In May of 2016, a family in San Francisco decided to do some renovating on their house.

So they brought in a team of construction workers and started digging in the backyard and

everything was going well until one day they came across something buried in the

yard something hard and metallic and extremely unexpected.

They had dug up a coffin.

And it was the coffin of a little girl, nearly three years old. The coffin was this long cast iron

oval with two glass windows on top for viewing the dead. This style of coffin

had become popular in the mid to late 1800s, which is when

this coffin was from, 1876 to be exact. So yeah, this coffin had been in the backyard for over 140 years. The homeowners had a question. How had this happened? How had this

happened? How had this coffin come to be buried deep in what was now their backyard?

The problem that cemeteries run into is often there in, you know, prime land and that was the problem here in San Francisco is the

cemeteries were sort of in the heart of the city.

This is Lauren Rhodes.

For over a decade, Lauren has been on a mission

to visit cemeteries all around the world.

She took a couple hundred of her favorite cemeteries

and put them into her new book,

222 cemeteries, to see before you die.

Here they passed a law in 1901 forbidding any more burials in the city.

A lot of the people who had been buried out here

were single men who came out for the gold rush

or single men who came out for the silver rush

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