A Halloween Special Report: Every day, San Diegans unwittingly walk over thousands of bodies in unmarked graves. Here's where some of them of the ones we know of are located.
In summertime, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people arrive at the park, setting up cunningly made folding tables and soft chi-chi blankets, sipping chardonnay as a band plays at a weekly concert in the park. Some of the tykes, trailing oh-so-patient parents, inevitably make their way away from the synth-drenched cover songs and down a lazy slope to the park's southeast corner, where a surprise silently awaits, a series of granite and gray headstones.
The tombstone memorial down the grade serves as a reminder of what was. The park was once consecrated ground, among San Diego's earliest cemeteries, and dates back to the 1800s. According to, 10 acres of land was set aside by city officials in 1870 for a burial ground, with half being dedicated to Protestants and the other half to Catholics.
Many of the graves here are marked by simple white wooden crosses. All buried here were interred between 1849, when Juan Adams was laid to rest, and 1880. Some of those buried at the site were sent there after serving death sentences. It's believed that more than a dozen, but not more than 20 souls have been ignominiously preserved in such a manner, their locations detected in 1993 with the aid of ground detecting radar.
Among the notables interred here are Gianni Versace's killer, Andrew Cunanan; and Charles F. Buddy, the first bishop of the Roman Catholic Dioceses of San DiegoThe federal military cemetery boasts some of the most spectacular vistas in all of California. The site is named for Gen. William Rosecrans, who fought to preserve the union during the Civil War