Lincoln Park Golf Course

"A century ago, there were more than 30 cemeteries in San Francisco, covering thousands of acres. These included Yerba Buena Cemetery, at what is now Civic Center BART; four giant cemeteries in the Inner Richmond; a Jewish cemetery at what is now Dolores Park and the vast Golden Gate Cemetery. The Golden Gate Cemetery was the city's first graveyard and was segregated into different plots for different ethnicities, including the Chinese Cemetery at what is now Lincoln Park Golf Course. San Francisco in the 1900s was not a clean place, and the acres of cemeteries were not safe or sanitary. Most of the sites already had no room for more bodies, and coffins were not always used, leading to some archival reports of kids finding body parts while playing among the mausoleums. One of the more curious concerns among white residents were the goings-on at the Chinese cemetery. The story goes that to provide sustenance to the spirits, Chinese mourners would often leave delicacies and meat on the gravestones of loved ones during funerals. Opportunistic vagrants would walk the cemetery at night and feast on the offerings. As Charles Caldwell Dobie's 1933 book "San Francisco: A Pageant" described, “In a bygone day, the cemetery was the haunt of ghoul-like hoboes who regaled them-selves on roast pig and sweetmeats once the funeral cortege had disappeared.” After decades of political fighting, it was finally decreed that the tens of thousands of bodies would be moved to the new necropolis of Colma, south of the city, and it even became illegal to get buried in San Francisco. The Chinese cemetery, however, was not properly exhumed, and in 1993, excavation for the renovated Legion of Honor Museum at Land's End uncovered at least 700 bodies, and it's believed that there are many more still under Lincoln Park Golf Course. While the meat-strewn graves are long gone, Chinese tombstones are still visible today on the 1st and 13th fairways."