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One of the first stories we were told, was the story of how SF repeatedly dug up and reburied graveyards in order to make space for modern progress. The first occasion was when the city decided to relocate the bodies in a cemetery in order to build the cable car system in a straight line. The bodies were moved to the Yerba Buena Cemetery, where they didn't stay for long. That cemetery was moved again in order to build City Hall. But, when people were trying to find the bodies from the original cemetery, many of them were missing, mutilated, or piled in mass graves.

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The last Portals described how, starting in 1854, four cemeteries were installed in the then-desolate Lone Mountain area of the Inner Richmond District. Neighborhood boosters began a campaign at the turn of the century to clear this 320-acre city of the dead.

They enjoyed some early success: In 1901, the city banned burials and cremations. But 13 years later, voters rejected a proposal to relocate the graveyards.

The city's rapid westward expansion kept the issue alive. By 1920, the population of the Richmond District, just 3,000 in 1895, had soared to 66,000. In 1923, cemetery foes won a victory when the state passed a law allowing local governments to remove bodies from areas where new burials had been banned.

Seeing the writing on the crypt wall, the smaller two cemeteries in the Richmond, Odd Fellows and Masonic, began soliciting money from their members to buy land in San Mateo County where bodies could be reinterred. That left Laurel Hill and Calvary, a Roman Catholic cemetery.

Laurel Hill, located where Trader Joe's and the former Fireman's Fund Building are today, was in a difficult position. As Tamara Venit Shelton writes in "Unmaking Historic Spaces: Urban Progress and the San Francisco Cemetery Debate," a 2008 article that appeared in the journal California History, Laurel Hill was an independent business with shrinking revenue, and it "also occupied prime real estate in between the major commercial arteries of Clement and Sutter streets."

Mayor James Rolph supported relocating the cemeteries, but the subject was sensitive enough that, as in 1914, he refused to approve removal without a general vote. In 1924, the issue was once again presented to the city's voters. Business and real estate interests strongly supported removal and quoted Rolph, who said, "Sentiment must yield to progress."

The Cemetery Defense League, led by lawyers for Laurel Hill, pointed east to make a preservationist argument. "In Eastern cities like New York, Boston and New Orleans, the old cemeteries lie in the very heart of the business districts, and are never disturbed by ruthless greed, but are the treasured landmarks of cities," the league wrote. "Are we San Franciscans more deficient in sentiment and honor for our forefathers than our Eastern brethren?"

Supporters of removal flipped this argument on its head, saying the cemeteries had become so dilapidated that respect for the dead required their removal.

The Richmond Banner, a neighborhood newspaper, ran pictures showing fallen gravestones and weed-covered tombs. Cemetery opponents also noted that the city had built Lincoln Park over the old City Cemetery without removing the bodies. "Today, players of golf make merry over the remains of the dead, unhonored and unsung," opponents wrote, warning that this could be the fate of the four Lone Mountain cemeteries if the city did not remove the graveyards in an orderly fashion.

On election day, the defenders of the cemeteries once again prevailed, but this time by a narrow margin. The vote was followed by a court ruling that upheld the city's right to remove the cemeteries as public nuisances. That was enough for the Masonic and Odd Fellows graveyards, which moved their dead to Colma. Calvary soon followed.

Laurel Hill, the oldest of the four cemeteries and the largest at 54 acres, was where many of the city's elite were buried. It was the last holdout.

As another vote loomed in 1937, supporters of keeping the cemetery in place tried to arouse reverence for the site. They held a memorial day for pioneers at its most famous and imposing landmark, the tomb of Sen. David Broderick, and proposed that the cemetery be turned into a park whose historic tombstones would attract tourists.

But in November, San Franciscans voted 65,725 to 32,449 to remove Laurel Hill. The great cemetery war that had started more than four decades earlier was finally over, and the dead had lost. In the end, the remains of nearly 150,000 people were removed and reburied in Colma. A handful of veterans were moved from Laurel Hill to the Presidio cemetery.

The number of people who were connected to the dead had dwindled, and only a fraction of the remains were claimed by relatives and given individual plots. Thousands of bodies were buried in a mass grave. According to Woody LaBounty and David Gallagher's Outside Lands podcast No. 43, that grave is being encroached upon by two temples to modern progress, a Home Depot and a Best Buy.

In a strange and somehow fitting denouement, Laurel Hill's tombstones, grave markers and other monuments ended up being scattered all across the city. Because few were claimed by descendants, the Department of Public Works appropriated them and used them for a variety of utilitarian functions.

Some of the headstones became part of the seawalls at Aquatic Park and the municipal yacht harbor. The wave organ, near the St. Francis Yacht Club, is composed of old cemetery monuments. Other markers were used to build the seawall off the Great Highway at Ocean Beach, where they occasionally are revealed when tide and wind conditions are right. The place where the writing on the tombstones is most legible is in Buena Vista Park, where they were used to make rain gutters.

As for the vast city of the dead that once spread out across the Inner Richmond, just one small part remains: the Columbarium, located near Geary and Stanyan, on what was once part of the Odd Fellows Cemetery. With Mission Dolores and the Presidio, it is one of three remaining cemeteries in San Francisco, and the only place where a nonmilitary resident can still be interred - a link with the city's dead that goes back to the Gold Rush.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com
Trivia time
The previous trivia question: What was the largest recorded snowfall in San Francisco history?

Answer: 3.7 inches fell downtown on Feb. 5, 1887.

This week's trivia question: What was San Francisco's first drive-in restaurant?
Editor's note
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub's OurSF.

