Haunted Cemeteries Page 5

  Finally, Hinsdale Animal Cemetery in Willowbrook was established in 1926. As might be expected, all of the apparitions seen in the memorial park are animals that have been buried there. And they come in all varieties, shapes, and sizes!

  Part Two

  STATESIDE

  SPIRITS

  Ghosts are everywhere! Reports have surfaced of haunted graveyards in every state of the Union. Some legends date from the time of early colonial settlers; others have only come to light in the past couple of decades. Let’s make our way across the country, west to east, in search of spooks.

  We’ll start on the Left Coast, where Valentino’s pet dog and Marilyn Monroe turn up in Tinseltown. Spectres inhabit at least two cemeteries in New Orleans, and the son of Satan is said to be buried outside Kansas City. Meanwhile, the wraith of a Lady in Gray searches for a loved one in a Confederate cemetery in Ohio.

  Then we’ll visit the East Coast, starting with a grave robber in Key West. Then it’s on to Baltimore to catch the phantom of one of America’s master writers of the macabre. After a quick stop at the battlefield hauntings in Gettysburg, we’re off to Salem, Massachusetts, where one restless soul resents having been unjustly put to death for witchcraft. Finally, we’ll drop by the gravesite of a real-life witch in Maine.

  Let the nightmares begin!

  Chapter 7

  Old Town Terrors

  The original boundaries of the El Campo Santo Cemetery in the Old Town settlement of San Diego have been lost in time, and many of the graves have been forgotten and paved over by city streets. Little wonder, then, that cars parked nearby won’t start or will go dead as they pass the graveyard’s gates.

  Why wouldn’t it start? Samantha had never had trouble with her car before. And this one was almost brand-new. Twenty-five thousand miles was nothing for a Toyota. And this one was a Prius. There was no way it should be dead!

  In the old days she would have known what to do. As a little girl she had watched her dad dozens of times as he coaxed life out of a succession of junkers their family had owned. He’d pop the latch, open the hood, jiggle a couple of wires, get back behind the wheel, pump the gas pedal a few times, and like magic the carburetor or whatever would catch and turn over.

  But Samantha, parked there beside El Campo Santo Cemetery a few blocks outside Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, had no idea where to start. Almost nothing under the hybrid’s hood looked familiar.

  Just then she noticed a woman dressed in nineteenth-century garb on the other side of the cemetery wall. She was obviously one of the park employees paid to dress up in period attire, but she seemed distracted, detached, wandering without focus among the graves.

  “Excuse me,” Samantha called. “Do you know if there’s a garage around here?” She motioned toward her car and glared down at the dead engine. Getting no response, she looked back in the direction of the cemetery. The mysterious woman had disappeared.

  Samantha’s eyes quickly surveyed the cemetery, then peered down San Diego Avenue. How could that woman have gotten out of sight without me seeing or hearing her go? she wondered. Oh well, with a car on the fritz, she had little time to worry about the stranger. Sam reached into her purse, found her cell phone, pulled out her AAA card, and dialed.

  Fortunately there was a gas station with a mechanic not too far away, and the auto club operator told her that help would be there in about twenty minutes. Not too bad, Sam reflected. It was still warm, a late, lazy Sunday afternoon, and it would give her a chance to reflect on all the incredible things she’d seen that day.

  Samantha had been living in San Diego for about three years at that point, drawn there as so many others have been by its temperate summers and mild winters. It was a small big city: the second largest in California, home to about 1.5 million inhabitants, depending upon how many of the surrounding communities you wanted to include as part of the greater metropolitan area. She loved that she was close to the ocean, the mountains, the desert—and another country. Tijuana was just a few miles away!

