A HALLOWEEN SEASON LOOK AT CALIFORNIA’S NECROPOLIS – COLMA

COLMA, CALIFORNIA – It’s called the City of the Dead, the City that Always Sleeps, etc. There are roughly one point five million people buried in the many cemeteries which make up Colma.

I sometimes think of it as an unliving Woodstock Concert audience, complete with Arlo Guthrie’s ghost exclaiming “There’s supposed to be about a million and a half dead people here tonight!” But as we’ve established, I’m kind of weird. 

Colma is near San Francisco. Fresh graves in San Francisco cemeteries in the 1800s expanded those graveyards so much that around the turn of the century the city banned any additional cemetery space. The overflow began filling what is now Colma.

Eventually, Frisco decided that the existing graveyards in the city were taking up too much valuable real estate, so untold thousands of graves were moved out of San Francisco and reestablished in Colma. The city was officially labeled a necropolis in 1924 and by now the dead are said to outnumber the living in Colma by over a thousand to one.

The city has cemeteries centered on various nationalities, like Italian, Chinese, Serbian, Russian, Japanese and many more. Naturally, more general cemeteries abound as well.

Through a virtual miracle, good taste has prevented Colma from becoming the setting for countless horror films or Halloween bacchanalias. The residents and officials very deliberately snub any attempts to turn the place into a commercial tourism circus or some sort of “Roswell of the Dead.”

Even the comparatively few ghost stories regarding Colma tend to be on the mild side. The town’s police blotters are far more exciting and include accounts of couples oinking and boinking amid the graves, thefts of monuments and occasional dancing on the graves or other disrespect to the dead.

In the spirit (as it were) of Colma’s dignified air toward its cemeteries, any horror stories or films set there should limit themselves to plotlines about profaners or desecrators of the site suffering the consequences at the hands of ghosts. Nothing gory or zombie-related, more like Jean Rollin’s eerie film The Iron Rose. 

Countless well-known figures lie buried in the necropolis, so I would hope somebody someday comes up with a tale (or poem) about some sort of Congress of Ghosts, with the shades of the many well-known figures laid to rest in Colma interacting with each other. Or getting drinks at Molloy’s served up by ghosts of late tavern employees. 

To twist an old saying, there’s no ancient legend like a new ancient legend, so somebody should get on this ASAP. I’d even settle for a Halloween musical done in the style of Sunday in the Park with George or Cats.

The Emperor Norton, Wyatt Earp, Josephine Earp, Joe DiMaggio, Abigail Folger, Levi Strauss, Julie Rosewald and other dead residents of Colma deserve it!

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