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How San Francisco evicted thousands of dead people

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The last Portals described how, starting in 1854, four cemeteries were installed in the then-desolate Lone Mountain area of the Inner Richmond District. Neighborhood boosters began a campaign at the turn of the century to clear this 320-acre city of the dead. They enjoyed some early success: In 1901, the city banned burials and cremations.

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The Black Plague outbreak in the 1910s led to innovations in the way scientists fought contagions. Below,a receiving station for a bounty on rats.

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A ghost kept haunting some guys house and kept all maids from staying there for more then a day. He would throw things at them and do his best to terrify the girls. One of the girls went to bed in the room he normally resided in, and was woken up in the middle of the night when a strange figure appeared. She was frozen in place, unable to speak as he walked towards her and began leaving cold objects next to her head. Once he was finished he vanished, leaving the maid to scream and notify the owner of the house. He came in and discovered a litter of dead white kittens with bloody red handprints pressed on each of their bodies. Creepy!

TL;DR: Dead White Kittens with Bloody Handprints left behind next to a petrified maid. Fun!

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Sure, only a few people killed themselves in the Union Square suicide alley. But that's still something we should be worried about, and this is an ongoing citywide problem.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/preventing_back_alley_suicides_in_san_francisco.html

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They wanted to expand the city and dug up all the graves in the city and tried to move them out. Some bodies were found headless, others were found years and years later in strange states. Still more are still under the feet of SF residents.

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Where is my home?
It was morning that I left, my home was still there, erect with high red brick and glass eyes. A great shake made me dizzy,and i ran back home, but where is my home?
I saw nothing familiar, nothing at all, just rubble.

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Survivors of the Jonestown Massacre describe what the "Rainbow Family" was really like

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Survivors of the Jonestown Massacre describe what the "Rainbow Family" was really like

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At the time of his death, Jim Jones held such power over his followers that he was able to direct more than 900 of them to participate in a mass murder-suicide.

Jones was the leader of the Peoples Temple, a ministry of his own devising that convinced hundreds of Americans to move to his compound, known as Jonestown, in the South American nation of Guyana. Of the 918 Americans who lost their lives in the Jonestown massacre on Nov. 18, 1978, investigators determined 907 died from ingesting poison, including nearly 300 children. They used cyanide, and either injected it into people with syringes or mixed it with a powdered soft drink called Flavor Aid.

Others were shot or stabbed that day. Jones himself was found with a single bullet wound to the head.

Watch "Truth and Lies: Jonestown - Paradise Lost" on Friday, Sept. 28 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

The tragedy spawned the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" to describe blindly following someone, although that brand of powdered drink wasn't used that day and some survivors of the massacre dispute the claim that everyone who died at Jonestown willingly followed Jones to their deaths.

"The reality is that it was not some giant, 'Let's get together and die for Jim Jones moment'" said Tim Carter, a former member of the Peoples Temple, who escaped death that day only because a top aide of Jones sent him away from the compound to go on a last mission for the church. "It was exactly the opposite. That was my experience. What happened in Jonestown was murder."

Before Jones became known as an unhinged religious leader, he was a kid growing up outside the small town of Crete, Indiana. He said in an interview once that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks, an outcast who found a home in the Pentecostal church.

Captivated by the charismatic style of Pentecostal and Methodist preachers, Jones became a preacher himself. He rose to prominence in the 1950s and founded his ministry, the Peoples Temple, in which Jones, who was white, promoted social justice, racial and class equality and desegregation. But some of his former followers said he paid lip service to those ideas to lure people in.

"He was a predator who had really ... mastered the art of luring people from every segment of life," said former Peoples Temple member Yulanda Williams.

In addition to their biological son, Stephan, Jones and his wife, Marceline, had adopted children of Korean-American, African-American and Native-American descent.

"They called themselves the 'Rainbow Family,' because they wish[ed] -- both in their church leadership life and in their personal life -- to show that all people are equal before God," said Jonestown scholar Mary Maaga.

Jones moved the church first to Redwood Valley, California in the 1960s, then to San Francisco in the 1970s, and his congregation swelled to roughly 5,000 members. Many said they were drawn to Jones' inclusive, anti-war and anti-capitalist messages. Another attraction, former members said, were showy "faith healings," in which Jones seemed to miraculously and instantaneously heal sick or injured people.

"I thought he could heal because I saw healings and I thought they were real," said former Peoples Temple member Leslie Wagner-Wilson. "He was a master of manipulation, but you saw him with this dark hair, the sunglasses, and the way that he spoke -- he was a great orator -- and it moved you, it inspired you because he was so passionate. And so I was just enthralled."

As time went on, former members said Jones became more extreme, manipulating his congregants with blackmail and administering humiliating beatings to those who displeased him. Former members also said he abused drugs and alcohol.

"Punishment became a normal thing," said Williams, one of the former members. "His behavior became totally irrational. You begin to just go with the flow out of fear. Fear of the fact that if you left the church, what you might experience, what danger might be brought to you."

"He started to alienate you from your families ... destroy that family unit," she continued. "So that then he could become the predator, but also the one who was the provider of every need that you required in life."

Some former members said he would also practice "fake suicides" in small groups. "Dying for the cause" was something some former members said Jones brought up regularly.

In 1974, Jones leased more than 3,800 acres of isolated land in the jungle from the Guyanese government. He believed that the mostly English-speaking South American country could become a sort of utopia for his California-based congregation.

