"In 2001, a hiker took a summertime stroll on the dunes at Ano Nuevo and made a gruesome discovery: Bones just below the sandy surface, which turned out to be numerous human skeletons," Ross Eric Gibson writes. "The San Mateo County Sheriff's Office launched a murder investigation, only to learn this was the remains of a graveyard, recalling a tragic era on what had once been the coast of Santa Cruz County prior to 1868."