Laura Hart closes her eyes and counts back from ten. “Five…four…threeee…” Her six-year-old voice squeals, and she pinches her eyes even tighter. “Two…one…ready or not here I come!” she screams
to her cousins once her eyes open. Looking around the cemetery she peaks around large cypress trees and behind several gravestones; where could they be hiding?
When her family visited their plot in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park,
running, giggling, and hide-and-seek became tradition in a place that is
usually home to sadness and solitude.
HART is etched on the front side of a thick square stone. Sitting on top
is a three-feet-tall gray obelisk with deceased family members’ names and dates etched on all four sides. Laura laughs aloud, realizing that if she decides to be buried in her family plot, there is no room left on the monument.
“We used to sit here and make daisy crowns,” remembers Hart, now twenty-three. “And then we would have sandwiches on that grave.” She points to the neighbor, a large granite stone slab that subs as a picnic table, next to her family’s gravestone. After lunch, she explored the park, visiting famous gravestones such as Tiffany & Co. and venture into forbidden
territories. A large section of trees surround a gated pit that formerly
housed bodies in its walls.
Being too little, Hart’s father would climb over the stucco wall, stand
on the stone bench directly underneath, and carry his little girl over into
the locked up area.
“My dad’s Peter Pan,” jokes Hart about the games they played and
the adventures they took inside one of the many cemeteries on San
Francisco’s border.

The city’s promise of gold brought many pioneers to the Pacific Coast. Plenty didn’t make it and those who survived buried their loved ones right along the trail. In the late 1800s, a law passed
forbidding any burials to take place outside of an “established”
cemetery, such as a church, city, or county grounds. Mission Dolores and Laurel Hills were the first of many areas to be the official final resting spot for the deceased.
Within a few short decades the sites were full to capacity.
Cemetery owners began shopping for more land inside the growing city, but San Francisco officials who cited the land as “too valuable” always cut their efforts short. As an alternative, cemetary plotters began setting their eyes on sites south of the city boundaries in the tiny agricultural town of Colma.
In the 1900s, a bill passed ending the burial of any more
bodies within San Francisco county lines, leaving many of the old cemeteries plagued with vandalism, neglect, and deemed health
hazards, according to Colma’s website. The bodies were unearthed and transported to the new necropolis of tombstones in Colma.
Today, Colma’s cemeteries are the complete opposite of the stereotypical graveyard. There are no dark shadows, broken and neglected headstones, spider webs or howling coyotes. Instead, from El Camino Real, they resemble private clubs or resorts. Woodlawn’s front building looks like a British castle with a huge moat entrance, layered brick walls, and towers. Many could mistake this as the entryway to an amusement park. The tranquil appearance of these cemeteries and many of their neighbors adopted the ambiance of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This Victorian gem of the early-1800s was the first of its kind,
a “rural cemetery.” Cemetery planners preferred to have burial grounds away from the crammed church graveyards and even further away from the “bustle” of city life. They wanted to create a place where people could visit loved ones but return to their industrial lives feeling rejuvenated from the “pleasure gardens.”
There are seventeen of these lush treasures across the 2.2 square mile town of Colma. Among the memorial parks, as they like to be known, are Catholics, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Serbians, Japanese, and even beloved pets. Among the one thousand five hundred “noisy” neighbors, 1.5 million “quiet” ones coexist. The buried include baseball giants Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul, founding editor of the Chronicle, Charles de Young, William Randolph Hearst, Wyatt Earp, as well as a Russian czar, a coffee heiress, resting in peace beneath the cold, Colma soil.