"He even showed us this movie about the Jewish concentration camps, called 'Night and Fog," Williams said. "He said, 'This is what they have planned for people of color. We've got to build our land up over there in Jonestown, we've got to get over there. We've got to move fast, we've got to move swiftly, we've got to pool our resources together."

"I mean, he sold us a bill of goods," she added.

"You got to remember, this all started back in the '60s and '70s. Our society was in turmoil. There was constant aggression going on. You had riots going on," said former Peoples Temple member Thom Bogue. "And then you have Jim Jones saying, 'Do I have the place for you. For us.'"

Two years later, 50 of Jones' followers, along with Guyanese workers, started building a Peoples Temple compound in the middle of the jungle. It became known as Jonestown.

"We were building something grand down there. We really were. It was something fantastic," said Bogue, who was about 13 or 14 years old when he arrived. "I could even, at that age, see that we had built something big, kind of cool, in the middle of the jungle."

Members built cabins, and would eventually set up a daycare, a medical clinic and a pavilion for community gatherings. They also planted crops and raised pigs and chickens. At first, it seemed to some members that Jones had delivered on his promises.

"We were working 18 hours a day but we were seeing the fruit of our labor," Jones' son, Stephan Jones, said. "There was real passion about what we were doing."

Then, Jones started sending home videos of the compound back to the church in San Francisco. Former members said the videos showed beautiful cabins, food and smiling, happy people. Much of the promotional information, they said, proved to be false or exaggerated - life at the compound proved to be much more difficult and constricted than they had expected.

By 1978, nearly 1,000 followers had moved to the Guyana compound, former members said, and food started to run out. Having been forced to give up their passports and money upon arrival, some former members said they were cut off from the outside world.

"Everyone was forbidden from reading anything because [Jones said] they were liars," said former member Deborah Layton. "[He called it] fake news ... Jones coined fake news. Anything that was written about him [he said ]was fake. It was all to ruin his name and his cause and what he stood for."

But during this time, some defectors spoke to the press about the Peoples Temple, and allegations of physical and sexual abuse against Jones surfaced. Layton, who made it out of Jonestown and back to the United States in May 1978, went to the authorities for help.

"I wrote an affidavit begging the United States government to get involved, that 1,000 people were being held against their will in Jonestown, and that Jones was a monster and had lost his mind," she said.

Play

Williams and her family convinced Jones to let them leave Guyana on the condition that they return at a later date. While back in San Francisco, she says she was contacted by Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., who was looking into allegations against Jones. Ryan decided to lead an investigative delegation to Jonestown in November 1978 to look into the allegations. The delegation included Ryan's staff, members of the press and a number of people concerned about their relatives there.

Within 24 hours of the congressman's arrival on Nov. 18, 1978, nearly everyone was dead. Members of Jones' security team shot and killed Ryan and four others on an airstrip near the compound as Ryan, members of his staff, journalists, defectors and family members were on their way to boarding planes to leave Jonestown. In the now famous "death tape," later recovered by the FBI at Jonestown, Jones can be heard instructing his followers to ingest the poison after the congressman was killed.

Roughly 90 former Peoples Temple members survived or managed to escape the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown. Jones' sons, Jim Jones Jr., 18, and Stephan Jones, 19, who had lived at the compound with their father, were at a basketball game in the captial city of Georgetown on the day of the massacre.

"When people say basketball saved their life, I can literally say basketball did save my life," Jim Jones Jr. said. "If I wasn't playing basketball, I would have died."

Stephan Jones has since written several essays about his father and the legacy of Jonestown.

Many former members still carry the guilt and shame of what happened in Guyana.

For some, including Williams, Jonestown changed their lives forever, and they have tried to move forward. She now works as a police officer in San Francisco.

"I think that Jim Jones was a predator. He was a manipulator. He definitely was a monster, a real monster," Williams said. "What I do today, as a police officer and the person that I've become, it's all due to my experiences in this cult. I've found the importance of being courageous. The importance of being outspoken and the importance of speaking with people and listening to them and trying to assist them in whatever way I can for them to get out [of] situations that are not healthy for them."

ABC News' Muriel Pearson contributed to this report

Watch "Truth and Lies: Jonestown - Paradise Lost" on Friday, Sept. 28 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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40 years after Jonestown massacre, ex-members describe Jim Jones as a 'real monster'

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At the time of his death, Jim Jones held such power over his followers that he was able to direct more than 900 of them to participate in a mass murder-suicide. Jones was the leader of the Peoples Temple, a ministry of his own devising that convinced hundreds of Americans to move to his compound, known as Jonestown, in the South American nation of Guyana.

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This epidemic pushed scientists to create innovations for fighting the Black Plague. Below, a receiving station for a bounty on rats.

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My internet isn't working so I can't find a link or photo but a famous man staying in the Paisley Hotel stood up during a round of cards, said, "Boys, I've gotta go," and collapsed, dead.

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So basically this amazing bar owner named Tessie shot the man she loved because he had an affair because she chose her bars over him. So when she shot him he was like, "Dont press charges" before just dying on the ground and so she got away with it which is just a big mood

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The rats swarming out of the sewers after the boric acid was thrown in there, and them figuring out that the plague came from them was absolutely fascinating, and then it happening again after the earthquake and fire I just find insane. Just, all of the rats taking over the city at once is a horrifically intriguing experience.

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Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague David K. Randall W. W. Norton (2019)

An urban outbreak of a deadly infectious disease with no known cause is a disaster planner's worst nightmare. In his rousing book Black Death at the Golden Gate, journalist David Randall describes just that: the bubonic-plague epidemic that struck San Francisco, California, in 1900. The race to identify, isolate and halt the disease is set against a rich background of official complacency, financial malfeasance, political intrigues and scientific disputes.

