California's largest 19th-century coal district left five ghost towns and a 235-grave hilltop cemetery where midwife Sarah Norton, killed in an 1879 buggy accident, is identified as the gliding 'White Witch' apparition.
5175 Somersville Road, Antioch, CA 94509
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Vehicle parking fee approximately $5. Mine tours have separate fees; see ebparks.org for current pricing.
Access
Limited Access
Steep unpaved trails on hillsides; Rose Hill Cemetery requires a significant uphill hike. Mine tunnels require stooping in sections. Some trails accessible to mountain bikes.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1859 · California's Largest 19th-Century Coal Mining District · Five Ghost Towns · National Register of Historic Places · East Bay Regional Park District · Welsh Mining Community History
Coal was discovered in the hills north of Mount Diablo by William C. Israel in 1859, and the Mount Diablo Coal Field quickly became the largest coal-producing operation in California. Three railroads carried coal from the field to the San Joaquin River for shipment to San Francisco and other Bay Area markets.
At its peak, the district supported five towns spread across the hillsides. Nortonville, the largest, had roughly 1,000 residents. Somersville, Stewartville, West Hartley, and Judsonville made up the remainder. The workforce was ethnically diverse by the standards of the era: miners arrived from Wales, England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and Australia. Twelve named mines operated across the field, including the Empire, Star, Black Diamond, and Manhattan mines.
The industry carried the risks common to underground coal mining. An explosion in 1876 killed William Gething and several other miners; the dead were buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, the Protestant burial ground serving the mining communities that sits between the Nortonville and Somersville sites. The 1906 earthquake destroyed the cemetery's original records, preventing complete identification of all graves. Over 200 people are buried there, including significant numbers of children who died in the epidemic disease outbreaks — smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid — that swept mining communities with inadequate public health infrastructure.
Coal mining ended around 1906 as cheaper imported coal made the operation unviable. Silica sandstone mining replaced it during the 1920s through 1940s; the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company operated a sandstone mine for glass container manufacturing, and a second mine supplied the Columbia Steel mill in Pittsburg. Together the two operations recovered more than 1.8 million short tons of sand.
The East Bay Regional Park District acquired the property beginning in 1973, and the preserve opened May 8, 1976. The Greathouse Visitor Center, opened in 2003 inside a restored mine building, houses exhibits on coal and sandstone mining history. The preserved Hazel-Atlas mine tunnel is the site of weekend guided tours.
Sources
Rose Hill Cemetery's ghost tradition is more specifically documented than most California haunting sites. Sarah Norton was a real person: the widow of Nortonville founder Noah Norton, she worked as a midwife for the mining community's families and is credited — in accounts preserved by the Beyond Haunted site and other sources — with delivering more than 600 babies for miners' wives over her years in the district. She died on March 25, 1879, at age 68, after being thrown from her buggy while traveling to assist a sick woman.
The legend of her funeral contains a detail that attached itself to her memory and likely generated the ghost tradition. According to local accounts, two funeral attempts at the cemetery were disrupted by severe weather; the third attempt, at which she was finally buried, occurred in calm conditions. Whether this reflects actual documented weather events or accumulated narrative elaboration, it is now inseparable from accounts of her apparition.
Visitors and residents describe seeing a white figure — described variously as a 'white witch,' a 'glowing lady,' or a 'woman gliding through the cemetery' — among the headstones at Rose Hill. The association with Sarah Norton is circumstantial but persistent; her grave is marked and known, which gives the figure a name and a story that the cemetery's many anonymous graves do not provide.
The mine tunnels carry separate accounts. The Beyond Haunted documentation and Patch.com's local reporting both note unexplained sounds — footsteps, voices, the sense of being followed — in the deeper sections of the mine passages. A 'phantom hearse' and children in black have been described near the cemetery approach. These accounts are harder to trace to specific individuals or incidents and function more as accumulated visitor lore.
The 1906 earthquake's destruction of the coal-era cemetery records is a factual gap that the haunting tradition fills: without documentation, the names and circumstances of many buried individuals remain unknown, creating the conditions for a kind of collective, unnamed haunting.
Notable Entities
Guided weekend tours of the restored Hazel-Atlas sandstone mine tunnel — a 950-foot corridor with reconstructed exhibits depicting 1940s glass-sand mining operations. Meet at the Greathouse Visitor Center. Advance registration recommended as spots fill. Operated by the East Bay Regional Park District.
The hilltop cemetery serving Nortonville and Somersville holds over 200 burials from the 1860s–1900s coal era, including victims of the 1876 mine explosion. Many graves mark children who died in epidemic outbreaks. The cemetery is accessible via a steep 0.5-mile trail from the Somersville town site trailhead. Sarah Norton's grave is marked; locals associate her with the 'White Witch' apparition.
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