Sacramento City Cemetery

Visitors to Sacramento City Cemetery have described a couple dressed in black, a little girl seen playing near the headstone of a child, and a dog said to have belonged to a former caretaker that trots alongside people as they come in and then vanishes. John Sutter Jr. donated the first ten acres on November 28, 1849, and within a year the cemetery was receiving the dead of the 1850 cholera epidemic: about 600 victims were buried in mass graves whose exact location is no longer known. More than 25,000 pioneers, immigrants and their descendants now lie here, including many of California's early political figures, on grounds kept by volunteers. The cemetery is open in daylight and closed at night except for organised events.