USA TODAY National
COLMA, CA — On a cloudless October afternoon, Richard Rocchetta piloted his Toyota through a sea of weatherbeaten headstones and mausoleums that sprawl over hilly, manicured lawns of his hometown. He points to some of his best-known neighbors.
There’s Joe DiMaggio, the “Yankee Clipper.” There’s Wyatt Earp, the mustachioed Old West lawman. There's music impresario Bill Graham and William Randolph Hearst, the news tycoon. And in between, the lesser-known: Bankers, priests, Hells Angels bikers and Alcatraz inmates. And the mass graves of corpses evicted from San Francisco cemeteries a century ago.
Rocchetta is a gravedigger’s son, and he knows this place by heart.
Colma, incorporated as a necropolis in 1924 after San Francisco banned new burials, is home to 1.6 million souls in 17 cemeteries that take up most of its 2.2 square miles. In one of America’s most grave-dense cities, there are Italian, Serbian and Japanese cemeteries. Majestic arched entrances and elegant columbariums. Even a pet cemetery, where Tina Turner's dog is buried with one of her fur coats.
It's fitting that in a place where the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one, its roughly 1,600 above-ground residents have embraced the winking motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”
Growing up in the “City of Souls,” Rocchetta built forts with friends in the trees that edge cemeteries and learned to drive on cemetery roads. Neighbors worked in flower shops or setting headstones. At the dinner table, his father, an Italian immigrant with a seventh-grade education, talked about his day as a gravedigger. Graveside arguments. Children’s burials. A body that had turned to bones when he had to move it.
Now retired, Rocchetta can still see gravestones from his window. Each day brings more permanent residents, arriving in black hearses trailing solemn convoys of hazard-flashing cars to a place still served by generations of locals who cut granite memorials or pour sympathetic whiskeys.
This time of year, you might imagine that Colma would be Halloween mecca, that it would draw legions seeking gothic shenanigans and fog-shrouded backdrops for seances or selfies.
To be sure, there are events like trick-or-treating and a showing of the film “The Haunted Mansion" in a cemetery. And it's not without a past that has includes occasional tales of nighttime cemetery sounds or strange events, such as the Virgin Mary appearing in a tree.
But those who live or work among the city’s silent majority eschew the spooky romanticism of Halloween – insisting this is not the haunted place many envision, but rather one of reverence that stands as a story of how we remember our dead and their place in history.
Rocchetta, who remains steeped in Colma's history as a member of the local historical association and museum director, said he takes his matter-of-fact approach to a life spent among the dead from his father’s maxim:
“You need to worry more about those above ground than those underneath it.”
The birth of the ‘City of Souls’
The city’s story starts about 10 miles up the San Francisco Peninsula.
By the late 1800s, San Francisco was booming, fueled by the Gold Rush. And its cemeteries had grown into an overcrowded mess.
Worries about health hazards from vaporous winds blowing from cemeteries were fueling newspaper headlines calling for the cemeteries to go, according to the book “City of Souls” by Michael Svanevik and Shirley Burgett.
In 1901, San Francisco banned new burials within city limits. Some of the city’s neglected cemeteries fell into ruin, with toppled gravestones and thieves scavenging mausoleum doors, Svanevik said in a 2021 interview, noting some people wandered in for boozing, late-night sex and even to steal skeletons.
Above all, many of the cemeteries sat on prime land that was “needed for the living,” according to the Colma Historical Association. By 1914, eviction notices were sent to all San Francisco cemeteries ordering them to exhume and move the dead.
The Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco had already purchased 300 acres of sloping cabbage and potato fields in the area known as Colma, where it opened Holy Cross Cemetery. Others followed suit.
Despite years of legal battles over the relocations, more than 150,000 bodies were exhumed from the 1920s to the early 1940s for the trip to Colma, each in various stages of decay.
Intact caskets − or boxes of bones if they had deteriorated − were loaded onto wagons and rail cars and moved to Colma in what could be a grisly affair. While some paid to have headstones moved, many stayed in San Francisco and were later used in building projects including gutters and a breakwater.
At Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, funeral rail cars would arrive multiple times a day at a station across the street, said Monica WIlliams, Director of Cemeteries for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
“There used to be a bell on the top of the building, and they would bring the casket into the building, they would ring the bell, and that would signal the grave diggers to come down and pick up the casket,” she said.
Over time, the city drew a cross-section of San Francisco society: Wealthy socialites, artists, top political leaders and business titans including those known as the Potato King and Cattle King. There were also prisoners, paupers and unclaimed bodies who went into mass graves, including remains of 39,307 Catholics at Holy Cross.