Not least, the story shows how such outbreaks often become sociopolitical crises, triggering official anti-science rhetoric and fear of the 'other' - from the 'Spanish' influenza pandemic in 1918 (see T. Tansey Nature 546, 207-208; 2017) to the US AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

After ravaging Europe and Asia in the fourteenth century, bubonic plague reappeared sporadically. In the late 1870s it emerged in south central China. An outbreak in 1893 killed thousands in Canton, spreading along rivers and steamer routes. At the end of the nineteenth century, plague was identified in a recent Chinese immigrant to the then-independent Hawaiian islands. The pathogen probably crossed from there to San Francisco, on a regular trade route.

The city was notoriously corrupt, dirty and overcrowded. California's 1848-55 gold rush had swelled the population more than 25-fold. By 1867, Chinese immigrants made up 90% of the workforce building the transcontinental railway. By 1880, some 16% of the population of San Francisco were Chinese. Yet they faced animosity and segregation: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for instance, cracked down heavily on immigration. Chinatown became San Francisco's most congested and impoverished district, with ramshackle wooden buildings carved up into tiny, packed spaces. In March 1900, the first suspected plague victim died in one of them.

The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, had been identified in 1894, but little was known about transmission, treatment or prevention. As Randall shows, plague was often egregiously framed as a "racial disease" to which people of European ancestry were immune. (This racist fallacy arose in part because European expatriates in colonial India and Hong Kong rarely caught diseases that ravaged the deprived, crowded communities outside their compounds.)

That first case panicked San Francisco's authorities. They quarantined Chinatown, preventing any movement of food in, or of its inhabitants - many of them cleaners, cooks and labourers - out. Civil unrest ensued, and people began to hide the dead and dying from "wolf doctors" - the city's health inspectors. Outside Chinatown, the middle-class white population was outraged by the disruption. A definitive diagnosis was needed.

One of the few public-health officials able to provide that diagnosis had arrived in San Francisco not long beforehand. Joseph Kinyoun was a veteran of the federal Marine Hospital Service (MHS) in Washington DC, the Bellevue Hospital in New York City (see D. Dobbs Nature 539, 354-355; 2016) and the European labs of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. His growing reputation had irked his boss, surgeon-general Walter Wyman, who exiled him to California.

Kinyoun's tests on samples from the first suspected victim confirmed the presence of plague. Yet political and popular pressure had already led the local Board of Health to lift the quarantine. From that point, Kinyoun was at war with more than a bacillus. As Randall shows, medical authorities, politicians, the press and the quarantine-averse public resisted his efforts. Kinyoun was hampered, too, by intellectual arrogance and a dearth of local contacts (he was based at an isolation hospital on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay).

Most city health officials refused to implement Kinyoun's suggestions for inspection, selective quarantine and inoculation with a still-experimental vaccine developed by Russian bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine. City officials went to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting the plague's presence. A court case against the MHS, brought by the Chinese Six Companies (a benevolent society protecting Chinese interests) questioned Kinyoun's medical qualifications: a real doctor practised with patients, not microscopes.

The hostility to science percolated upwards. Texas and Louisiana threatened to close state borders, and California governor Henry Gage - mindful of his state's annual $25-million fruit harvest and concerned other states would suspect a problem - disparaged "the plague fake" in a letter to US secretary of state John Hay and issued threats to anyone publishing on it. Yet reports reached Washington DC and an independent scientific enquiry was commissioned. Its confirmatory report weeks later did not halt the skulduggery. Gage called the investigation unfair, and organized a state-wide news blackout; Wyman colluded in trying to suppress the report. Yet the news was leaked in early 1901, and both city and state then pledged funding to eradicate the disease and treat patients. Kinyoun, however, was denied vindication. He was dispatched to Michigan and ultimately replaced by the scientifically trained Rupert Blue.

Blue established an office and lab in Chinatown, and worked with Chinese organizations. But infected people were still being hidden by their families, and disputes persisted between state and city health authorities and the federal MHS. Dismayed, Blue requested a transfer, believing that only a widespread epidemic would ever shake San Francisco from its torpor. That happened in 1903.

Immediately recalled, and with new authority and support, Blue set about disinfecting the city. Starting with Chinatown, earthen basements were concreted, concrete ones flooded with carbolic acid, walls washed with lye, streets asphalted, cesspools filled and decrepit dwellings demolished. Infection discovered elsewhere in the city led Blue to ponder modes of transmission. Suspecting flea-infested rats, he initiated a ferocious eradication campaign. In 1905, convinced the city was safe, Blue again left.

He was recalled twice more. San Francisco's magnitude-7.9 earthquake in 1906 destroyed some 80% of the city's infrastructure and left more than 250,000 people homeless, with rats massing over devastated land and open sewers. Blue controlled small outbreaks and left; 16 months later, the disease was back. Returning to the devastated city, Blue - commandeering offices dubbed the Rattery - sent an army of rat catchers into the city, and had hundreds of rodents autopsied daily for signs of plague. To quell complacency, he threatened to quarantine the entire city and prevent the prestigious US Navy battle fleet from docking.

San Francisco was finally declared plague-free in November 1908; four years later, Blue became US surgeon-general.

As Blue noted, the disease had crossed into the wild squirrel population. Today, an average of seven people a year, most of them hikers, are infected in the United States and are treated with antibiotics.