  At one time, of course, San Diego was part of Mexico. In 1769, Gaspar de Portolà, the governor of Alta California (or upper California, the Spanish-controlled region above Baja), erected a fort (the Presidio) on a hillside about five miles north of today’s downtown San Diego. Father Junípero Serra then established the first of his twenty-one Franciscan missions in California under the garrison’s protection. By the 1820s, a pueblo made up of tiny adobe houses grew up on the flat lands beneath Mission Hill, forming the foundation of what is now called Old Town San Diego. Many people refer to the hamlet as the birthplace of California.

  Samantha had decided it was finally time she took a look at the place, and that’s what had brought her there that sunny autumn day. Old Town preserves several restored and renovated structures, including five adobe houses that were built from about the end of the Mexican War of Independence in 1821 to around 1872. Halfway through that period, in 1850, California obtained statehood.

  Knowing that she planned to end her day at the cemetery, Sam parked on San Diego Avenue along the graveyard’s low wall and walked the two long blocks up to Twiggs Street, where Old Town officially began.

  No wonder it’s the most visited state park in California, thought Samantha. It has something for everyone! Each of the buildings was a mini-museum unto itself. In nine square blocks she was able to visit the state’s first schoolhouse, first newspaper office, first courthouse, a blacksmith shop, stables, several former private homes, and lots and lots of stores and boutiques.

  After wandering around the various attractions for a couple of hours, Sam made her way down San Diego Avenue to the Whaley House. Although technically outside the confines of the state park, the house (a California State Historic Landmark) was perhaps the single best-known structure in Old Town—if for no other reason than its reputation for being haunted.

  That’s right: a real, honest-to-goodness haunted house!

  Thomas Whaley had been born in New York City in 1823 and, like so many others, traveled west during the California gold rush to seek his fortune. He had been a merchant in San Francisco before moving to San Diego to start a business in 1851. Two years later he married Anna DeLaunay in New York City. In 1857 he built his still-standing home in Old Town on a former execution site where, most notoriously, James Robinson, better known as Yankee Jim, had been hanged for stealing a boat.

  The two-story, plain Greek Revival–style house with its side wing was the first home built of bricks in San Diego. In addition to its being the family residence, various rooms in the large structure served, at one time or another, as the county courthouse, San Diego’s first commercial theater, a granary, a dance hall, a schoolhouse, a polling place, a general store, the county records archive, and the meeting place for the County Board of Supervisors.

  The Whaleys lived in the house until 1885, when they moved south to the rapidly growing new district down by the harbor. Whaley died in 1890 and is buried with his wife in San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

  According to the legends Samantha heard as she toured the home, the Whaleys began to hear heavy, disembodied footsteps there shortly after they moved in. Thomas said they sounded like the boots of a large man, presumably those of Yankee Jim’s spirit. Also, the windows were known to unlock and open themselves at will.

  In later years, at least four ghosts were reported in the house. Among them was a short, ruddy-faced woman wearing a nineteenth-century print dress, who was spotted in the former courtroom. Psychic Sybil Leek said she saw a young girl with long hair and a full dress in the dining room. Anna Whaley’s apparition has turned up in the garden and in the rooms on the ground level. Perhaps the most frequent visitor is Thomas Whaley himself. His full-body spectre usually appears on an upper landing wearing a frock coat and pantaloons.

  Sam was disappointed that none of the fabled phantoms deigned to show up for her, but she realized ghosts seldom appear in broad daylight. She didn’t really believe that people cou
ld return from the Great Beyond, but she knew she’d probably have to come back on a weekend night when the house was open late if she wanted to catch one of them.

  As Samantha strolled the two short blocks to the El Campo Santo Cemetery, she noticed the long shadows crossing San Diego Avenue. Instinctively she looked at her watch and then turned to face the coast. The sun was almost below the tops of the buildings, and the sky was turning a bright crimson. It would be a beautiful sunset.

  As she passed through the gate into the graveyard, a sudden chill passed over her. Unusual for that time of the year, especially since there wasn’t a breeze, but who doesn’t feel a small shiver just before entering a cemetery?

