Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainAn 1880s ranching-community burial ground in the hills above Paso Robles
Chimney Rock Road, Paso Robles, CA
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public cemetery. No fees.
Access
Limited Access
Hillside grass with sandy paths and gradient
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1878 · San Luis Obispo County Pioneer Cemetery · Adelaida Mining and Ranching District
Adelaida is a sparsely-populated district in the Santa Lucia foothills roughly twenty miles west of Paso Robles in San Luis Obispo County, California. James Lynch, a sheep rancher, is recorded as the first Euro-American settler in the area in 1859. Quicksilver mining and small-scale agriculture brought a peak population of around seven hundred residents distributed across hills and creek valleys during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Wesley Burnett established the Adelaida Cemetery in the late 1800s on a sloping parcel along what is now Chimney Rock Road. The cemetery contains burials from the Adelaida community's ranching and mining era. The surrounding district is today better known for cool-climate vineyards along the Chimney Rock Road and Vineyard Drive wine corridor; the cemetery remains an active rural burial ground and a stop for local-history enthusiasts.
The headstone most often associated with the cemetery's folklore belongs to Charlotte Sitton, identified in local tradition as a minister's wife who died in 1890 at the age of nineteen, shortly after the death of her young child during a diphtheria outbreak. The specifics of her death have circulated as both illness and suicide in different retellings; the documentary trail accessible from public sources is thin.
Sources
Local tradition holds that Charlotte Sitton appears in the Adelaida Cemetery on late Friday evenings, dressed in a long white nightgown, walking the hillside to place flowers on a small grave understood as her child's. Some retellings cast her in a pink dress and refer to her as the Pink Lady; both versions trace to the same headstone and the same nineteenth-century diphtheria narrative.
A cluster of secondary phenomena attaches to the cemetery's small toolshed and the immediate hillside. Visitors have reported heavy footsteps approaching the shed from the slope behind it, shadows that move along the shed's south wall, and a recurring report of car keys being taken from a pocket or a dashboard and located later in another part of the cemetery. A tree along the cemetery boundary is sometimes described in local folklore as bleeding sap.
The Central Coast Paranormal Investigators have documented visits to the site. Photographs taken at the cemetery on a 2001 visit have circulated in print and online; the images have been interpreted as showing an apparition and an orb, though the documentary value of the photographs is limited.
The cemetery is gated and closes at dusk. Visitors should keep to daylight hours, stay on paths, and treat the active burial ground with the respect it deserves.
Notable Entities
A small hill-country pioneer cemetery roughly twenty miles west of Paso Robles. Closed at dusk; no entry after dark. Pair with a drive of the Adelaida wine country along Chimney Rock and Vineyard Drive.
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