Randall's account is pacy and gripping. And his examination of the conflicts, prejudices and priorities involved make for sober reading in a world where Ebola clinics are being torched and anti-vaccination movements threaten a resurgence in diseases such as measles. As most public-health authorities agree, the question we need to ask about the next pandemic is not 'What if?' but 'When?'
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01239-x

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Plague in San Francisco: rats, racism and reform

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Tilli Tansey extols a history of California's chaotic early-twentieth-century epidemic. Tilli Tansey extols a history of California's chaotic early-twentieth-century epidemic.

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She left an ominous letter that only raised more questions about her choice to die and why she decided to die that day. The hotel is also right next to the Mongolian Hotpot restaurant I’ve gone to many times. Weird. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC19110629.2.136&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

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We went to the street corner where the Zodiac Killer was picked up. It was a turning point in the hunt for the killer.

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He killed 5 people and possibly 28 more.

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the fog is called karl by san franciscans, which is iconic.
also that whole convoluted story about tessie and how she went from being nobody to owning a bunch of successful bars and having a husband who she later split with because he didn't like that she valued her success over him. she killed her husband in public but he didn't want charges against her so she went free. it was hilarious.
didn't find any article about it??

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https://wildsftours.com/the-st-francis-hotel-history-haunted/

Also I got this amazing picture of my friend Amitza at Union Square

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The massacre of over 900 people within the Jonestown cult that spend around a decade in San Francisco before moving to the Guyanese Jungle.

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The "Jonestown Massacre" occurred on November 18, 1978, when more than 900 members of an American cult called the Peoples Temple died in a mass suicide-murder under the direction of their leader Jim Jones (1931-78). It took place at the so-called Jonestown settlement in the South American nation of Guyana. Jones had founded what became the Peoples Temple in Indiana in the 1950s, then relocated his congregation to California in the 1960s. In the 1970s, following negative media attention, the powerful, controlling preacher moved with some 1,000 of his followers to the Guyanese jungle, where he promised they would establish a utopian community. On November 18, 1978, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan, who had gone to Jonestown to investigate claims of abuse, was murdered along with four members of his delegation. That same day, Jones ordered his followers to ingest poison-laced punch while armed guards stood by.

Origins of the Peoples Temple

Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the tragedy at Jonestown marked the single largest loss of U.S. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster. The megalomaniacal man behind the tragedy, Jim Jones, came from humble beginnings. Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in rural Indiana. In the early 1950s, he began working as a self-ordained Christian minister in small churches around Indianapolis. In order to raise money to start a church of his own, the charismatic Jones tried various ventures, including selling live monkeys door-to-door.

Did you know? More than 400 unclaimed bodies from the Jonestown tragedy are buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where many of Jim Jones' followers were from. A stone memorial to the Jonestown victims was unveiled at the cemetery in 2008.

Jones opened his first Peoples Temple church in Indianapolis in the mid-1950s. His congregation was racially integrated, something unusual at the time for a Midwestern church. In the mid-1960s, Jones moved his small congregation to Northern California, settling first in Redwood Valley in Mendocino County. In the early 1970s, the ambitious preacher relocated his organization's headquarters to San Francisco and also opened a temple in Los Angeles.

Jim Jones: Rise of a Cult Leader

In San Francisco, Jones became a powerful figure. He curried favor with public officials and the media, donated money to numerous charitable causes and delivered votes for various politicians at election time. Peoples Temple ran social and medical programs for the needy, including a free dining hall, drug rehabilitation and legal aid services. Jones' message of social equality and racial justice attracted a diverse group of followers, including idealistic young people who wanted to do something meaningful with their lives.

As Jones' congregation grew (estimates of the group's size vary; a 1977 expose by New West magazine put the number of Peoples Temple members at 20,000), negative reports began to surface about the man referred to as "Father" by his followers. Former members described being forced to give up their belongings, homes and even custody of their children. They told of being subjected to beatings, and said Jones staged fake "cancer healings."

Faced with unflattering media attention and mounting investigations, the increasingly paranoid Jones, who often wore dark sunglasses and traveled with bodyguards, invited his congregation to move with him to Guyana, where he promised them they would build a socialist utopia.

Trouble in Paradise: Prelude to Jonestown

In 1974, a small group of Jones' followers went to Guyana to establish an agricultural cooperative on a tract of jungle in the tiny nation of Guyana. (Guyana, which gained its independence from Great Britain in 1966, is the only country in South America with English as its official language.) In 1977, Jones and more than 1,000 Temple members joined them and moved to Guyana. However, Jonestown did not turn out to be the paradise their leader had promised.

Temple members worked long days in the fields and were subjected to harsh punishments if they questioned Jones' authority. Their passports and medications were confiscated and they were plagued by mosquitoes and tropical diseases. Armed guards patrolled the jungle compound. Members were encouraged to inform on one another and were forced to attend lengthy, late-night meetings. Their letters and phone calls were censored.

Jones, who by then was in declining mental health and addicted to drugs, had his own throne in the compound's main pavilion and compared himself to Vladimir Lenin and Jesus Christ. He was convinced that the government, the media and others were out to destroy him. He also required Peoples Temple members to participate in mock suicide drills in the middle of the night.

Airstrip Ambush

Leo Ryan, a U.S. representative from California, heard from some of his constituents that their family members were people being held against their will at Jonestown and decided to go there to investigate. Ryan arrived in Guyana in November 1978, with a delegation that included news reporters and photographers, along with concerned relatives of some of the Peoples Temple members.