  The burial ground was simple and very small, a fraction of what had been a sizable resting place for 477 souls. It had once extended far beyond its current adobe walls, to the west of San Diego Avenue and to the east of Linwood Street. Given the tiny graveyard’s importance in early California history, Samantha had expected it to be a well-kept, grassy expanse dotted by stone and wooden markers. What she found was much more rustic.

  Though cleared of brush and weeds, the squarish parcel was almost completely barren, with dust and dirt underfoot. Most of the earthen graves were encircled with rocks. Quite a few were surrounded by low, white picket fences, one or two with an iron railing. Some of the graves had a wooden cross or one made of bricks. A few of the headstones were nothing more than flat, perpendicular slabs of wood. All the markers were austere, reminding her of similar graveyards she had visited in pioneer towns throughout the Old West.

  El Campo Santo (or the Holy Field) was founded as a Roman Catholic burial ground. It was probably intended as a final resting spot for the town’s elite, but it wound up accommodating saints and sinners alike, with many rogues among its longtime residents.

  Perhaps best known among them was poor Yankee Jim. Sam looked down at his gravesite, set within a simple oval of round stones. An upright plank bearing the hanged man’s name stood at one end. It looks like a boogie board stuck at the head of the grave, mused Samantha. A separate marker detailing the unfortunate man’s life sat on a short post stuck in the center of the grave.

  Nearby was the final resting place of Antonio Garra. As with Yankee Jim, a wooden panel acted as a tombstone at one of the narrow ends of a stone oval. But Garra’s memorial included a candle in a small metal lantern topped with a small cross. A low, engraved granite marker was added to the gravesite in 1992 to commemorate his fight for the rights of local Native Americans.

  Garra was a chief of the Cupeño tribe, and in 1851 he led an uprising against the local government. The town had begun to tax the natives but refused to allow them representation in the city council. After his capture in January the following year, Garra was made to stand in front of his open grave, which some say he was forced to dig himself, so that when he was summarily shot by a firing squad his body would fall back into the hole. (Thomas Whaley was among the executioners.)

  As Samantha stood there at the foot of the grave contemplating justice in the 1850s—hadn’t Garra and his people simply been demanding the same rights as those who fought the American Revolution?—she felt a sudden uneasiness. She couldn’t put her finger on the sensation, but something didn’t seem quite right. All she knew was she had to get away from that spot.

  Moving to the opposite side of the cemetery, she came across the side-by-side graves of Bill Marshall and Juan Verdugo along the back wall, tucked into the southeast corner of the graveyard. Marshall was a Rhode Island sailor who jumped ship when the whaling vessel he was working on docked in San Diego in 1844. For several years he lived among the area tribes and wound up marrying one of the local chief’s daughters. He and Verdugo, a local Native American, became involved in the 1851 Indian uprising. Both were captured and tried. Verdugo admitted taking part in the rebellion; Marshall did not. Both were found guilty and hanged on a gibbet set up outside Whaley House on December 13, 1851. In the same manner Yankee Jim had been strung up, the men were hauled into position on the back of a wagon, and once the nooses were tightened around their necks, the cart pulled away to leave the men swaying in the breeze.

  Again, a feeling of vague discomfort passed through Samantha. What is going on? she thought. All these old stories were getting to her.

  That was when she quietly left the cemetery and walked down the sidewalk to her car. And now, here she was, waiting for the tow truck to arrive.

  Fortunately it showed up right on time, even a little sooner than promised. The driver hopped out with a sort of lopsided grin on his face. Before Samantha could say a word, he nodded knowingly and said, “Having trouble starting your car here by the graveyard? You wouldn’t be the first.”

  And with that, the young man broke into one of the strangest stories Samantha had ever heard.

