Dublin's Historic Pioneer Cemetery Lets Imaginations Run Wild

DUBLIN, CA — What's better than a nighttime walk in an old cemetery during eerie October? This weekend, visitors are touring Dublin’s historic Pioneer Cemetery after dark and listening to haunting ghost stories about the city's dearly departed. Ghostly images of long-dead pioneers in Old St. Raymond Church will greet them, and they'll be on their toes during nervous walks through the nearby dark and creaky 162-year-old Murray School House.

The tour and cemetery provide glimpses of Dublin's early settlers, including the 1859 burial of Tom Donlon, who fell to his death while helping construct Old St. Raymond's Church. His burial marked the cemetery's establishment, and reading the many worn tombstone inscriptions dating back to the 19th century provides an unforgettable history lesson that leaves visitors wandering into the past.

Not everyone loves cemeteries. Bay Area publisher Dave Eggers had this to say about resting places in his brilliant non-fiction Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius": “Not that there seems to be any appropriate place to bury someone, but these municipal cemeteries, or any cemetery at all for that matter, like the ones by the highway, or the ones in the middle of town, with all these bodies with their corresponding rocks — oh it's just too primitive and vulgar, isn't it? The hole, and the box, and the rock on the grass? And we glamorize this process, feel it fitting and dramatic, austerely beautiful, standing there by the hole as we lower the box. It's incredible. Barbaric and base.”

But then there's the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who died at the tender age of 29 in 1822. “The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place,” he wrote in his famous poem "Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats."

For some of us though, cemeteries, especially old ones, are extraordinary places where our imaginations run wild — best visited after dark by flashlight, in the company of friends.

For more information about this weekend's cemetery tours, visit the city's posting: Dublin Pioneer Cemetery tours.