THE STORY
Reported Haunting
One of San Francisco's oldest surviving burial grounds has a ghost tradition stretching back more than a century, with reports of apparitions, uneasy presences and unexplained encounters among its historic graves.
The cemetery adjoining Mission San Francisco de Asís is one of the few historic burial grounds that survived San Francisco's twentieth-century removal of most cemeteries. Its graves include early settlers, Indigenous Californians and prominent figures from the city's early history. Stories of strange encounters in the cemetery are not merely modern internet folklore: local historical reporting has traced reports of ghosts there to at least 1891, when even a San Francisco police officer reportedly described a supernatural encounter. Modern visitors continue to report unusual sensations and apparent presences among the graves.