One of the things that I am absolutely fascinated by is the way cities are built up over their dead. In long-lived cities like Rome or Paris or London, it’s inevitable that cemeteries from the past have been built over and forgotten. In San Francisco, which isn’t even 250 years old, the shortness of memory is more surprising.
Journalist Beth Winegarner shares my obsession with cemeteries. Her newest book is “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History,” which comes out today. In the book, she looks into the cemeteries that used to lie beneath the Presidio Parade Ground, the Asian Art Museum, what’s now a Target, and much more.
I asked her to tell us about it.
“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History”
by Beth Winegarner
San Francisco is famous for many things: tech companies like Twitter and Uber, the cacophony of sea lions at Pier 39, the Painted Ladies houses, major earthquakes. It’s also known, especially among locals, for not having any cemeteries.
But what if I told you that settlers established nearly 30 cemeteries in San Francisco between the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1770s and 1901, when city leaders banned any new burials within city limits — and that, in the process of moving 150,000 graves to Colma in the early 20th century, tens of thousands of graves were left behind?
My new book, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” traces the history of these burial grounds, from one at Mission Dolores where headstones still mark the grounds, to a pet cemetery hidden beneath a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Presidio. It includes many graveyards where bodies still rest beneath the ground while residents, workers, and tourists unknowingly pass over them every day.
Writing is one of my favorite ways to connect with the history of a place, and with the place itself. In my first book, “Sacred Sonoma,” I wrote about unusual places in Sonoma County, in Northern California: Locations where people reported ineffable (or chilling) experiences, or hauntings. I dug into local history, including indigenous and settler history, and created a kind of travel guide to these sites, which remains popular to this day.
After almost 20 years living in San Francisco, I felt like I wanted to get to know this place better, and a friend connected me with an amazing digital archive of local newspapers. Out of curiosity I looked for articles about San Francisco’s cemeteries, and began to discover just how many there were, how badly mismanaged they were in the early years of the city, and how many were forgotten.
As San Francisco and its population expanded, graveyards were pushed farther and farther out from the city center. And with so many people coming and going, especially after the Gold Rush, the city had very little institutional memory. A cemetery would be decommissioned, its grave markers (usually wood) removed and sometimes its burials relocated, only to be rediscovered when a new generation wanted to dig sewer lines or build something. Many crews fled job sites because of what they found beneath the soil.
After San Francisco banned burials, residents voted to move the graveyards south to a small town just outside city limits. The majority of burials, probably about 75%, were relocated, but about 25% remain in place. They’re beneath the Lincoln Park Golf Course, the Legion of Honor Museum, the Asian Art Museum, the University of San Francisco, and residential neighborhoods of the Golden Gate Park panhandle, among others.
I became fascinated by these discoveries, and moved by the existence of so many abandoned dead. Once I started learning, I couldn’t help but write, in the hope of sharing this history with others and remembering what so many people had forgotten. It’s helped me understand San Francisco better, and I hope readers find meaning in it, too.
“San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” by Beth Winegarner (trade paperback, 172 pages, 60 photographs), with a foreword by Roberto Lovato, author of “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and the Revolution in the Americas,” is being published by The History Press on August 28, 2023. You can order a copy from Amazon or directly from The History Press.
To find out more and to see dates for local and online events in connection with the book, click here.
You can also follow Beth on Instagram, where she’s posting images of the old cemeteries.
I am excited to announce that Beth will chat about all things cemeteries with me on October 27 at the San Francisco Columbarium: RSVP here.
Rozz’s niche at Hollywood Forever as photographed by Mason Jones.
by Lilah Wild
It began when I decided: fuck it, I’m going somewhere special for my 30th birthday.
Café La Bohème was a fine-dining establishment that had gotten a rep around the Los Angeles travel boards as “the goth restaurant.” I’d been curious about it for a while and, really, what better time to go? Since I live in San Francisco, it mandated a road trip southward, so we’d just have to spend the weekend. Hello, Route 5!
“We’re going to L.A.” I announced to my other half and began planning an itinerary: Forest Lawn, Trashy Lingerie, Venice Beach, Canter’s, Melrose of course. We hit the club listings and saw that Frankenstein would be playing with The Deep Eynde and The Coffin Draggers on Saturday night. Perfect! I sketched out a tentative schedule, but other than a nice dinner, didn’t have anything planned for Sunday, my birthday. I figured it would resolve itself along the way.
Our internet hotel deal landed us in a Beverly Hills three-star a few streets away from Rodeo Drive, which was a most amusing place to emerge covered in torn fishnet, heading to some bar in the middle of nowhere for a night of good deathrock. Truly, it seemed to me, there were few better ways to spend the last night of my 20s than watching a bunch of cranky old punks in ghoulface. Why be afraid of aging when there’s a whole beautiful scene that gleefully paints itself up like living corpses? You can’t get any older than dead.