On November 17, the congressman and reporters were welcomed to the Jonestown compound, to their surprise, with a dinner and evening of entertainment. Jones even agreed to meet with reporters. However, during the visit, some Peoples Temple members asked Ryan's group to help them get out of Jonestown.

On November 18, Ryan and his group, which also included a small contingent of Peoples Temple defectors, left Jonestown. While waiting at a nearby jungle airstrip, they were ambushed by gunmen sent by Jim Jones. Ryan was killed, along with a reporter and cameraman from NBC, a photographer from the San Francisco Examiner and a female Peoples Temple member who was attempting to leave.

900 Die at Jonestown

The same day as the murders at the airstrip, Jones told his followers that soldiers would come for them and torture them. He ordered everyone to gather in the main pavilion and commit what he termed a "revolutionary act." The youngest members of the Peoples Temple were the first to die, as parents and nurses used syringes to drop a potent mix of cyanide, sedatives and powdered fruit juice into children's throats. (Jones had reportedly obtained a jeweler's license at some earlier point, which enabled him to stockpile cyanide.) Adults then lined up to drink the poison-laced concoction while armed guards surrounded the pavilion. This horrific event is the source of the phrase, "drinking the Kool-Aid."

When Guyanese officials arrived at the Jonestown compound the next day, they found it carpeted with hundreds of bodies. Many people had perished with their arms around each other. Jim Jones, age 47, was found in a chair, dead from a single bullet wound to the head, most likely self-inflicted.

The death toll at Jonestown on November 18, 1978 was 909 people, a third of them children. A few people managed to escape into the jungle that day, while at least several dozen more Peoples Temple members, including several of Jones' sons, were in another part of Guyana at the time. In total, only 33 survived.

A terrifying recording of the event, known as the "death tape," helped investigators understand what happened that night. Researches also found over one thousand recordings of propaganda , conversations and sermons that painted a gruesome picture of the activities of the Peoples Temple.

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Jonestown - Massacre, Guyana & Cult | HISTORY

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The "Jonestown Massacre" took place on November 18, 1978, after more than 900 members of an American cult called the Peoples Temple died in a mass suicide-murder under the direction of their leader Jim Jones (1931-78). The mass suicide-murder took place at the Jonestown settlement in the South American nation of Guyana.

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Macabre string of murders in SF by a still unidentified killer with a mind for puzzles and games in the 1960's and 70's.

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The Zodiac Killer is one of America's most infamous serial killers. During the 1960s and 1970s, Zodiac murdered at least five people, often couples in secluded areas, near San Francisco. His first victim was Cheri Jo Bates. He wrote a confession about her, including a message to "beware..."

The media has been captivated by the Zodiac Killer because of his relationship with the media. Zodiac began sending coded messages taunting police to various newspapers very soon after his first murder. He signed these letters with a circle with a plus sign over it, his symbol. He infamously sent a cipher that said, "This is the Zodiac speaking. By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is..." This was followed by a series of 13 symbols that were supposed to be his name, encoded. To this day, this code has not been cracked.

The Zodiac Killer case remains unsolved. Although suspects have come forward - and continue to come forward, to this day - no one has been confirmed as the actual Zodiac Killer. Some of the more famous suspects include Arthur Leigh Allen, who was dismissed because of his handwriting sample, and Earl Van Best, Jr., more recently, who was accused by his son in a tell-all book, The Most Dangerous Animal of All.

For more information, please visit:
The Zodiac Killer Biography

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The Zodiac Killer is one of America's most infamous serial killers. During the 1960s and 1970s, Zodiac murdered at least five people, often couples in secluded areas, near San Francisco. His first victim was Cheri Jo Bates. He wrote a...

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There was the body of a girl found underneath a San Francisco house recently. She's been identified & has living descendants.

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Her remarkably well-preserved body was discovered a year ago in an unmarked metal casket in a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood.

She was barely 3 when she died and was interred in a long-forgotten cemetery more than a century ago. When workers discovered her elaborate coffin beneath a concrete slab, there were no markings or gravestone to say who she was.

Over the last year, as the casket rested in a new grave in Colma, a team of scientists, amateur sleuths and history buffs worked tirelessly to solve the central question in this Bay Area mystery: Who was the little girl in the casket?

This week, they announced their answer: She was Edith Howard Cook.

According to the Garden of Innocence, an organization that buries abandoned and unidentified children, the girl's DNA was matched to that of a descendant now living in San Rafael.

Who was Edith?

Edith Howard Cook was born in San Francisco on Nov. 28, 1873.

The daughter of Horatio Nelson Cook and Edith Scooffy Cook, she died of marasmus - a form of severe undernourishment - on Oct. 13, 1876, said Jelmer Eerkens, an archaeologist at UC Davis who analyzed Edith's hair.

Marasmus is characterized by a severe deficiency in nutrients, particularly protein, and can be brought on by viral, bacterial or parasitic infections.

Chemical isotopes showed that in Edith's last months, she essentially wasted away from malnutrition, he said. There was no evidence that doctors tried to use treatments popular at the time, such as morphine, mercury or cocaine.

The girl's DNA revealed that part of her lineage traced back to the British Isles.

She was found entombed in an airtight casket that was 37 inches tall. Her curly locks were laced with sprigs of lavender. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds were placed on her chest.

Edith Cook's original casket was found in San Francisco on May 9, 2016. (Courtesy of Elissa Davey)

How did researchers know where to look?

