Coastside cemetery had a spooky start

“It was mostly thriving in the 1870s, but by the 1890s, it was on its way to becoming a ghost town,” Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association, said. “Half Moon Bay was just better located, and the coast didn’t need two towns.”

Despite its short life span, it managed to open a cemetery around 1868, but its very first burial set a bad omen.

According to a manuscript from a College of San Mateo student in 1938, a little boy from the town, whose last name was Downing, fell into a coma after becoming ill and was buried on the belief he had died. Soon after, a man became ill with similar symptoms, fell into a coma but eventually awakened.

“The Downing boy’s father, realizing the possibility of his son having been buried unconscious, opened the grave and found that his son had turned over,” the manuscript read.

“It’s a pretty chilling thing,” Postel said.

The CSM student had interviewed some former locals, including a Catholic priest, as part of the research about coastside cemeteries.

“It’s based on these two coastsiders who were telling a story to a student in 1938, so I’m not going to absolutely verify that this is something that actually happened, but he did have two sources that were in the know, and one of them was a priest,” Postel said.

Despite its illegality, burials still take place there, he said.

Newer gravestones show that such burials have taken place as recently as this August and several more over the course of the last couple years.