Town where the dead outnumbers the living by a thousand to one

A TINY town in California has a chilling claim to fame. The dead residents outnumber the living by a thousand to one.

Town where the dead outnumbers the living by a thousand to one

THE tiny town of Colma in California has the nickname “The City of the Silent” and not because its population sits at just 1800.

It’s because the town, located in San Mateo County near the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, has a population of dead people that outnumbers the living by nearly a thousand to one.

Colma is home to 17 separate cemeteries where more than 1.5 million souls have been put to rest. It’s not due to some mysterious plague taking out all the locals. The reason for the unusually high body count is that San Francisco decided it didn’t want any more dead people.

In the 1900s, the city banished all but a couple of the 26 cemeteries there, along with the dead they held, from within city limits.

The city’s politicians had argued that cemeteries spread disease but the true reason for the eviction, according to the New York Times, was the rising value of real estate.

Town where the dead outnumbers the living by a thousand to one

Originally, Colma’s residents were primarily employed in occupations related to the many cemeteries in the town but since the 1980s, Colma has become more diversified, and a variety of retail businesses and car dealerships has brought more life to the town.

Still, 73 per cent of Colma’s 5.7 square kilometres is zoned for cemeteries — and they house some pretty notable names.

The Yankee Clipper himself, Joe DiMaggio and Frankie “The Crow” Crosetti — both New York Yankee legends — are buried in Colma’s Holy Cross Cemetery.

Levi Strauss, fashion magnate and founder of Levi Strauss & Co denim jeans is buried in the Hills of Eternity and Home of Peace cemetery.

Newspaper tycoons Charles De Young, founder of the San Francisco Chronicle, and William Randolph Hearst, who founded mass media company Hearst Communications — which later went on to purchase the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the Houston Chronicle, Cosmopolitan and Esquire — are resting in peace at the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park.

Colma residents are proud of their quirky claim to fame. The town has even adopted the motto: “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma!”

You can even pick up a T-shirt with the slogan at Colma’s history museum.

“All the cemeteries you go through here, they’re a history of San Francisco and of California,” Richard Rochetta, a Colma Historical Society board member whose father emigrated from Italy and spent 30 years as a caretaker at Olivet Memorial Park, told the New York Times.

Town where the dead outnumbers the living by a thousand to one

Another resident, Owen Molloy, whose family owns the only bar in town, fondly recalls playing hide-and-seek among the tombstones as a child and marvels at the view of Holy Cross Cemetery from his home.

“It doesn’t creep me out,” he told the New York Times.

City Councilwoman Joanne del Rosario also doesn’t give her underground neighbours a second thought, telling the Times: “I’m more afraid of the living than I am of the dead.”