El Campo Santo, “the holy field,” is a small walled cemetery on San Diego Avenue in Old Town. The plot inside the adobe wall is only part of what was once buried here. A streetcar line, and then the street itself, cut through the grounds. Brass discs in the sidewalk and the roadway still read “Grave Site.” That is the fact under the ghost story. The haunting claims came later.
The cemetery opened in 1849. California State Parks records 477 burials between 1849 and 1897, among them early Californio families, Native people, and newcomers who died in a rough port town. Antonio Garra, a Cupeño leader, was executed by firing squad in 1852 after an uprising against a tax on Native livestock. His reported last words asked pardon and offered it in return. Yankee Jim Robinson was hanged in 1852 for stealing a boat, the only one then in the bay. The hanging took place on the grounds of what is now the Whaley House, and he is buried at El Campo Santo. Tour scripts move his ghost between the two sites.
The grounds shrank as Old Town grew. A horse-drawn streetcar line was cut through the cemetery in the 1890s and later became San Diego Avenue. Some graves were moved. Others were not. By the time the street was paved, at least 20 graves lay under San Diego Avenue and the sidewalk, and more under Linwood Street. In 1933 the San Diego Historical Society rebuilt the wall, reset markers, and set a white cross in the plot, using an early photograph as a guide. In the 1990s ground-penetrating radar was used to mark graves still outside the wall. The discs in the pavement are those marks. One state assemblyman was exhumed and reburied inside the new boundary. The rest were left where they were.
Ghost tours treat the paved graves as the cause of the activity. Reported encounters, all of them visitor stories, include a man in period clothes identified as Yankee Jim, a figure said to be Antonio Garra, a gravedigger working plots that are no longer inside the wall, cold spots near the sidewalk discs, and shadows along the white fence after dark. None of that has been verified. What is verified is that people are buried under a working street, and that cars park on top of the markers.
The cemetery is at 2410 San Diego Avenue, in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. The gate is often open in daylight. The sidewalk discs are easy to miss if cars are parked over them. It is a burial ground in a tourist district, not an abandoned set. Stay off the graves, and do not scrape the markers for a photograph.
The history here is the 1849 cemetery, Garra, Yankee Jim, and the street built through the dead. The haunting is the explanation tours give for why those graves are still under the pavement.
Relevant links
- California Historical Landmark listing — dates, Garra, and the streetcar cut
- Atlas Obscura: El Campo Santo — the paved graves and the Yankee Jim marker
- USGenWeb archive notes — 1849 start, 1933 restoration, and graves left under the street
- Frommer’s Old Town note — address and the sidewalk markers