Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum

In the 1800’s people didn’t look at cemeteries as a resting place for their loved ones but as land to sell with the potential for their own property values to go up. By the 1900’s new burials ended and the slow, decades-long process of exhuming the dead from San Francisco’s 30 cemeteries and sent them to their new resting place in Colma. In 1993, while renovations were happening workers had found 700 bodies buried underneath the building. The Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum was once Golden Gate Cemetery, which was a graveyard for the poor and working class European and Chinese immigrants. The bodies that were found were moved to Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo County. Experts say although they found and moved a significant amount of bodies there are still probably thousands of bodies still under the museum.

-Dezi