In September 1878, William Holland, the only remaining original member of the Holly Springs, Mississippi Yellow Fever Relief Committee, described the presence of the plague in his small town as, ‘living in the midst of the very garden of death’. According to available sources, this epidemic, which relentlessly swept across the state, claimed over four thousand citizens in five months, with the total number of cases exceeding sixteen thousand individuals. Although the pestilence was well-known in the region, the 1878 outbreak differed, as it took several previously ‘healthy’ Northern Mississippi cities by surprise, decimating their populations. These late nineteenth century ‘Bad Deaths’ were disturbing to a state reeling from the horrors of enslavement, the violence of the American Civil War, as well as the onset of the brutal ‘Jim Crow’ period. The memory of the 1878 chaos assumed an almost mythological quality over time, including narratives of horrifying burial scenes with decomposing corpses exposed, shallow graves unearthed, and ‘disease-ridden’ cemeteries filled to capacity. Tales of yellow fever mass/trench burial in previously ‘ordered’ cemeteries also endured over the decades. However, a few affected North Mississippi cemeteries were lately mapped using Ground Penetrating Radar, with results often appearing to be inconsistent with the oral record. This paper will address three such cemeteries, including those in Holly Springs, Batesville, and Grenada. The work will postulate various reasons for the reliance upon local legend, as well as the frequently unacknowledged endurance of ‘Good Death’ burials, even in the midst of the yellow fever disaster.