Julia Morgan's 1928 labyrinthine columbarium holds thousands of urn-books in a library built for the dead.
4499 Piedmont Ave, Oakland, CA 94611
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Ghost tour tickets sold separately through tour operators; columbarium public areas free to visit during open hours
Access
Wheelchair OK
Interior courtyards and columbarium halls are paved; some narrow corridors
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1928 · Julia Morgan Architecture · National Register of Historic Places · Active Columbarium · Oakland Landmark
The Chapel of the Chimes sits at the northern edge of Mountain View Cemetery, which was established in 1863 and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The chapel itself came later: the original structure dates to around 1909, but its distinctive character comes from the 1928 redesign and expansion undertaken by Julia Morgan — one of the most prolific California architects of her era, best known for the Hearst Castle commission she carried simultaneously.
Morgan's design for the Chapel of the Chimes is genuinely strange. She conceived the columbarium as a library — niches and alcoves designed to hold cremation urns shaped and labeled like hardbound volumes, arranged on shelves that run floor to ceiling in halls modeled on Gothic monasteries. The building grew through decades of additions, each retaining her vocabulary of arched cloister walks, indoor garden courts, and mosaic tiles. The interior disorients visitors in a specific way: nothing quite repeats, corridors turn unexpectedly, and natural light arrives through colored glass from directions that don't match the building's exterior.
As of the mid-2020s, the Chapel holds the cremated remains of tens of thousands of people. It is an active facility — families visit regularly, interments continue, and events including musical performances and seasonal gatherings draw outside visitors. Morgan's own work is documented by the Julia Morgan Architectural History Project at Cal Poly, which holds drawings and correspondence related to the chapel commission. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sources
The Chapel of the Chimes doesn't have a single dramatic incident driving its paranormal reputation — no murder, no named spirit, no documented catastrophe. What it has is architecture that happens to be deeply unsettling, combined with a function that has accumulated decades of grief within a single building.
Ghost tour operators working the Oakland-Berkeley corridor have used the chapel grounds as a departure and arrival point for years. The joint tours with Mountain View Cemetery cover both properties. Inside the chapel, the commonly reported experiences involve disorientation — a sense that the building is larger than its exterior suggests, that hallways lead somewhere different than expected, that you've passed the same alcove twice. Whether these constitute paranormal phenomena or simply reflect Morgan's deliberately non-linear design is genuinely ambiguous.
Staff at the facility over the years have described the same quality: that working alone in the interior halls after hours produces an unusual feeling of being accompanied. The building holds an enormous number of cremated remains in a very compressed space, and that fact alone shapes how people experience it. No specific apparition or documented incident drives the reports — the building's atmosphere is the phenomenon.
Joint ghost tours organized by local operators depart from the Chapel of the Chimes grounds and extend into adjacent Mountain View Cemetery. Tours cover the architectural oddities of the columbarium — its cloister gardens, urn-filled alcoves, and Gothic archways — alongside the documented history of the cemetery's more prominent residents.
The columbarium is open to visitors during regular hours. The interior — designed by Julia Morgan in the late 1920s and expanded through subsequent decades — consists of interconnected Gothic halls, indoor gardens, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of cremation urns shaped and labeled like books. The effect is genuinely disorienting in a quiet building holding tens of thousands of cremated remains.
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