The secrets of the San Francisco Columbarium FacebookTwitterEmail The Columbarium, 1 Loraine Court, San Francisco.Andrew Chamings Most Bay Area folk know the oft-repeated fact that the Colma has more dead bodies than living ones — it's true and it's not even close. The town, formed in 1924 as one of America's only necropolises, has a living population of about 1,700, but entombs about 1.5 million bodies. The reason that the little town a few miles south of San Francisco is one big graveyard is the mass (and pretty gruesome) movement of bodies that occurred a century ago. But one beautiful building in San Francisco, hidden down the end of a dead end street just north of Golden Gate Park, still stands as a vestige to a time when the city was covered in graves.