There’s a little town in the San Francisco Bay Area called Colma that is quite fascinating to us taphophiles. Here’s something wild about it: the dead there outnumber the living one thousand to one. You see, Colma was originally founded as a necropolis (i.e. a cemetery). Many bodies thought to be resting in peace were exhumed and then transported from the San Francisco city limits because they were running out of space for gravesites (and of course didn’t want to use any prime property for new cemeteries). So about 150,000 bodies were moved between the years 1920 & 1941. A lot of the corpses were transported by street car. (No word on if they had to pay a fare to ride) Some grave markers were even taken and then used in various San Francisco public works projects. Some examples include using some of them for drain gutters at Buena Vista Park and others in firming up the breakwater near the St. Francis Yacht Club. Some of them can still be seen when it’s low tide on Ocean Beach for those inclined to look for them and I admit I’d be one of them ghouls looking. Some of the more famous people buried in Colma include: San Francisco Giants baseball star Willie McCovey, New York Yankee star and Mr. Coffee salesman, Joe DiMaggio, tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Old West legend, Wyatt Earp, and jazz musician Vince Guaraldi (Charlie Brown Christmas), among others. The 17 cemeteries there take up almost 75% of the town’s land area. Sounds like my kind of place. Can you imagine the restless spirits that must be hanging around there? All those bodies that were to rest in peace dug up and shipped out? The paranormal factor must be off the charts. A definite must visit some time.
