Wyatt Earp and our Graveyard Adventure

Video on Youtube. We suggest waiting until the end of this proof to view it.

The Beginning

Cam: I don’t know what happened. I suddenly got a bug in my bonnet to buy a ukulele. I can’t explain it. But that late the only place still open was the Serramonte Music Center. So I invited Orion on an adventure. Because, what’s right next to Serramonte? Colma. The city of the dead, where all the dead from San Francisco’s earliest cemeteries went. And who’s buried in Colma? Wyatt Earp.

It was too good to pass up.

Orion: I had suggested earlier that we do the Graveyard Venture because I have a fondness for tasks that get you out and about…and I also have a fondness for graveyards. I’m not exactly…goth…but I think they can be powerful places with beautiful landscaping and a sense of quiet found in few other urban locales. Colma sounded like a dream exploration destination and I was all too eager to come along. As with all good stories involving the dead (and…undead?) our story started at a mall, Serramonte Mall, so Cam could buy his ukulele. Not to be outdone, I bought myself a nose flute. And it was on. The adventure had begun.



The Entry

Cam: Having located his grave, and then purchased a uke, and two nose flutes (more on that later), we proceeded to the Hills of Eternity Cemetery. There was no guard of any sort. You could walk right up into the pitch black fields from the road. The cemetery was actually two divided by a central road. I knew only that Wyatt was buried in the Jewish section; but to my surprise, the whole cemetery was Jewish. The only thing to do was explore the whole thing.

Orion: Having no particular sentiment for Wyatt Earp (my only real impression of him is Kurt Russel’s over-the-top ruffian exterminator in Tombstone) I was along simply for the thrill of it. Finding his gravestone in Colma seemed an unbelievably difficult proposition—there were thousands of graves in seemingly haphazard arrangements and all we knew was that his headstone was black. Great…and my night vision is bad enough that even Cam would spook me at times.



The First Walk Back

Cam: We walked back through rows of graves; the ones at the front were old and classical and then they slowly changed to the more modern, conservative designs. Soon, we could date whole section of the graveyard based on the style of monuments left. There were anomalies of course, a single row of century old graves in between the plots of those who had died mere months ago.

Orion: Like I said, like finding a needle in a haystack. The more I looked, though, the more I wanted to find Wyatt’s grave…I felt incredibly disconnected from the bodies buried beneath the earth as if they were never human, never alive. Searching for one, in particular, of someone I knew (in a certain sense) added purpose, and an unexpected gravity, to the search.



The Vertical Mausoleums

Cam: Towards the back, we discovered a strange change. There were suddenly tall vertical mausoleums, with no gates and very little ornamentation. At first I thought this was a socio-economic division, but the dates all showed they came from the same recent time period. It’s as if the civic planning hadn’t been thought out this far in advance, and we are now forced to house remains in the equivalent of apartment high-rises. When I die, I want to be buried in a pine box, with no preservatives, and surrounded by acorns. I don’t need a gravestone, I want an oak tree to mark my passing.

Orion: And when I die, I want to be buried beneath the city streets and for my cemented epitaph to one day scrape away and for the legends of my ghost to grow more and more fantastic with each passing year.



The Scary Noises

Cam: When we had reached the back of the cemetery, we began to walk back. Suddenly, we heard a sound like keys clanking in a pocket. We ducked and crouched silent for many moments. The sound continued, but it stayed in place. Eventually we ventured toward the sound, and found a small metal and glass pinwheel mounted permanently to the grave of a very young girl. It was spinning and clanking in the breeze.

Orion: I’m man enough to admit that, when I realized the source of the noise was coming from the corner of the cemetery, in the corner of a dark circle of rather tall hedge, I ran quite a ways to find Cameron and explore the source of the noise along with me. You know, so we could “share” the experience. Even more startling was the sound of a screech owl minutes later from a tree just over our heads. Not that we jumped, or anything.

Cam: Of course not...



The Search

Cam: We began to search in earnest for the Earp’s plot. I know only that it had been recently replaced, and would look out of place in it’s current plot. We began to search, row by row, section by section. It took us nearly and hour to realize that we were not going to find it this way. We didn’t even know for sure what it looked like.

Orion: Needled in a haystack, again. We did find some very new graves that we knew to avoid as it was unlikely they’d be near that of a 19th century lawman.



The Phone Call

Cam: When desperation set in, I called for help. Help answered in the form of Britt Crawford: Using his net skills, he dialed up a satellite map of the area, with the Earp’s grave marked. He’d never been to the cemetery before, so he had describe it from the air. We navigated on the ground by the sections of the cemetery marked by pathways, and by the largest crypts. Witht he power of technology, sattelites and cel phones, we found it, in no time at all. Thank you, Britt!

Orion: This was one of my favorite parts. Though I felt we’d somehow failed in not finding Wyatt’s grave naturally, following Britt’s instructions to the graveyard was like some kind of macabre treasure hunt. We practically skipped down the paths looking frantically for the fantastic grave we knew must be his…



The Earps

Cam: The gravestone was so non-descript, I’d actually walked by it once before in our fruitless unaided search. We gathered rocks, and in accordance with Jewish tradition, placed them on top of the stone. Then, in accordance with what I’d like to believe is cowboy tradition, we played Amazing Grace. On the Nose Flute.

Orion: Let the record show that I am a poor nose floutist…and that I’m somewhat ashamed to have laughed my way through most of the song.

Watch the video now!



The Second and Third Cemetery

Cam: Satisfied, we left, but we still had a spark of adventure left, so we drove to another set of cemeteries. One was a Potter’s Field, in great disrepair. The other was a large, expansive, but much newer cemetery. We counted away the few minutes till midnight by standing in the Potter’s Field, telling our own true ghost stories (more on that in a later task), and exploring a seemingly empty gothic looking crypt. At midnight, we snapped a picture for proof, and called the Graveyard Adventure a rousing success.

Orion: The crypt was quite frightening and the ghost stories oh, so true…but the picture snapped of a real live ghost in the first cemetery was as scary as anything. Though my notes continue to reference fear, though, I felt much more at peace than my notes imply…being outdoors at night in such a quiet, charged place is really my favorite way to spend an evening.






(can you see the ghost?)