mastodon 4.7.3✏️ Journalist & author: bethwinegarner.com
📚 "San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History" out now!
🎧 Co-host, Dead Reckoning podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-reckoning/id1812728990
👩🏻🦰 She/her.
I have been thinking a lot lately about an incident when I was 5 or 6. I had gathered several tadpoles and was keeping them in a bowl of water at home, watching them transform into frogs. We fed them frozen spinach. One morning I woke up and they were gone. My dad told me they’d turned into frogs and hopped away.
Best case scenario is he put them back into the creek where I found them. I don’t want to think about other scenarios.
Friends! I am so excited to share that I have a new chapbook out, "Swim Poems." These lines were written over the course of a year swimming in the San Francisco Bay (April 2025 to April 2026) and I'm grateful to Bottlecap Press for giving them a home.
Get yourself a copy here (or buy one for a friend who swims!):
From Japan to Forestville California, Hichijiro Ito and his family launched a successful Gravenstein apple ranch before the US imprisoned them in internment camps and accused Hichijiro of being a spy. It's all in my new blog post on my website.
You've probably heard about Jim Jones, the People's Temple, and the infamous mass killing at Jonestown, but did you know that all of this kicked off in San Francisco? That Jim Jones was deeply entangled with city leadership, participating in corruption and cover-ups? It's … not great!
Join Courtney and Beth for the real story of People's Temple: How they settled in San Francisco, placed their cronies at every level of government, and co-opted the civil rights and social justice movements of the era to their own nefarious ends. Beth also tells us how the tragedy and controversies live on through ongoing issues with the victims' burial monument in Oakland.
"Their lives were short and filled with physical hardships, according to the team’s re-examination of the bones. Many individuals endured physical trauma due to chronic strain, and 18 out of 19 of the studied sailors suffered from scurvy."
https://www.404media.co/corpse-point-in-the-arctic-is-melting-disturbing-centuries-old-bodies/
Long before we had protracted, bad-faith government arguments over the political football of welfare, food, and medical aid, we had ALMSHOUSES. If you were poor, sick, or hungry in the United States, this is where you went for help. Were they great? Probably not! Were they better than the workhouses in England that sold your body after you died? Yes!
Join Courtney and Beth to learn about the Almshouse in San Francisco, which opened in the 1850s and is now a skilled nursing facility. We trace the origins of indoor and outdoor poor relief in the US, talk about what the women of the Almshouse were up to, and speculate wildly on whether people are buried on the property.
If you missed my talk last night with Alex Ryder and Woody LaBounty about Yerba Buena Cemetery, one of San Francisco's earliest settler cemeteries, you can watch it here:
Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, California, and Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, both owned and operated by Dignity Health, received disciplinary actions from federal and California state officials in 2022, 2023, and 2024 for mishandling the remains of deceased patients.
https://brokeassstuart.com/p/sf-health-giant-accused-of-letting-bodies-decompose
✨🪦 BONUS episode of DEAD RECKONING! 🪦✨ San Francisco just agreed to pay $750,000 in a settlement to a former investigator for the Medical Examiner's office, who says she was fired after she accused the office's director of throwing away a human skull. Beth and Courtney talk about the lawsuit, allegations of bullying and bigotry in the Medical Examiner's office, and the unidentified man whose remains are at the center of the story.
Harpsichord + dance beats = Patrick Wolf's new song, "The Beast"
I've been so long worrying
What I was doing wrong
I forgot my rights
You banished me
To the border
Then you hate
What I became to survive
“It’s complex to grieve the legacy for the institution that has bred so much positivity and also so much harm,” said Julia Pilkington-Alexandre, who organized the gathering to lay flowers outside the building.
“We remember the bravery this building has known. The joy. The pain. We commemorate this complex legacy and lay this court to rest. And we will fight another day.”
https://missionlocal.org/2026/05/san-francisco-immigration-court-now-closed-montgomery/
Happy Walpurgisnacht, everyone!
“The Kashaya Pomo word for white people is pala-cha, or miracles, and an elder told me the reason: When white people entered this land, they killed humans, they killed animals, and they chopped down trees, but instead of getting punished, instead of this violence turning back on them, more white people arrived, and the violence continued.” —Greg Sarris
✨🪦 THIS TIME ON DEAD RECKONING 🪦✨ Who were San Francisco’s abortion doctors? In the second part of our look at this history, Beth introduces us to three practitioners, including a son who took up the family business after his father retired, and an iconoclastic woman who built a successful practice and never lost a patient.
