Did you ever wonder about how Colma Cemetery came about?

 Just south of Daley city, you will find the 2.2 square mile town of Colma. There are 17 cemeteries in Colma, which means three quarters of the town are zoned for the dead. 

There are 1431 living residents in the little town. The multitude of cemeteries are the final resting place to roughly a million and a half people who have passed. 

Some famous deceased inhabitants resting for eternity in Comla are Joe DiMaggio and William Randolph Hurst. 

It’s a beautiful, undeniably spooky little place, with a ton of  florists and not a heck of a lot else. 

So how did something so strange come to be? How did so many dead people end up buried in Colma? 

Lemme tell ya’ll!

In San Francisco proper, between 1782 and 1898, more than 11,000 dead people were buried. There were 4 huge cemeteries, spanning 70 city blocks of valuable city real estate. In the deadly Gold Rush days, huge swaths of western San Francisco had been allocated to burring the dead. 

By 1880 living residents started really trippin about the huge population of dead people. It was being called a health hazard; it was making peoples commutes way long because they had to travel around hella graveyards. They also haven’t really figured out how much upkeep graveyards require, and they were falling into bad shape. The stones were breaking and falling over, people were stealing stuff, dead body parts were popping up from the earth. It was gross. 

So reasonably city residents were like “guys, this is wild, something has to be done.”

There was space in Colma, plenty of space and it’s very close to San Francisco. 

The first two cemeteries to move were Jewish cemeteries named Hills of Eternity and Home of the Peace. 

Did you know Dolores Park used to be a cemetery? It was moved to Colma. In the 1800s, San Francisco’s cemetery association purchased more and more acres of Colma's farmland to move all the burial grounds out of the city and free up the highly sought after land. 

By 1924, the city was officially all about cemeteries. When other businesses tried to get a foothold going, the town council vetoed it. They were explicitly committed to being a town for the dead. 

Moving the bodies from San Francisco to Colma was a whole thing. Lots of coffins had fallen apart so body parts were packed into make shift boxes. Religious cemeteries required a whole process, often a priest had to be present. 

During the time of all this action, Colma smelled very strongly of death. There was no preservatives- there was thousands of dead bodies in transport and various states of reburial. Just imagine it. 

It was messy, lots of dead people were misplaced in transport and never identified. Lots of bodies went back into the ground with no real idea of who they had been. 

The gravestones and markers were not over to Colma from San Francisco. They were reallocated in weird ways throughout the city. You can see the 1800s gravestones still lining the gutter in Buena Vista Park today!

Some graves were just ditched and built over. In 1950 during the excavation that was needed for building a big library called Gleeson, they found 200 dead bodies that had simply been left behind. 

In 1966 a work crew building the Hayes Residency hall found so many dead parts they got weirded out and refused to continue digging until a service was brought in to properly remove them. 

As recently as 2011, a construction project came upon 100s of abandoned bodies from a gold rush era abandoned former cemetery. 

Just think of all the haunting possibilities involved with this kind of mess, holy cow! 

So the story of Colma and San Francisco’s moved cemeteries is fascinating. Its an excellent Halloween take to be told this upcoming Thursday that shows some true scary local color. 

One thing is for sure, we know the worst place to be should there ever be an actual zombie apocalypse. 

Stay away from San Francisco and far away from Colma. 

Happy Halloween!!