Cool Finds

This Couple Found a Mysterious 150-Pound Sculpture Buried in Their Backyard. Now, They’re Trying to Figure Out Who Made It

After discovering a large limestone bust on their San Francisco property in May, Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn have spent the past few months trying to unravel its backstory

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

August 17, 2026 10:33 a.m.

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Greg Gatwood was working in his San Francisco backyard this May when his shovel struck something hard beneath the dirt. Gatwood, a 65-year-old landscape contractor, figured that he’d hit an old fence post footing.

Instead, after freeing the object with a pickax, Gatwood found himself face to face with a bust of a woman. Made of limestone, the hefty piece consisted of a woman’s head and neck rising from a rectangular base. It was substantial, weighing roughly 150 pounds and measuring about 22 inches wide, 18 inches high and 10 inches deep.

“It’s exciting,” Gatwood tells NBC Bay Area’s Raj Mathai. “It’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever dug up in a yard, and I’ve dug up a lot of things over the years.”

Gatwood showed the mysterious masterpiece to his partner, Judy Gittelsohn, who is a professional painter. Over the past few months, Gatwood and Gittelsohn have made it their mission to figure out who carved the bust—and how it ended up in their backyard.

“I have spoken to close to 50 people, and nobody knows anything about it,” Gittelsohn tells the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sam Whiting. “It was done by someone with a sophisticated skill level. It was not created by a hobbyist.”

Experts caution that definitively identifying the sculpture’s creator will be challenging, if not impossible, without a signature or some sort of historical documentation.

“It is a treasure that they just found,” Ken Middlebrook, curator of collections at the nonprofit History San Jose organization, tells KTVU’s Jesse Gary. “The difficulty will be trying to identify who made it.”

Mystery sculpture found in San Francisco backyard | KTVU

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Though its origins remain decidedly murky, Gittelsohn has a strong hunch about the sculpture’s maker: She thinks it may be linked to Ralph Stackpole or one of his protégés.

Stackpole was an American sculptor and muralist who lived and worked in San Francisco during the first half of the 20th century. He moved to the city in 1901 and left his mark on it over the next several decades. In the 1930s, the artist created one of the frescoes inside Coit Tower as part of the Public Works of Art Project, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reform programs during the Great Depression. Stackpole also carved the two towering Art Deco figures that still guard the entrance of the historic Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building in San Francisco. Additionally, he made pieces for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition, which was held on the city’s artificial Treasure Island.

In addition to creating his own art, Stackpole spent nearly two decades teaching sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute. The institute closed in 2022, but the building that housed its sculpture department sits across the street from Gittelsohn and Gatwood’s home in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood. Before the couple’s two-story house was built in 1948, the property was an empty lot—and Gittelsohn suspects that Stackpole or one of his pupils might have buried the sculpture there.

“His disciples, his students, created this similar look of the flattened nose and broad face,” she tells NBC Bay Area.

Historian Anne Schnoebelen, vice president of the board of directors at the Treasure Island Museum in San Francisco, says that it’s possible the piece was created by either Stackpole or Adeline Kent or Helen Phillips, two of his students who lived nearby.

She speculates that the bust might have been featured at the Golden Gate International Exposition, in an area called the Court of Pacifica. In addition to Stackpole’s 80-foot-tall statue of the mythical goddess Pacifica, the site featured 20 Pacific Unity sculptures, including 12 smaller works arranged on the tiers of a three-tier fountain and 8 larger sculptures on the surrounding plaza.

“It looks like it could’ve been one of the faces made for the Court of Pacifica, but we don’t know,” Schnoebelen tells the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Lin.

As for how the sculpture ended up in Gatwood and Gittelsohn’s backyard? Schnoebelen says we may never have an answer.

“It could have been somebody who didn’t like the way it turned out, or maybe Stackpole didn’t like it,” she tells the San Francisco Chronicle. “There is a reason somebody buried it, and maybe they don’t want people talking about it.”

Gatwood is equally curious about the bust’s backstory—and he’s come up with his own theory about how it ended up on the property.

“Perhaps it was given to someone in this house, and it was displayed in the yard and the yard kind of fell into disuse and became overgrown, and maybe the statue fell off a wooden pedestal—I don’t know,” he tells NBC Bay Area. “Most antiquities are dug up because they were once prized and displayed, and then things happened.”

Whatever the explanation, Gatwood plans to enjoy the sculpture. He’s building a pedestal to display it in the house’s backyard, where he says it will remain unless the couple finds “out it is a priceless sculpture that needs to be in a museum,” per the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I’ve always thought every yard deserves a nice piece of garden art,” Gatwood tells the Times. “This will be displayed in a special way in our yard. I hope to share the photos of our yard when it’s completed with the statue beautifully placed.”

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.