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Language: en

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There aren't many graveyards in San Francisco.

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Two, actually:

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a small one at Mission Dolores Church,

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and a military one at the Presidio.

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San Francisco land is too expensive to be
given to the dead,

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and it has been for a long time:

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in the first decades of the 20th century,

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all the 150,000 bodies buried in San Francisco
were moved.

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To one town.

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Here.

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Welcome to Colma, just a few miles south of
San Francisco:

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a town known as the City of Souls.

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Colma is only a small place,

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but about three-quarters of it is made up
of cemeteries.

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About one and a half thousand people live
here...

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along with about one and a half million who
don't so much live here as just... rest.

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That means the dead outnumber the living by
around a thousand to one.

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And many of those bodies were moved here from
their first resting place,

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or their second, or their third.

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The trouble was that San Francisco ran out
of room,

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and banned new burials.

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the dead don't pay rent,

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and their living relatives don't really want
to either.

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With no new, er, customers arriving in San
Francisco,

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the old graveyards there had no money for
upkeep, and fell into ruin.

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There were reports of grave robbery,

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of valuables or -- occasionally -- of skeletons.

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So fourteen cemetery associations founded
this town as a place for the dead.

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Many of those moved here were placed in mass
graves,

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their tombstones sold to be used for construction
material

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or dumped in the Bay as breakwaters.

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With no-one to pay for new funeral plots

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and more than a hundred thousand bodies to
move,

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the folks doing the job took shortcuts.

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Sometimes, modern construction work in San
Francisco

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will exhume dozens of bodies that the movers
missed.

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So why go to the trouble of moving them at
all, then?

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Well, it was either move the bodies immediately,

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or deal with them while you're digging foundations
for new buildings anyway.

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What else were they going to do?

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Almost everyone has a fear and disgust response
to death, for good reasons:

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and religion and tradition in America, then,

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dictated that the dead must be buried.

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The Catholic Church wouldn't allow cremation
until decades later,

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and, well, there wasn't another option.

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And sure, the comments on this video

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will make all sorts of horror movie or zombie
apocalypse jokes --

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and if you've already done that,

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congratulations, you're not original --

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but here's a different question:

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most people figure that cemetery plots are
forever.

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If you choose to be buried,

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the spot where you're laid to rest is permanently
yours,

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at least in some sense of yours.

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That's not true: already, some areas of Europe
are re-using graves,

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and eventually every headstone's going to
be weathered away.

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So here's my question:

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when does moving a body stop being disrespect
for the dead

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and start being archaeology?