In 1924, the city, first named Lawndale and later changed to Colma, was incorporated as a city to protect the dead from encroachment. It had already drawn a supporting cast of hearse drivers, monument-makers and flower shops to the area.
After World War II, the above-ground population grew when veterans purchased bungalows in Colma’s Sterling Park neighborhood, some costing $8,950, with GI loans (some of which are now are worth nearly $1 million). But the population of the living, which would only grow to about 1,600, reamining forever dwarfed by the dead.
By the 1970s, Colma's western edge attracted car dealerships and later big box stores, a rail transit station and apartments. Nurseries and a golf course clung to other parts of the city. In 1998, the Lucky Chances casino opened, surrounded by graveyards on three side, which critics saw as a sacrilege. But its 60-table card room, tucked into a low-key design, remained. It brings gamblers to play Pai Gow or Texas Hold'em and, city officials said, critical revenue to the town.
Today Colma's cemeteries are a peaceful island of calm among busy interstates, San Francisco’s airport and the bustle of Silicon Valley. One that draws not just mourners but tourists seeking out history.
They include George Moscone, a San Francisco mayor who was assassinated in 1978 along with Harvey Milk, a member of the board of supervisors who was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress murdered by Charles Manson’s cult members.
And the Emperor Norton, a late-1800s San Francisco eccentric figure known for wearing a ostrich-plumed hat and sword and dubbing himself the "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” Still more include a Hells Angel member was buried in Colma grave with his motorcycle in the 1970s.
Fans leave baseballs or bats on the grave of Joe DiMaggio, or coins and other memorabilia on the black granite headstone where Wyatt Earp and his wife are buried. They visit denim magnate Levi Strauss, who lies in a domed mausoleum. There are sold-out tours of famous Northern California wine makers, merchants and bottlers.
And family members visit loved ones in non-demoniational, Jewish, Catholic, Japanese, Greek, Serbian cemeteries. A Chinese cemetery whose entrance is flanked by giant panda statues and Pet’s Rest, where plots with animals from ocelots to iguanas honor pets with names like Yugi, Taco, Ludwig, Buster, Chico the Chihuahua.
“It’s like the United Nations of cemeteries,” Rocchetta said, each with its own vibe. The Chinese cemetery is “very Feng shui,” he said, “and, of course, the Greeks are all facing east when they bury them.”
Generations of Colma families still serving the dead
The sun rose over the nearby San Bruno Mountains on a recent day, lighting misty cemeteries dotted with cedar and palm trees. Landscaping crews zipped along cemetery roads around in carts as sprinklers shot water across green lawns.
At Holy Cross, it was another busy day for the nonprofit cemetery that houses more than 400,000 souls and adds another 1,500 a year, with plenty of room as more people choose to be cremated rather than buried in a coffin. But the work never stops.
“It’s like running a little city,” said Williams, who oversees a staff of 60 who mow lawns, weed, dig graves, plan services, install headstones, sell gravesites, give tours and help with genealogy and other research.
That research, for example, recently discovered a survivor of the 1912 Titanic disaster was – by sheer chance – buried within feet of a man who worked on the ship that rescued her.
"You have to be present to people who are grieving. And that's really meaningful work,” she said. “But the fun part is learning all these stories. And that's what cemeteries are about, telling stories.”
Across town, Mark Fontana leaned over a slab of granite in a monument manufacturing shop located right next to the Italian cemetery, full of headstones in various stages, giant stone cutting machines, diamond-grinders and a room for sandblasting headstones.
V. Fontana & Company was opened in 1921 by his grandfather, Valerio Fontana, a stone-cutter who immigrated from Italy and worked on San Francisco's city hall before moving to Colma. Its nearby office is full of historic photos, and Mark Fontana’s daughters live upstairs, just as he and his father once did. Outside is an open air patio, where family and friends gather for long dinners next to a kitchen plastered with family pictures.
While technology has changed – photo images can now be set on stone - he bases his business on quietly listening to what people want in a final marker and delivering it. Recently that ranged from a man in his 70s who lost his childhood sweetheart to cancer to a woman who was burying her beloved horse.
“It's the final thing anybody's ever gonna do for whoever they're doing it for,” he said. “And it’s there for all time.”
A mile to the west, Owen Molloy polished glasses at another local landmark — Molloy’s Tavern, opened by his grandfather in the 1920s in a former hotel and stagecoach stop across the street from Holy Cross Cemetery to capitalize on Irish wakes.