Eros and Psyche in Hollywood Forever. Photo by Loren Rhoads.
After a couple of drinks and watching The Deep Eynde transcend the ’70s-era wood-paneled stage ambiance, we noticed a vendor table and went to investigate. Pins! Little death pins! And lots of them. While I picked out a handful for my jacket, the guy behind the table taunted me: “Why don’t you have any pins on your jacket! He’s got pins on his jacket!” That made me smile, because I put them all over my other half’s lapels earlier over lunch at Duke’s.
After our purchase, the vendor handed us each a free pin. He refused to sell those particular ones during April: an image of Rozz Williams. We looked at each other: yeah, that’s right, this is around when it happened. Everything fell into place: we’d spend my birthday paying a visit to Rozz.
Hollywood Forever by Loren Rhoads.
Hollywood Forever sits on Santa Monica Boulevard, amidst the bustle of discount clothing stores, burrito joints, impatient traffic. Daily life whirls on all around it, but when you pass through the gates, it provides an impressive pocket of peace and quiet. We pulled in and made the assumption that Rozz was in the cemetery and — judging from the size of the place — we would need a map to find him. So off to the gift shop it was. The souvenir map was scattered with stars for all the celebrities buried within. It turned out that Rozz was in the columbarium. I’d been told that the one in S.F. was an intriguing place to visit, but I still hadn’t made it yet, so this was my first time to see how cremated remains were laid to rest.
The first room in the building was a chapel, with a box of tissues considerately placed at the end of each pew. Behind this we entered the columbarium proper. The place was like nothing I’d ever seen before — it had the gilded elegance of a department store, the hush and order of a library, with a large fountain splashing away in the center, and golden afternoon light spilling down from overhead. The walls and pillars were inlaid with hundreds of little windows. Wondrous. We circled the perimeter of the room, gazing into the boxes. The first floor had a more somber tone, with what looked like books inscribed with the names of the deceased. Things got more interesting on the second floor, where we’d been directed to find Rozz.
Many of the cases were still empty — Hollywood Forever’s website touts the columbarium as a unique yet cost-effective place of remembrance, but it looks like it’s still in the midst of catching on. That made the few occupied boxes stand out and catch our attention, with their urns and photos and mementos nestled in soft beds of velvet and satin. The first case I saw contained a photograph of a glamorous blonde, caught in a sunlit smile. A small poster of a pulp flick she’d starred in stood alongside a Seraphim Classics angel figurine, her business card, and headshots of all the various looks she could pull off. It looked like she’d quite enjoyed playing the vamp. A necklace curled in a corner. Taped to the glass was a card left by a visitor. Going from the indie film credit and her obvious love for dress-up, I couldn’t help but smile back at this complete stranger: this was someone after my own heart.
Douglas Fairbanks’ monument, Hollywood Forever. Photo by Loren Rhoads.
A few cases down, an officer’s cap was surrounded by press clippings and photographs of a gorgeous Asian pinup girl and her military paramour clinking champagne glasses, somewhere in the middle of the past century. Across the room, a man sporting a DA ’do was captured in the midst of a fierce dance step before a band, eyes closed and every nerve alive. His ashes were kept in a box covered with vibrant tattoo art.
Every so often, we’d run across a cherub statue perched atop a luxurious drape of fabric, with a discreet advertisement for the columbarium’s memorial options.
I walked around the room, enamored by each tiny stage: so much like my altar at home, with all the treasures I’ve accumulated over time, each representing a different facet of my spirit. These little shrines seemed so warm and intimate, infused with such a flavor of personality, compared to the cold stone slabs outside, marked with only names and years or maybe some lovely but generic statuary, not much else beyond a lump of marble to tell you about the person resting there.
We found Rozz in a pillar next to the staircase. His ashes were in a ceramic urn, flanked by a dead rose and a handwritten note. There were faint lipstick traces on the glass where someone had kissed him goodbye, along with fingerprints tracing out the Christian Death symbol, a X transposed over a cross. In reading the note, I cursed not having a pen. There were a couple of lines I wanted to remember, which I paraphrase here:
I erect a burning temple in my heart, to house such treasures as these A thousand starlit memories to comfort me in my hours of need…
Outside the case, there was a sconce to the right, inside which curled a zine bearing Galaxxy Chamber’s contact info. I badly wanted to pull it down and read it, but decorum prevented me. On the floor lay a small stack of flyers for some band’s Rozz Williams tribute night, along with their CD and two dozen roses. Initially, I was put off that someone was using a grave as a place to promote their night — some people never quit — but later thought about how I wouldn’t mind my resting place being used as a crossroads of sorts, a place for the living to connect with each other. Still involved in the community after my death: I wouldn’t mind that at all.