  By 1899, there was demand for a better road from Old Town to the new San Diego along the edge of the bay. After much discussion, it was decided to run a horse-drawn streetcar on the most direct route between the two communities. Unfortunately, that cut right through El Campo Santo Cemetery. It seemed a practical solution at the time. Many of the graves were unmarked, the names of the dead long forgotten. New burials had ceased; most townsfolk were by then being interred in Cavalry Cemetery in Mission Hills. But rather than remove and relocate the buried bodies, the city fathers allowed the pathway to be laid out on top of the graves. Then, in 1942, the track was paved, creating San Diego Avenue.

  The problems began almost immediately. People who left their cars on that stretch of road—unknowingly on top of the old graves—would return to find them unable or difficult to start. In later years, their car alarms would go off for seemingly no reason.

  Could the people who were buried under the street and sidewalks be causing all the trouble because they weren’t happy about those walking and parking on top of them?

  Eventually about twenty of the abandoned graves were found using special sonar detectors. A tiny brass circular medallion engraved with the simple phrase “Grave Site” was placed over each location.

  “And if you’ll notice,” the mechanic told Samantha, “one of those little tombstones is right there on the edge of the pavement by your front tire. Somebody is probably lying beneath our very feet—and your car. I heard some of the businesses around here got together and had the place exorcised back in 1996 so the ghosts would stop acting up. Did it work? Well, here we are, aren’t we?”

  That wasn’t all, the mechanic added. As people walk through El Campo Santo they sometimes feel an unexpected and unexplainable chill, almost as though they were passing through a wall of ice. Others sense a general disquiet or apprehension while standing near some of the graves, probably those belonging to unhappy souls.

  And there were plenty of reports of ghosts floating in and around the cemetery. Sometimes it’s merely a green mist or a faint light passing over the sidewalk. But phantoms spotted within the graveyard include a Native American man as well as a woman who materializes by the south wall, dressed all in white. Some of the apparitions are half-figures, visible only from the waist up. All are in wardrobe dating to Old Town’s heyday. But none of them sticks around for very long. The spectres vanish in the blink of an eye.

  Like that woman in the Victorian dress I talked to earlier today, thought Samantha. Oh, my God, did I actually see a ghost?! Instinctively, she gazed out over the cemetery, hoping that the spectre would come back to confirm her suspicions.

  But as she started to contemplate her run-in with the Spirit World, Samantha heard the low buzz she knew to be the hum of a hybrid. She turned back to the mechanic as he gently lowered the hood.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” he admitted. “The engine turned over the first time I tried it. Seems the spooks just wanted to get your attention.”

  And so they had. Samantha was eager to leave the cemetery far behind. She traveled the two or three blocks to Interstate 5, merged into rush-hour traffic, and slowly began
to make her way back home. But the story of El Campo Santo stayed with her . . . and continued to haunt her for many nights to come.

  Chapter 8

  Pretty in Pink

  The ghost of the Pink Lady floats over the graves of the early 1900s Yorba Cemetery in Yorba Linda, California. But check your calendar before going to visit the spectre. If she decides to appear at all, it will be on June 15 of an even-numbered year.

  It was only by accident that David knew about the ghost. He stumbled onto the old legend while making plans to visit the Nixon Library and, on a whim, decided to see whether there was anything else to do while he was in Yorba Linda.

  Fat chance, he thought. Yorba Linda wasn’t exactly ground zero for sightseers in Southern California. The presidential library was only there because that’s where Richard Nixon had been born, and his boyhood house had already been preserved. When it came time to store his presidential papers, it made sense to put his library and museum on the adjacent property.

  David had “done” the museum years ago, but it had recently become part of the official Presidential Library system under the National Archive, and there had been a complete renovation. Also, the last time he had visited, both Pat and Richard Nixon were still alive. She had died in 1993, the former president the following year, and both were now interred on the library grounds. Their low, gray marble headstones were located to the east of the exhibition hall, between a reflecting pool and the birthplace. Nixon’s presidential helicopter had also recently been added to the holdings and sat to the southeast of the simple, two-story house.