HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
California Historical Landmark No. 57: the site now under Seaport Village, traditionally identified as San Diego's oldest burial ground and a 1905 mass-casualty triage point.
Harbor Drive and Pacific Highway (Ruocco Park area), San Diego, CA 92101
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public park and waterfront area. No admission fee.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Flat waterfront park with paved paths.
Equipment
Photos OK
California Historical Landmark No. 57 · Possibly San Diego's oldest burial ground · USS Bennington explosion triage site 1905
The flat point of land at the junction of Harbor Drive and Pacific Highway has been called Dead Man's Point for at least two centuries. The traditional explanation, enshrined in California Historical Landmark No. 57 (designated December 6, 1932, with a physical marker placed in 1954), holds that the crew members of Don Juan Pantoja y Arriaga's 1782 Spanish survey expedition who perished from scurvy or intestinal illness were buried here — making this potentially San Diego's oldest marked burial ground.
Scholars have challenged that account. The San Diego History Center published a 2016 journal article titled 'A Monument to an Event That Never Happened,' examining Pantoja's own logs and arguing that the cartographic name 'punta de los muertos' may derive from nautical usage — 'deadmen' referred to mooring logs — rather than actual burials, and that Pantoja's diary makes no mention of scurvy deaths at San Diego. The debate is unresolved, and the landmark designation stands.
What is not in dispute is what happened here on July 21, 1905. The USS Bennington, a gunboat anchored in San Diego harbor, suffered a catastrophic boiler failure at around 10:30 AM. The explosion killed 66 sailors; the sheer number of burn casualties overwhelmed San Diego's hospitals. Triage and mortuary operations were established at the foot of Market Street — the immediate waterfront above this point — as the city processed its worst single-day mass casualty event. The dead were buried at Fort Rosecrans two days later.
The site today is occupied by the Seaport Village shopping development and Ruocco Park, a public waterfront space. Whether anything of the original burial ground survives beneath the development footprint is unknown.
Sources
The paranormal reputation of Dead Man's Point derives almost entirely from the documented history rather than from a body of witness accounts. What exists is a pattern of dark-tourism interest driven by the known facts: this land holds (or once held) the city's oldest European graves, and it was where San Diego's residents sorted through the burned dead from the Bennington explosion in the summer of 1905.
Paranormal investigators who have examined the area describe a heavier atmospheric quality at the waterfront site compared to the surrounding commercial development, but the published accounts from San Diego's paranormal research community do not include specific dated sightings, named entities, or independently corroborated phenomena. The site functions more as a historically documented location of death than as a place with an active ghost tradition.
What the historical record does confirm: somewhere beneath the current retail and park development — or close by — San Diego's oldest non-Indigenous graveyard may still exist, its boundaries unmapped and its contents undisturbed. That fact alone makes the site of interest to anyone trying to understand what lies beneath the surface of a city that has been continuously inhabited for over two centuries.
Ruocco Park and the adjacent Seaport Village waterfront occupy the site the 1954 historical marker identifies as La Punta de los Muertos — Dead Man's Point — California Historical Landmark No. 57. The marker acknowledges both the traditional Spanish burial account and the 1905 USS Bennington triage operations conducted at the foot of Market Street nearby.
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