Jayne Mansfield’s cenotaph in Hollywood Forever. Photo by Loren Rhoads.
We spent a lot more time at Hollywood Forever than anticipated. We walked out of the columbarium and lingered over the rest of the grounds, exploring with our map. Brushed dirt from Jayne Mansfield’s elegant cenotaph. Frowned on the impersonal, filing-cabinet layout of the mausoleum in the back. Grinned at Mel Blanc’s “That’s all, folks!” written across his tombstone.
We mused on the things we’d put in our own display cases. A few weeks before, an online quiz made the rounds among my LiveJournal friends and was one of the rare few I’d participated in. Unlike the kazillion “What kind of meatloaf are you?” personality tests, this one asked you to name 12 things you’d put in a box to tell someone about yourself. I’d included a bottle of theatrical blood, a silver pentacle, a Skinny Puppy cassette, a sprig of white sage, a pair of kitty ears. It seemed an eerie foreshadowing of today’s visit, since all those windows asked me this same question on a much more permanent level: what would I leave behind to tell the world what my life was about? What will define me when I’m gone? Walking past the graves back to the car, I thought about how the first three decades of my life were over and how much more I want to do. That how I decided to spend the time ahead of me was what would ultimately end up behind that glass. Forever.
Choose it carefully, kid.
Dinner that night at La Bohème was absolutely sublime.
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This essay originally appeared in Morbid Curiosity #9. Reprinted here with Lilah’s kind permission.
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Lilah Wild’s dark fiction is an ongoing search for hidden cauldrons within the modern landscape, exploring the contemporary fantastic and horrific. She is a graduate of Clarion West and a member of NYC-based writing group Altered Fluid. Her work has appeared in Pseudopod, Spinetinglers, Not One of Us, Dark Tales from Elder Regions: New York, Niteblade, and other venues of quality scrawl. When she’s not elucidating on Old Hollywood screen goddesses or the blood and fire quotient of metal videos that purport to be evil, Lilah can be found dabbling in tribal fusion bellydancing, hiking the deco puzzlebox of Manhattan, or running away to the beach. She lives in Queens amid a clamor of doom metal noodling and four cats.
For the next year, I’m planning to put a cemetery essay up every Friday. If there is a cemetery that has touched your life, I would love to hear from you, particularly if there is one you visited on vacation. The submissions guidelines are here.
The oculus in the dome of the San Francisco Columbarium
I went to a funeral last week in one of the most beautiful places in San Francisco. I’ve written about the columbarium before — I’ve visited it many times — but this was the first time I’ve been there for the purpose for which it was intended.
The dead man was the husband of a friend of mine, father to a daughter the same age as my own. I didn’t know him well, but I love his wife, so I went to the celebration of his life. It was perfect: a slide show, a board with stories from his life, cards made by his daughter’s classmates, a table with portrait photos of him and the urn with his ashes.
Their daughter came over to say hi. I told her my daughter sent her love. Then I asked, “Are you on spring break this week?”
“No,” she said. “I’m skipping school today.”
I could tell she was troubled by the forbidden aspect of it, so I said gently, “I think you have a good reason.”
Her face froze and she nodded, then dodged off before I could apologize. Oh, well done, I thought. You made a child cry at her father’s funeral. I tried to imagine anything I might have said that wouldn’t have reminded her of her loss, but I came up blank.
Remembering my brother’s funeral, almost 12 years ago now, and how I could barely speak for grief, I forgave myself, because really there are no magic words that make the loss stop hurting. There is no making it better. The person you love is gone forever and your love has nowhere to go, so it turns on you and hurts you. All you can do is keep going on, treasuring your memories and slowly, slowly, let your loved one go.
For all that I write about graveyards and their denizens, I haven’t found any wisdom with which to comfort others. We die, but life goes on. This young girl will grow up, fall in love, travel, find work, live a rich and full life, but she has lost something she will never get back: her innocence, her sense of security, her daddy’s love. Around her, the Columbarium was filled with beauty and fascinating stories. Outside, the day was perfect: a flawless blue sky, 65 degrees, green grass, bright sun, birdsong. I’m sure she didn’t even see that.
I walked back to my car, inarticulate with emotion. I hadn’t lost anything today, but I could see the future so clearly: the deaths of my parents, my friends, maybe my husband although he’s sworn never to die. I have been lucky to have only lost my brother and my grandparents so far. I think growing up is not buying a house, or having a child, or pursuing a career. For me, it means learning to face all the loss to come.
I have so much to learn.
