(Roving correspondent Kristen Tobiason revisits the scenes of our past glories. Today, we find out where the bodies are buried — or not.)
“You moved the headstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!” In the Stephen Spielberg film “Poltergeist,” a suburban family is attacked by malevolent spirits provoked by a relocated graveyard.
Calvary Cemetery, a k a “Pioneer Park,” (1501 Washington Place in Mission Hills) shares a similar history (tho’ the only spirits I’ve heard of there are those of the bottled variety). Historically, the area served as a Catholic graveyard “between 1875 and 1919, with burials continuing up until 1960.” In 1970 the cemetery was converted into a public park, and “the grave markers (but not the people) were removed. A group of some of the gravestones were clustered together and a central memorial was placed in the southeast corner of the park. The exact number of people buried there isn’t known, but research alludes to possibly 4,000 burials which have occured there.”
