the city starts giving itself away. Garrison Creek is the easier one to feel in your body. Start around Trinity Bellwoods and walk with your eyes on the shape of the land instead of the storefronts. You’ll notice dips where the ground falls away more than it seems like it should, and streets that don’t behave the way a rigid grid is supposed to. The biggest clue is the Crawford Street bridge, which looks oddly dramatic if you don’t know why it’s there. It spans what was once a much more obvious valley, and it’s probably the clearest surviving piece of the old creek landscape. Stand there for a minute and you can almost picture the ravine before it was buried and built over. Taddle Creek is subtler, but once you’re on to it, it’s everywhere around the University of Toronto and the Annex. Near Philosopher’s Walk and the old campus buildings, the terrain gently sags and rises in ways that make more sense when you remember a watercourse used to pass through. Some roads curve a little strangely, and certain green spaces feel less accidental than they first appear. It’s not dramatic in a “look at that river” way. It’s more like reading a palimpsest: the modern city is on top, but the earlier version keeps showing through. What actually happens here is basically a very good urban walk. You’re not going to a site with ticket booths or interpretive actors. You’re wandering through regular Toronto streets, parks, campus paths, and residential blocks, noticing how topography still argues with the street plan. If you like maps, this gets even better. Pull up an old creek map on your phone and compare it in real time as you walk. Suddenly a weird bend in a road, a park in an inconvenient spot, or a basement-level grade change starts to make sense. Even the fact that some areas flood more easily has roots in these buried waterways. A couple practical things: don’t go trying to enter drains, culverts, storm sewers, or anything fenced off. The rivers themselves are inaccessible and it’s dangerous anyway. The point is the above-ground evidence, which is fully public and honestly more interesting than people expect. This is free, available anytime, and best done at a slow pace. For Garrison Creek, come in from Ossington or Dufferin Station. For Taddle Creek, start at Museum Station and roam south and west through campus. If you’re the kind of person who likes knowing why a city looks the way it does, this walk will get under your skin a bit. Afterward, downtown won’t feel flat anymore.