After I went to the service, I found this link on twitter. It’s advice on how to support someone who is grieving. I think I will turn to it often as my friend survives her loss.
Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco, California
The Neptune Society’s lovely columbarium in San Francisco features a stained glass window in every room off its main floor rotunda. Every room, that is, except one. The Tiffany window from the 13th room was stolen before the Neptune Society took possession of the building and has never been recovered. That room has plain white frosted glass in memory of what was lost.
The columbarium is one of my favorite places in San Francisco. I take everyone there. I even sent John Levitt there when he was looking for San Francisco locations for Unleashed, the third Dog Days book.
I’ve toured the columbarium three times now, most recently with the Obscura Society. Every tour has been different, even though caretaker Emmit Watson led each one. After his decades of caring for the building, he has so many stories that he can tailor what he tells each time.
New window at the Neptune Society Columbarium
I’ve written about the columbarium before as a cemetery of the week, but that didn’t really explain the depth of my affection for the place.
This last time I visited, we got to explore the new wings. I’d never been in there before. Most of the niches are empty still, but the space was alive with the sound of a fountain. The cool blue light coming through the stained glass window was peaceful. I started to think that I might have found my permanent resting place in San Francisco.
I’m not in any immediate need of it, but it feels good to have that settled.
Golders Green Crematorium
aka Golders Green Memorial Gardens
Hoop Lane, off the Finchley Road
London, England NW11 7NL
Telephone: +44 20 8455 2374 Founded: 1902 Size: 12 acres Number of cremations performed: 323,500+ Open: Winter hours: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Summer hours: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
One of the oldest crematories in England and the oldest in London, Golders Green may also be the best-known crematorium in the world. Over the years, many famous people have chosen to be cremated there. Some remain there in urns in the columbarium or beneath rosebushes in the garden.
Golders Green is the name of the once largely Jewish neighborhood. The Crematorium stands across from a Jewish cemetery, but accepts all denominations. An estimated 2000 people are cremated there each year.
Cremation was legalized in Britain in 1884. For the first 17 years, Londoners had to travel by rail to be cremated in Surrey. After Queen Victoria died in 1901, her surgeon Sir Henry Thompson – also president of the Cremation Society – opened Golders Green the following year.
The redbrick crematorium was built in an Italianate style with a large tower that hides its chimney. It was built in stages as money became available. The current crematorium was completed in 1939. Its three columbaria contain the ashes of thousands of Londoners.
The 12-acre garden contains several large tombs, two ponds with a bridge, and a large crocus lawn. Apparently, that’s quite spectacular in early springtime.
In addition to the columbaria, there are two cremation chapels and a chapel of remembrance. On almost every wall, says London Cemeteries, there are commemorative tablets. The earliest ones hang on the cloister walls.
A different book called London’s Cemeteries says Golders Green is “the place to go for after-life star-spotting.” Among the people cremated here whose ashes were either scattered here or placed in the columbaria: Kingsley Amis, children’s author Enid Blyton, Marc Bolan, Sigmund Freud with his wife and daughter, Rocky Horror’s narrator Charles Gray, Who drummer Keith Moon, playwright Joe Orton (whose ashes were combined with those of his murderous lover Kenneth Halliwell), ballerina Anna Pavlova, actor Peter Sellers, Bram Stoker.
Many more have been cremated here, but their ashes were either scattered or enshrined elsewhere. Among these are England’s Prime minister Neville Chamberlain (Westminster Abbey), poets Rudyard Kipling (also Westminster) and TS Eliot (Church of St. Michael, Somerset), and the writers Henry James (Cambridge Cemetery) and HG Wells (scattered off the coast of Dorset).
Maps are available from the office and reports are that the staff is very helpful in finding a specific location. The columbaria are now locked, although they can still be visited with a guide. It seems there is also a tearoom, but I haven’t been able to turn up any information about its hours. There’s a photo of it on foursquare.
For Darren Beach, author of London’s Cemeteries, “the Golders Green Memorial Gardens are among the most spiritually satisfying places in London…It could be the tranquility inspired by the sheer geometry of the place – the chapels surrounded by arched brickwork form a kind of eerie coastline to the oceans of gardens beyond.”
Extra special thanks to Carole, for lending me her beautiful photographs!
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One of the things that I am absolutely fascinated by is the way cities are built up over their dead. In long-lived cities like Rome or Paris or London, it’s inevitable that cemeteries from the past have been built over and forgotten. In San Francisco, which isn’t even 250 years old, the shortness of memory is more surprising.
San Francisco is famous for many things: tech companies like Twitter and Uber, the cacophony of sea lions at Pier 39, the Painted Ladies houses, major earthquakes. It’s also known, especially among locals, for not having any cemeteries. 