First, they needed a lead. The casket was more than 140 years old and there was no headstone. The team had to find a map of Odd Fellows Cemetery that would show the layout at the approximate time Edith was buried.

A scale plan of the cemetery development in 1865 ultimately was found at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Researchers overlaid the cemetery map onto the neighborhood where the casket was found.

The results narrowed the girl's identity to two prime candidates. Thanks to the Internet and a culture of open records that existed from the 17th century to the 1960s, amateur genealogists were able to tap centuries of records of censuses, births, marriages, properties and deaths to trace up and down each candidates' family tree. The whole effort took three people 3,000 hours, said Elissa Davey, who spearheaded the search for Edith's identity.

"I knew this day would come because I knew we wouldn't give up on her," Davey said.

A map of Odd Fellows Cemetery in San Francisco shows where Edith Cook was buried in the late 19th century. (Courtesy of Elissa Davey)

Bob Phillips, a 65-year-old retired federal employee from Seattle, said he read about the casket's discovery online and emailed Eerkens, the UC Davis professor, to volunteer his genealogy skills.

Phillips traced Edith's family back to the 1600s and then up to modern times. He found someone he believed to be a living grandson of Milton Cook, Edith's older brother.

But the descendant, Peter Cook, 82, didn't know his family tree on his father's side back more than a generation. Some of the names Phillips mentioned sounded familiar, but there wasn't enough to confirm that Peter Cook was related to Edith Cook, who would have been his great-aunt.

"In researching the family, particularly when we narrowed our focus down to Edith Cook and her family, you become kind of involved and you're sort of rooting for it to be Edith," Phillips said. "You can follow their family on through various articles and census records, and you get a kind of sense of who they were and what their life was like."

The team met Peter Cook at his home in the fall and took a saliva swab for his DNA.

Peter Cook, 82, of San Rafael, submits saliva for a DNA test in 2016. (Courtesy of Elissa Davey)

How did they confirm it was Edith?

Using just a handful of hair strands only a few inches long from Edith's scalp, Eerkens and UC Santa Cruz biomolecular engineering associate professor Ed Green mapped the girl's DNA and chemical isotopes.

The follicle tissues provided nuclear DNA, which contains genetic information from both parents but is more difficult to harvest, and mitochondrial DNA, which shows only the mother's genetic information but is in much greater abundance.

Because the girl was in a casket for more than 140 years, only about 10% of the DNA sequenced from the hair belonged to the girl. The rest was mostly fungus or other organisms, Green said.

But he and his students weren't intimidated - they work with DNA from ancient hominids and woolly mammoths regularly.

"This is an atypical sample in that it's kind of young - from 1876," Green said. "It's kind of an easier sample."

If Green's team hadn't been able to sequence Edith's nuclear DNA, "we would not have been able to ID the girl," Eerkens said. "In fact, we probably would have ruled [Edith] out."

The comparison between Peter Cook's DNA and Edith's turned up a 12.5% match along unique genomes that can be identical only along direct descendants, Green said.

He and his students were thrilled with the results.

"It's unlike a lot of scientific projects where there's not a prospect of a binary answer like, 'Yes, this is it,' or, 'No, it is not,' " Green said. "Most of what we do is open-ended, and progress comes in steps so small you don't even know you're making them. It was so special."

The family tree shows living descendant Peter Cook in relation to Edith Cook, a.k.a. "Miranda Eve." (Courtesy of Garden of Innocence)

Who was Edith's family?

Edith was the first daughter and second-born child in the Cook family, who was prominent in San Francisco in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Scooffy family, on Edith's mother's side, was among the first pioneers to arrive in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, said Phillips, the amateur genealogist who helped find the girl's identity.

Edith's grandfather was Peter Scooffy, an oyster merchant who immigrated to the U.S. from Greece through New Orleans. There, in 1845, he married Martha Bradley, whose family lineage traces back to the earliest Virginia settlers. The couple moved to San Francisco, where they eventually had Edith's mother.

On her paternal side, Edith's grandfather, Matthew Mark Cook, hailed from England and her grandmother from Nova Scotia. The couple had seven children and moved to San Francisco years after the Scooffy family.

Among their children was Edith's father, Horatio Cook. Together, Matthew and Horatio Cook established the family business, M.M. Cook & Son, a leather belting and hide-tanning business. After Matthew died, Horatio Cook continued to run the company with his sons (Edith's brothers,) Milton and Clifford, and renamed the business H.N. Cook Belting.

The company remained in existence until the 1980s, when it merged with Hoffmeyer Belting and Supply Co. in San Leandro. The new business was then bought by San Diego Rubber Co. Inc. in 1994 and renamed Hoffmeyer Company Inc.

Reports detail news about the Cook family in the San Francisco Chronicle and Honolulu Advertiser in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Though Edith wasn't around to see it, her family became part of the "jet set" crowd in San Francisco in the early 20th century, Phillips said.

Edith's younger sister, Ethel, was born after Edith died, and she grew up to become a San Francisco socialite, Phillips said.

In the book "Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World," about a middle-class woman's climb into the social strata, the author recalls a news clipping about Ethel Cook's "secret" marriage to a prominent New Yorker.

The news clipping described Ethel Cook as the "reigning bell of San Francisco," who once was "made famous by Grand Duke Boris of Russia, who drank a toast with champagne out of one of her slippers at a banquet and declared that she was the most beautiful American woman he had ever seen."

Today, the family continues to thrive, according to Peter Cook.

Cook has eight children, 13 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Already thoroughly knowledgeable about his wife's and mother's families, the phone call he received last fall regarding the mystery girl buried in San Francisco only expanded his family pride.

