El Campo Santo Cemetery

At El Campo Santo Cemetery in Old Town San Diego, some of the graves are under the street. The 2400 block of San Diego Avenue runs straight across the old burial ground, and the small round brass discs set flush into the sidewalk and the road aren't decoration. Each one is stamped "Grave Site." There's a body under it.

El Campo Santo was consecrated in 1849, the second-oldest cemetery in San Diego, Catholic, walled in adobe with a plain white cross at its center. Roughly 477 people were buried inside, with burials running until about 1880. Then the city decided the dead were in the way.

In 1889, two years after the last burial, San Diego ran a horse-drawn streetcar line straight through the cemetery. Officials said the graves in the path would be moved. The work was rushed, and it wasn't finished. In 1942 the streetcar route was paved over into San Diego Avenue, and more than twenty bodies were left where they lay, now under the pavement.

For decades no one knew exactly where. In 1993, ground-penetrating radar found them — and the city marked each spot with one of those brass "Grave Site" discs, in the sidewalk and out in the lane itself. People park on top of them every day.

The most persistent story here is tied to that pavement. Drivers who park over the graves report their car alarms going off with no one near the vehicle. The looser version of the tale says engines won't turn over at all, though the alarms are what people describe most.

There's more along the block. Visitors report cold spots on the avenue, a touch from no one, a sudden weight of sadness. The figure people see most is a man in 19th-century clothing — described not as walking but as floating a little above the ground, over a street that was paved across the people still buried beneath it.