Growing Up in a Town With 1.5 Million Dead Neighbors

What life is like in a place where being surrounded by death is just part of the neighborhood.

Photo: Jon Santiago

What’s it like to come of age in a town where dead residents outnumber the living nearly 1000 to 1?

Try asking the citizens of Colma, California.

While most towns have parks or shops at the center of their cities, Colma, meanwhile, has cemeteries. Seventeen to be exact, occupying nearly 75% of the town’s 2.2 square miles.

For many of you, this might sound like a scene straight out of a horror film. But for the people who grew up there, it’s simply a place they called home.

From Joe Dimaggio to Levi Strauss, this small, unincorporated town just south of San Francisco has served as the final resting place for Bay Area residents for almost 140 years. But in the last seven decades, it’s also blossomed into a suburban enclave.

After World War II, returning vets armed with GI benefits wanted to settle down and needed affordable housing. The developers in Colma delivered.

They built new neighborhoods where a generation of baby boomers grew up playing hide-and-seek in the shadow of millions of headstones. During Colma’s centennial celebration last year, I met two such past and present residents named Etta and Susanna.

Childhood in the City of Souls

Etta was born in Colma and shared a three-bedroom-one-bath household with 5 siblings and her parents. Susanna, meanwhile, moved there when she was 9 after the construction of I-280 in Daly City displaced her family.

For both these women, daily life looked a lot like what you’d expect in a tiny American town. It was the 1960s, so children walked to school, played games outside, and of course got into a little mischief.

“There was a lot of building going on around the neighborhood,” Susanna said. “And there were kids who would go to steal copper out of the walls (of new developments).”

With fewer than a 1,000 living residents, Colma during this period was a place where neighbors knew and looked out for one another. It became a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other’s business.

“I used to go to the Colma Creek and catch frogs,” Etta said. “And we’d sell them to the pet shop (on Mission Street).”

What set Colma kids like Etta and Susanna apart from children elsewhere in the bay was a connection to the town’s primary residents.

The dead.

To them, cemeteries functioned like public parks. A narrow passageway through the Italian Cemetery served as a shortcut for kids biking through town. The big pond at Cypress Lawn became a place for picnics and for feeding ducks.

“You had to get permission,” Susanna said. “(I’d ask my) mom is it okay if I could go down on my bike to (the pond)?”

“Oh my mom never knew where we were,” Etta said jokingly in response.

Even though the cemeteries functioned like their own personal playgrounds, kids knew how to be respectful. Etta says their parents taught them good manners, like to never step on gravestones since that would be inconsiderate or worse - sinful.

For some kids, living among a sea of graves sparked curiosity rather than fear. Etta, for example, made a habit of practicing her math skills, calculating the ages of the deceased from the birth and death dates labeled on their headstones.

“It was interesting,” she said. “Very peaceful, park-like.”

Susanna, though, had the opposite experience. Since she wasn’t born in Colma, she was terrified when she first arrived.

“It was scary,” she said. “We moved in on Halloween, which was goofy, but to me it was spooky.”

What the Dead Taught the Living

Today, both women look at their hometown with pride and fondness. It played a formative role in making them the people they are today.

But it also helped them develop a healthy relationship with something most Americans would rather avoid than acknowledge. In a country where death is often sanitized and brushed to the side, these women grew up hyper aware of their mortality.

“It’s just been like ‘yeah, this is a fact of life,’” Etta said. “When you’re a young kid, you see these people born, and they die, and it just was never a scary thing at all, or creepy.”

Instead of trying to outrun death, long-time Colma residents like Etta and Susanna have come to accept it. They’ve learned that recognizing the end of our lives doesn’t have to take away from living it.

And as the town’s motto goes, “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”