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. Continue reading
