Couple Unearths Mysterious 150-Pound Sculpture Buried in Their Backyard

Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn with sculpture discovery.

Photo: Judy Gittelsohn

You never know what might be hiding in your backyard. In May 2026, San Francisco resident Greg Gatwood was working in his garden when his shovel hit something hard beneath the soil. The 65-year-old landscape contractor initially thought he had struck an old fence post footing. Instead, after digging around the object, he found himself face-to-face with a mysterious sculpture of a woman.

Made of limestone, the bust weighs around 150 pounds and measures approximately 22 inches wide, 18 inches tall, and 10 inches deep. It depicts the head and neck of a woman emerging from a rectangular base.

While Gatwood has dug up plenty of things throughout his career, he’d never found anything quite like this. “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 says.

Since the discovery, Gatwood and his partner, painter Judy Gittelsohn, have been trying to figure out who made the sculpture—and why it was buried in their Russian Hill backyard. Gittelsohn has contacted nearly 50 people in search of answers, but the artist’s identity remains unknown.

One possibility is that the sculpture is connected to Ralph Stackpole, an influential sculptor and muralist who helped shape San Francisco’s art scene during the first half of the 20th century. Stackpole taught sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts, which later became the San Francisco Art Institute. Intriguingly, the building that once housed the school’s sculpture department is directly across the street from the couple’s home.

Gatwood and Gittelsohn’s house wasn’t built until 1948, so the property was still an empty lot during some of the years Stackpole and his students worked nearby. Gittelsohn has also noticed similarities between the sculpture’s broad face and flattened nose and the work of Stackpole and his students.

Stackpole, however, isn’t the only possibility. Historian Anne Schnoebelen has noted that the sculpture resembles faces created for San Francisco’s 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition. She also suggested sculptors Adaline Kent and Helen Phillips, both former Stackpole students who lived nearby, as possible creators. For now, the sculpture’s history remains unknown. No visible signature exists, and without documentation, identifying the artist could be difficult.

Gatwood and Gittelsohn aren’t planning to rebury their unexpected find. Gatwood is building a pedestal for the sculpture so that the mysterious woman can remain in the garden where she was discovered.