On a recent day, a patron drank a Guinness at the bar amid walls are covered in funeral notices from people who had come for a drink after saying that final goodbye. Hung too were some of the many articles including written about the bar, including one that noted that “Though the Molloy’s dwell in the valley of death,” it was a place where “black clad mourners duck in for a soothing pint.”
Molloy grew up here, and after taking over from his father, now lives within walking distance. The history is all around him.
During prohibition, he said the bar was used to store alcohol smuggled in from Canada on timber ships and later sold in San Francisco gas stations. Wyatt Earp, before his death in 1929, would sometimes come in for a drink after refereeing nearby boxing matches held in the area.
Its location meant visits by mayors. Evil Knievel once rode his motorcycle through the bar.
Legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was a regular, drawn like many to its history and dive-bar vibes, Molloy said. “He used to write so many articles about Malloys, the editor asked him if he was on our payroll,” he said.
Rocchetta, for his part, heeded his father’s advice to stay away from gravedigging despite it being a union job with a pension back then. After working for the state, Rocchetta has played a key role in the historical society whose museum includes artifacts like a traveling embalming table.
A couple of years ago, Rocchetta purchased a grave site for himself in town.
But ask area residents how living or working in the City of Souls – surrounded by the unblinking fact of their own future – has impacted their perspective on death, and most respond with a shrug. Just a part of life.
Fences help quell cemetery misadventures
At night, things are generally quiet in the cemeteries, according to Helen Fisicaro, a Colma city council member and former mayor who has lived in town since the 1970s.
But it wasn’t always that way before cemeteries put in fences and installed security cameras.
Kids playing hide-and-seek in cemeteries and teenagers drinking beer at night weren’t uncommon, Molloy said.
“It was a free-for-all back then,” he said.
Former Colma Police Sgt. Tim Mackie told the East Bay Times in 2005 that during nighttime graveyard patrols, he’d discovered naked lovers, people dancing on graves and the remains of seances, with candles circling a grave and pieces of a chicken strewn about.
There was the time when police spotted a man with blood dripping from his ear and mouth in a cemetery who then seemed to disappear, the outlet reported, with Mackie noting that while there were “some cops who get spooked out at nighttime” he wasn’t one of them. An LA Times column from the 1990s cited what it said was the rare resident who claimed ghosts roamed one mausoleum for stillborns and infants.
Once a man shot and killed himself on his father’s grave at Holy Cross. Another time brass vases were stolen, Rocchetta said. There was one instance of vandals toppling monuments.
In 1997, a branch fell off a tree near Olivet Memorial Park, revealing a spot where people believed they could see the Virgin Mary in a gown with her hands folded in prayer, drawing large crowds.
“People would take photos and leave flowers,” Rocchetta said. “They had to have policemen out here because the traffic was so heavy.”
That too has been fenced off, and these days there’s little mischief – at least that they know about, said Fisicaro, the city council member. And in the era of remote cameras, it’s tougher to get away with hijinks.
Over the years, the cemeteries have also served as backdrops for movie scenes, from 1971’s “Harold and Maude” to 2006’s “Colma: The Musical.” The professional wrestler known as The Undertaker filmed a commercial at one of the Jewish cemeteries, Fisicaro said.
Ghost hunters have conducted paranormal investigations, Rocchetta said, but he recalled that at least once they came up short.
“I don’t think they found anything,” he said.
Balancing Halloween with reverence for the dead.
In the neighborhood where “Cinema at the Cemetery” was scheduled for a showing on a mausoleum lawn, homes are decorated with Halloween figures or skeletons, some within clear view of a real cemetery.
On Halloween, families come from nearby Daly City and elsewhere to trick-or-treat in the neighborhood, drawn by the peaceful streets and gothic backdrop.
But Fisicaro, who lives in the neighborhood, said the city has a complicated relationship with Halloween. The city works to balance fun with reverence, and discourages people from coming to the city to enter the cemeteries at night hoping for a ghostly experience. That also applies to a steady supply of writers who imagine the place to be haunted.
“Every Halloween, we get a call from some newspaper or whatever,” she said. “But there really isn't that kind of story here. It's not scary. It's not ghostly. There's this protection or reverence of the cemeteries.”
Reflecting town's motto, she, too, takes living among the dead with a winking stride.
When she moved into her home years ago, built by an early cemetery worker who died in the home, at times it almost seemed as if doors closed for no apparent reason. “We’d just laugh and go, ‘That's Mr. Jensen.”
Later, when she and her husband removed their fireplace, they found grave markers had been used in its construction.
If you find bones, she told him, we’re moving.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why it's good to be alive in this city where the dead outnumber the living
Reporting by Chris Kenning, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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