On two October afternoons, a small crowd will gather at the gates of Detroit's oldest continuously operating cemetery and walk among the headstones, listening for the voices of women who have largely slipped out of the city's official memory. The event is called Girls in the Graveyard, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a guided walking tour through Historic Elmwood Cemetery, followed by cider, sweets, and books.
The 2026 edition takes place Friday, Oct. 16, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., and Saturday, Oct. 17, from 2 to 4:30 p.m., at Elmwood Cemetery, 1200 Elmwood Street on Detroit's east side. Tickets are $35 per person, and each ticket includes a year of membership to The Outlier Collective, the membership program of Outlier Media, the Detroit nonprofit newsroom that organizes the event in partnership with the Historic Elmwood Cemetery and Foundation.
The premise is simple and a little haunting. During the tour, guides introduce attendees to journalists, educators, activists, diplomats, designers, aviators, public servants, and military pioneers who helped shape Detroit and beyond. The tour is led by Amy Elliott Bragg, a Detroit writer and historian who serves as Elmwood's director of education and has spent years researching the cemetery's 19th-century residents.
Elmwood itself is a character in the story. Founded by some of early Detroit's leading citizens and established in 1846, it was incorporated in 1849 as a nonprofit by an act of the Michigan Legislature. It grew from an original 42 acres to its current 86 and became, in the words of its own foundation, the final resting place of "tycoon and laborer alike." It is the oldest continuously operating, non-denominational cemetery in Detroit, and it functions much like a public park, regularly hosting tours and visitors.
Among the women buried there is Fannie Richards, born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1840 to free parents. Educated in Toronto, she settled in Detroit in her early twenties and opened a private school for Black children in 1863. In 1868 she was appointed instructor of the city's segregated Colored School No. 2. Working with local politician John Bagley and other activists, Richards helped bring a lawsuit against the Detroit Board of Education on behalf of a Black student refused enrollment in his neighborhood school because of his race. In 1869 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled public school segregation unconstitutional and ordered Detroit to integrate. Richards was transferred to the newly integrated Everett Elementary School in 1871, where she taught for 44 years and established the first kindergarten class in Michigan. She also helped found and finance the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies and served as its president.
Another woman on the tour's map is Cora Brown, who in 1952 won a seat in the Michigan State Senate and became the first African American woman elected to a state senate in the United States. A Democrat representing Detroit, she served from 1953 to 1956. She is buried in Section A2, Lot 27.
The cemetery's biography list also points to suffragists and philanthropists, a treasurer of the Ladies' Soldiers' Aid Society during the Civil War, and a teacher and philanthropist, among others — a cross-section of the women whose labor and activism built institutions that outlived them.
Girls in the Graveyard began as something of an experiment. According to a case study by Future Tides, which documents how news organizations build audience through live events, Outlier Media's first tour was a walking tour at Elmwood, chosen in part because the cemetery is open to the public much like a park and already offered tours of its own. That first outing sold out with 100 attendees. The response, boosted by local media partners including Michigan Public and the local ABC affiliate, told Ashley Fassett, Outlier Media's membership and event manager, that they were onto something. The event has since become an annual fixture of the newsroom's calendar.
The format has evolved into a full evening or afternoon out. After the walking tour, attendees gather for cider and sweets — in earlier years, refreshments came from the Detroit bakery Sister Pie — and browse hand-picked books from Source Booksellers, an independent, woman-owned bookstore in Detroit. The pairing is deliberate: the tour is meant to send people home with names and stories they can keep reading about.
That impulse — turning a cemetery walk into a lesson in local history — fits Outlier Media's broader mission. The nonprofit newsroom, which describes itself as helping Detroiters "get the info you need to navigate Detroit — and thrive," has built a membership program around events like this one. Anyone who has donated to Outlier Media or bought a ticket to one of its events in the past 365 days is considered a member of The Outlier Collective, which is why the $35 ticket doubles as a year of membership.
For all its spooky-season timing, the event is less about ghosts than about presence — the reminder that the women who fought for integrated schools, won seats in the state legislature, and built the city's charitable institutions are buried within a few minutes' walk of one another, under headstones most Detroiters have never read. The tour asks attendees to do what cemeteries are built for and what history rarely manages: to stop, look at the names, and remember.
Tickets and details are available through Outlier Media's events page. In past years the tour has sold out, so those interested are encouraged to reserve early.