One of California's oldest private cemeteries, willed to the Catholic Church by Bernardo Yorba in 1858 and holding prominent Californio families, where the 'Pink Lady' legend has drawn midnight visitors every June 15 for generations.
6749 Parkwood Ct, Yorba Linda, CA 92886
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access. Monthly guided tours on the first Saturday of each month, 10–11 AM. No admission fee.
Access
Limited Access
Uneven ground and grass paths through the cemetery. No paved paths.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1858 · One of Oldest Cemeteries in Orange County · Californio History · Mexican Land Grant History · Catholic Heritage
Rancho Cañón de Santa Ana was granted to Bernardo Yorba in 1834 as one of the large Mexican land grants that organized California's pastoral economy before American annexation. Yorba's rancho eventually encompassed roughly 13,000 acres of Orange County's inland valleys.
When Bernardo Yorba died in 1858, his will transferred the parcel containing the family chapel — the San Antonio de Padua Chapel — and the adjacent burial ground to the Catholic Church. The cemetery continued to receive the dead of the canyon's Californio community through the late 19th century, with burials documented from 1860 through 1939. The number of actual graves is uncertain: a 1993 survey identified 120 marked burials, but estimates of total interments — including unmarked graves — run as high as 600.
The families buried here represent the network of Californio ranching society: the Yorbas, the de los Reyes family, the Peraltas, the Dominguezes, and the Navarros. Their presence in a small fenced cemetery surrounded by a modern Orange County subdivision gives the site an unusual quality — one of the oldest intact burial grounds in the state, enclosed by tract housing that went up around it.
Orange County acquired the cemetery in 1967 and manages it as a historic site through OC Parks, administering monthly public tours through the county's George Key Ranch Historic Park.
Sources
The Pink Lady legend at Yorba Cemetery is one of Orange County's most durable ghost stories, and also one of its most thoroughly debunked. The standard account describes the ghost of a teenage girl named Alvina de los Reyes, killed in a buggy accident while returning from a dance at a local high school — her spirit appearing on June 15 in even-numbered years between midnight and 4 AM, emerging from an oleander bush and walking to the rear of the cemetery.
The actual Alvina de los Reyes is documented in the cemetery's records. Her gravestone reads that she died December 2, 1910, at age 31. She was a married woman with eight children, not a teenager. She died from pneumonia, seven days after giving birth to her youngest child. The high school referenced in the legend was not constructed until 1933, 23 years after her death. Her grand-nephew Arthur Peralta told the Yorba Linda Star in 1998: 'She died in childbirth. She was not returning from any dance.'
Historians and local researchers have traced the legend's origins to the 1940s, when local teenagers apparently invented the story for the thrill of it. The account spread through successive generations of storytelling, drawing larger crowds over the decades. By the late 20th century, June 15 gatherings at the cemetery had become a community event of sorts — crowds arriving to witness an apparition that the historical record suggests has no factual basis.
The OC History Roundup blog documented the gap between legend and fact in detail in 2007, and The Ordinary Extraordinary Cemetery project updated the analysis in 2023. The cemetery remains publicly accessible, and the legend continues to draw visitors regardless.
Notable Entities
OC Parks operates free guided tours of Yorba Cemetery on the first Saturday of each month from 10 to 11 AM. Tours cover the history of the Yorba, de los Reyes, Peralta, Dominguez, and Navarro families buried here, and the cemetery's role in Orange County's Californio past.
The 40,000-square-foot cemetery is publicly accessible. An estimated 120 to 600 graves mark burials from 1860 through 1939. The cemetery sits enclosed within a modern Yorba Linda residential neighborhood, a remarkable survival of a 19th-century landscape.
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