Where Neighbors Are Very, Very Quiet

The town of Colma is packed with 1.5 million people, but you’d hardly know it, since only 1,190 of them are living. The rest are what they refer to here as “the silent majority,” the permanent residents in a city made up almost entirely of graveyards.

Quiet? Colma is ... pick your punch line: It’s like a tomb. It’s downright dead. It’s the only town in America--the world, probably--where cemeteries outnumber supermarkets 17 to none. There are no public schools, no hotels and no libraries. There’s not a single soccer or baseball field.

The only bar is Historical Old Molloy’s, a wood-sided, 120-year-old saloon that stands next door to a headstone retailer and faces a hillside full of graves. Yellowed newspaper pages decorate the tavern’s walls. One details a growth spurt some years back that bumped the ambulatory population from 580 to 1,000.

“Colma Comes to Life,” the headline says. The reporter wrote at length of the town’s resurrection.

The truth is, this tiny suburb south of San Francisco--2.2 square miles--will never be noted for anything but a final resting place. Monument stores dot the two main thoroughfares, El Camino Real and Old Mission Road, like so many burger joints. There’s practically a flower shop on every corner.

“Almost everybody lives within a block or two of a cemetery,” said Mayor Helen Fisicaro, who lives across the street from one. Vice Mayor Frossanna “Fro” Vallerga goes her one better: She lives in a cemetery. Her husband, Larry, is the superintendent at a place called Eternal Home. All the Vallergas need to do to see the headstones is look out the dining room window.

Colma is so utterly steeped in death that residents have no choice but to live with it. They crack jokes. They talk about the wonderful green space and an eerie sort of beauty you can’t find anywhere else. The carved angels and stars and crosses and obelisks and statues of Christ that stretch in rows across the sloping lawns are like Renaissance museum pieces.

Older sections of cemeteries are crowded with personal vaults and family mausoleums dating to the early 1900s. Elaborate structures, with marble columns and granite pediments, they resemble federal buildings shrunk to the size of single-car garages. You couldn’t build them today--they would cost more than $1 million apiece.

In the Catacombs at Cypress Lawn, immense stained-glass ceilings cast a jade light over long aisles stacked six high with bodies. Some of the corpses are embalmed and hidden by square bronze nameplates. Others, cremated, are kept behind glass in metal urns that have the look of yachting trophies--cups with graceful handles and tapered necks. The engraved names evoke the impression of long-ago champions.

“The only ghost story I ever heard was about [the Catacombs],” said Patricia Hatfield, president of the Colma Historical Society. An alarm went off and the guard found a door ajar. Then he heard the sound of a baby crying. Then more babies--a chorus of them, from the area where dead children are buried--and he reacted the way you would expect him to react: He frantically locked up and left.

“He said, ‘My hair stood right up on end,’” Hatfield recalled.

A resident of Colma for half a century, Hatfield is the acknowledged authority on the town. A tourism poster hangs over her desk: “The flowers are in bloom! It’s time to visit your loved ones in Colma.” Not only does Hatfield know where the bodies are buried, she will take the time to show you.

Baseball great Joe DiMaggio lies in a black granite vault at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. Fans have left scuffed baseballs, a plastic bat and a framed obituary.

Dodge City lawman Wyatt Earp rests next to his wife at Hills of Eternity, under his third headstone. The first two, Hatfield said, were stolen, although one was later recovered.

Imposing classical columns grace a family mausoleum at Cypress Lawn that is unmarked by any name. Inside are members of the Hearst clan, including famed publisher William Randolph.

“I call us the United Nations of cemeteries,” Hatfield said. “We have Italian and Greek and Serbian and Japanese and Chinese cemeteries. We have Catholic, we have Jewish, we have nondenominational. We have a cemetery for everybody.”

Even the animals have one. Pets’ Rest, run by a man named Phil C’de Baca, who lives on the premises, looks much like any other except the graves are three feet long and marked by wooden dog biscuits.

Dogs and cats fill most of the 13,000 plots, but there are also six kinds of monkeys, several wolves, a cheetah, exotic birds, snakes and iguanas. C’de Baca remembers one family that reserved the cemetery chapel to hold services for a dark, foot-long fish, somberly buried in a pine box. “They burnt some incense and said some prayers,” he said. Some delay a burial for days and stop by to visit a beloved pet, C’de Baca said. “They’ll come and pick it up and walk around with it. Some people have a real difficult time letting go.”

Colma was incorporated in 1924 to serve as a necropolis for San Francisco after two city laws made the town necessary. One law banned new burials inside San Francisco’s boundaries. The other outlawed existing graveyards. The court battle lasted 20 years, Hatfield said. But in the end, thousands of bodies were dug up and hauled to Colma.

Urban growth has pushed into Colma in recent years. There’s now an auto mall, a card club and a Cineplex. A Kmart remains open. There are two Home Depots.

But you’re still as likely to be stopped by a funeral procession as by a traffic light. These are the newcomers arriving. They fill mausoleums, not apartment houses. Dozens every day take up residence in tiny parcels on newly developed hillsides.

Each plot has its own history. Near sundown, the mausoleum at Holy Cross is gloomy and dank, with miles of stacked bodies. Your echoing footsteps are the only sound as you navigate the forbidding labyrinth to find the crypt occupied coffee heiress Abigail Folger, murdered in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson.

San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, assassinated in his office in 1978, is not far away. Levi Strauss, the blue jeans king, is one of the luminaries of Colma. So is Claus Spreckles, the sugar mogul, and Harry “the Horse” Flambouris, a member of the Hells Angels, killed execution-style and buried along with his Harley-Davidson.

“They won’t tell anybody where,” Hatfield said, “because they’re worried somebody will dig up the Harley.”