Colma: Where San Franciscans Go When We Die

The ‘Town of Colma’ aka the “City Of Souls” aka the ‘Dead City’ aka ‘Silent Town’ is where San Franciscans go after they die.  It has a growing dead population of 1.5 million, and a living population of just 1,509.  Which may be the most ‘goth’ statistic I’ve ever read.  The literal smallest town in San Mateo County has 16 cemeteries (including a pet cemetery) 3 dive bars, and 1 Casino.  If you blink on the 280 South, you may miss it, if you stop, you might be dead.

Cemeteries in Colma, have more graves than San Francisco has living residents. CA. Photo: Colma.ca.gov

San Francisco is famously less than 49 square miles and for comparison’s sake, has a population of around 875,000, while the little town of Colma just south of us is only 1.89 square miles, and contains the bones or ashes of 1.5 million.   

99.9% of that Colman population resides underground, or in urns, mausoleums, and mass graves.  So why have so many people gone to Colma when they died?   Well, mostly because San Francisco didn’t have the space!  Every inch of this city is spoken for now, and even back 1849 when the gold rush brought in speculators by the hundreds of thousands (many of whom dropped dead in the city limits in the following decades) it didn’t take long for SF’s 26 cemeteries to be completely full.

This 1873 map shows San Francisco’s 4 biggest cemeteries, located on and around Lone Mountain where the USF campus is today. (David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

The Mission Districts’ big cemetery was in current day Dolores Park. In fact, many of our current SF parks were once cemeteries in the 1800’s, but by the year 1900 the City of San Francisco voted to stop burials within city limits altogether and had already begun shipping its bodies down to Colma.

Makes you think; ‘how many of them bodies did they miss?’

Dolores Park 1840-1900 was a Jewish cemetery.  Now those bodies reside in Colma.

By 1914, San Francisco city was issuing eviction notices to all its cemeteries to remove their bodies and monuments completely, land was too precious to be wasted on the dead!  So naturally, Colma inherited hundreds of thousands of bodies all at once. Many went into mass graves as there were no relatives to pay the $10.00 fee for removal.

Workers remove bodies from a San Francisco graveyard.  Can you imagine doing this for your dead relatives today? (Colma Historical Association)

For the dead who had relatives willing to pay for relocation, gravestones and grassy plots were provided in Colma (capitalism!).  And if you want to visit San Francisco’s most famous dead people, Colma is where to be!  Everyone from Emporer Norton to Levi Strauss resides in Colma!

The unspoken truth, is that many of the dead in Colma are in mass graves, in piles of forgotten, tangled bones, which sounds a bit like the title of a Morrissey song.

Emperor Norton RIP. Woodlawn Cemetery Photo source FoundSF.

Levi Strauss rests in a massive mausoleum located in the same row as the famous tombstone of gunslinger Wyatt Earp.  Other famous San Franciscans like Adolph Sutro and former mayor Joe Alioto, down to SF slugger Joe Dimaggio and San Francisco Chronicle founder Michael De Young all rest in Colma.  If you want to visit their graves (no judgment) check out this foundsf article with their locations.

Southbound streetcar from Southern Pacific bridge in Colma, 1947. Photo: C. R. collection, FoundSF

According to the Town of Colma’s own website, “Colma was chosen because of transportation. There was easy access by horse and carriage by way of Mission Street, streetcars ran from San Francisco to Colma, trains were going alongside the cemeteries and most of all having stops at each cemetery.”

If you’re planning on an emo getaway, or you just want to learn about Colma history virtually.  You can’t do better than this ‘A Taste of Colma’ video highlighting the Colma Historical Museum:

For more information on all sixteen cemeteries, including the pet cemetery go to the Cemeteries Contacts and Locations.