Shrouded Tales - Guided Tour at San Lorenzo Pioneer Cemetery

Learn about true tales of tragic ends, Victorian death traditions and superstitions all sprinkled with a touch of the paranormal at the Historic San Lorenzo Pioneer Cemetery on the corner of Hesperian Blvd and College St, San Lorenzo, CA.

The cost is $17 per person. Members are welcome to bring family members and other guests. We need a minimum 10 people for this event (maximum 20).

This is not a Bay Area Ghost Hunters event, but the Hayward Area Historical Society has given our group a private time for this tour. General public tours will be available at 7:00pm and 9:00pm. Our tour will start at 11:00PM and last approximately 1 1/2 -2 hours. Bring a flashlight.

Feel free to bring any hand held investigation equipment. You never know what we might stir up while hearing stories of the people buried here.

(Here are some details about the cemetery copied from the SF Gate)

The San Lorenzo Pioneer Cemetery is a 3-acre expanse of broken headstones, vandalized crypts, weeds, dust and mysteries. Closed for the past 50 years, it’s a glimpse into the rural and sometimes violent Bay Area that’s long since vanished.

It’s the final resting place for the Yoakum brothers, who were convicted of murder and hanged by a lynch mob in 1879. A few yards away is the grave of Henry Jorgensen (http://www.sfgate.com/search/?action=search&channel=bayarea&inlineLink=1&searchindex=gsa&query=%22Henry+Jorgensen%22), who was killed in an explosion at the Trojan Powder factory in 1907. Not far from him is a man named Mahler, who committed suicide after his wife died.

One of the tallest, most ornate monuments is for the Nebas children, who were killed when the family wagon got stuck on the train tracks following a May Day picnic in 1881. Five of the family’s six children died that day, and the headstone shows five small hands reaching down from above. The sixth child died months later, apparently from an illness unrelated to the rail tragedy.

The earliest marked grave is from 1853, when San Lorenzo — or Squattersville, as it was called then — was a hodgepodge of would-be farmers, failed gold miners, immigrants and adventurers. The nonsectarian, independent cemetery was a major burial ground for most of southern and eastern Alameda County, from modern-day Livermore to Hayward to Fremont.

But by the 1960s, the citizens’ board that ran the cemetery ran out of money to maintain the property so they turned it over to Alameda County. That’s when it closed to new burials. Eventually, heirs died off or moved away, and people stopped visiting. The gate became permanently locked, although that hasn’t been much of a deterrent to curious teenagers and thrill-seeking vandals.

These days, the Hayward Area Historical Society contracts with the county to oversee the property. It leads tours, researches those buried there and volunteers do what they can to keep the weeds and trash at bay. The public can visit the cemetery by making a reservation through the historical society.

Dotted with oaks and eucalyptus, the cemetery is a tranquil, if not creepy, spot amid the 21st century hubbub across the fence.

One of the more heartbreaking parts of the cemetery is the paupers’ field. More than 800 penniless or family-less people who died at the county’s Fairmont Hospital (http://www.sfgate.com/search/?action=search&channel=bayarea&inlineLink=1&searchindex=gsa&query=%22Fairmont+Hospital%22) between 1920 and 1931 are buried there