"I tried to trace my father's side, and I got to my father and that was it," Cook said. "All of a sudden they came with information on divorces, my grandfather went back to France on the USS Normandy. ... Oh I think it's fantastic. Jelmer [Eerkens] has got me back into the early 1700s. That really makes me feel good."

Where was Edith found?

Edith Cook's body was found inside an airtight metal casket beneath a garage in San Francisco's Richmond District, where the Odd Fellows Cemetery once was located.

The homeowner, Ericka Karner, said the casket was discovered by workers remodeling the home while she and her family stayed with relatives in Idaho.

At least twice in recent years, Karner said, she and her husband have heard the inexplicable sound of children's footsteps running in the home. The couple have two daughters, but the children were sleeping or not where the steps were heard in both cases, she said.

Even after Edith's body was found, disinterred and moved, the spooky steps still could be heard, Karner said.

"We had a couple of contractors, on separate occasions, who thought they heard footsteps," Karner said. Each time, the contractors walked through the house looking for a child - possibly a wayward kid who had run into the house from a park across the street - and both times, the contractors found nothing, Karner said.

"I'm not sure where I stand on where the soul goes, but my hope is ... if she was still hanging around here figuring out where she needs to be, that her being identified will give her a little peace and she'll potentially go off and be with her family, where she needs to be," Karner said. "We felt that if anything, she was a friendly spirit. If she wants to stay and play, we're totally OK with that!"

The home in San Francisco's Richmond district where Edith Cook's casket was found. (Courtesy of Garden of Innocence)

Why was Edith buried there?

According to historians, when San Francisco was in its infancy, residents and businesses coalesced around San Francisco Bay. The dead were buried in what is now the financial district.

But then came the Gold Rush of 1849, which flooded the city with new residents, new illnesses and death. Bodies in the financial district were exhumed and relocated west, closer to the ocean, to make way for the mass migration.

By the late 1880s, there were dozens of cemeteries in San Francisco, and most were full. Officials and developers deemed the burial grounds to be more valuable to the living, and they launched a decades-long campaign to evict the dead.

Undertaker advertisements from the late 19th century. (Courtesy of Garden of Innocence)

City crews and cemetery workers hauled hundreds of thousands of corpses south to what is now Colma. Today, the city has about 1,500 living residents and more than 1.5 million bodies underground, including such historic figures as Wyatt Earp and William Randolph Hearst.

An email last summer from one of Edith's researchers in Montana explained why so many bodies were missed during the mass transport of graves to Colma a century ago.

"Bulldozers weren't involved in the removal process," the researcher wrote. "The surface land was stripped bare at least seven years before actual digging began. The removal contractors placed string lines in an east-west orientation, spaced where experience told them the most graves would be intersected. Experts moved along those string lines, probing with hardened brass rods at set intervals. They could literally predict by feel and experience whether there was a casket, a collapsed grave, ashes or no grave at all below. Workers dug only where they marked and as deep as they marked. Everything was done by hand."

Researchers created a digital overlay of a half-dozen historical maps of Odd Fellows Cemetery, including original cemetery drawings and plans, to place on top of the neighborhood where Edith Cook was found. The work whittled down the potential identities of the girl. (Courtesy of Alex Snyder)

Where is Edith now?

Edith Cook was buried under the name "Miranda Eve" on an overcast June morning last year in Colma. Her pseudonym was picked by Karner's daughters because the girl had been discovered at their residence. Her original casket was put inside a slightly larger cherry wood-paneled coffin with handles on each side and two bouquets of white flowers on top.

Santa Cruz Memorial apprentice embalmer Megan Mackenzie and funeral director Lincoln Krassow examine and place the girl's original casket into her new casket, which was specially built to accommodate the original burial container. (Santa Cruz Memorial)

Her heart-shaped granite headstone read:
Miranda Eve The child loved around the world "If no one grieves, no one will remember."
The other side was left blank just in case true identity was ever discovered.

Everyone who helped in finding Edith's identity had their own reasons for making sure the slate didn't stay blank forever.

"One of the most amazing things about this: Everyone was working pro bono on this," Green said. "People wanted to solve this. It was infectious."

A second memorial service for the girl is scheduled for 11 a.m. June 10 at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma.

Since Edith's identity search began, the remains of three other people buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery location have been discovered and need to be identified, Davey said.

More than 100 people attended a ceremony for the girl's reburial in Colma, less than 10 miles from where she was originally buried. They christened her 'Miranda Eve.' (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

joseph.serna@latimes.com For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter. ALSO A Muslim father and son engrave the headstones at one of India's oldest Jewish cemeteries Overgrown and forgotten, Tacoma cemetery holds a mystery: thousands of unmarked graves Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery

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Mystery solved: Remains of girl in forgotten casket was daughter of prominent San Francisco family

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Her remarkably well-preserved body was discovered a year ago in an unmarked metal casket in a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood. She was barely 3 when she died and was interred in a long-forgotten cemetery more than a century ago. When workers discovered her elaborate coffin beneath a concrete slab, there were no markings or gravestone to say who she was.

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The haunting caused by a young woman named Florence Cushing, who jumped to her death from a 7th story hotel window in 1911. People staying in the renovated Paisley Hotel have reported waking up and seeing a woman sitting on the edge of their open window. Before they can react, she jumps from the ledge and disappears. Her death cast a dark shadow over San Francisco that lingers to this day.

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She hurled herself of the 7th floor for the Hotel Paisey in 1911