The story
Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve spreads over the Mount Diablo coalfield above Antioch, California — the state's largest coal operation of the 1860s-80s, whose towns of Nortonville, Somersville, Stewartville and neighbours held thousands of miners, many Welsh, before the industry died and the towns dispersed, leaving tunnel mouths, tailings and the hilltop Rose Hill Cemetery where mining families buried their dead, children of epidemics among them; the East Bay Regional Park District preserves it all, running underground tours of the Hazel-Atlas workings. Rose Hill carries the region's most famous legend: the 'White Witch', a figure in white among the graves — attached in telling to Sarah Norton, midwife of Nortonville, killed in an 1879 buggy accident, whose storm-interrupted funerals seeded the tale; the cemetery suffered decades of vandalism the district has painstakingly reversed, so the rules are absolute — daylight, respect, nothing touched. Visitors describe the white figure, lights, children's voices and mine-mouth cold. Present Black Diamond as coal-heritage first, Sarah Norton's memory dignified, the Witch hedged as the legend it is.