Renovators uncover 120-year-old casket of little girl under SF home

CBS SF CBS SF Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Renovators uncover 120-year-old casket of little girl under SF home 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Ericka Karner, a former San Franciscan living in Idaho, was having her childhood home near Rossi Playground renovated when construction workers at the house made a startling discovery.

To their surprise, the workers happened upon a tiny casket of a little girl believed to be about 120 years old underneath the house. The discoverers weren't able to find any identifying marks or names on the coffin, so in the meantime, they began calling the child "Miranda."

In the early 1900s, San Francisco officials ordered the majority of the large graveyards in the city to exhume and relocate their caskets south to Colma. Karner believes that Odd Fellows, one such cemetery, accidentally left behind Miranda when they moved in the 1930s.

That nearly century-old mistake presented a big problem in the present for Karner, who told KPIX that she was left without an option by the city for what she could do provide Miranda a final resting place. The city wouldn't claim the remains, because Miranda was properly buried, but it also wouldn't let her rebury the casket, because Karner could not present a death certificate. The result was that Miranda just remained in limbo in the backyard.

"It put us in this position of having this individual in our backyard and feeling awful as a mom knowing this is a small child," she said.

Luckily, Miranda's story is finding its resolution. Garden of Innocence, an organization that facilitates "dignified burials for abandoned and unidentified children," has offered to rebury her casket this summer.