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CHAPTER 3

El Campo Santo Cemetery

OLD TOWN SAN DIEGO

El Campo Santo Cemetery in Old Town is one of the oldest pioneer cemeteries in the state and an amazing mix of cultures. This is where the Day of the Dead festivities end, when hundreds of people with skeleton makeup fill the cemetery and spill out into the street to write notes and light candles for their loved ones who’ve passed on. It’s an amazing place to capture EVPs.

ONE OF THE SMALLEST EXISTING CEMETERIES in San Diego is the El Campo Santo Cemetery, on San Diego Avenue in Old Town. Unlike other cemeteries within the city limits, El Campo Santo seems to have visitors at all hours of the day and night, every day of the year. The energy fluctuates in an ebb-and-flow manner inside the small plot of land—energy that allows the dead to rise anytime they wish to interact with the living.

The graveyard is especially active with souls and the living on October 30, when Old Town (and most of the missions in California) as well as Old Town San Diego State Historic Park celebrate Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). On this day and the day after, All Saints’ Day, all of Old Town is awash in bright orange marigolds, the color of remembrance.

The celebration begins with the community coming into El Campo Santo to clean the graves and decorate them for the celebration, hanging huge, colorful crepe flowers in the trees and ladening the graves with offerings to let the dead know they are not forgotten. In the streets of Old Town, you’ll see face painting on many corners. The adornment of skulls and the making of crepe paper flowers—as well as live music in the Whaley House courtyard—are all part of the nearly round-the-clock activities. All of Old Town’s stores have elaborate altars with photos of family members who have passed and their favorite things to honor them. In the evening, people dressed in skeleton or period costumes walk in a candlelit procession from the Whaley House altar to El Campo Santo Cemetery, where speeches are made in remembrance of the pioneers of Old Town. People walk from grave to grave to leave orange flowers and notes to their relatives.

The cemetery was established in 1849 as a Roman Catholic burial lot. It took thirty-one years to somehow squeeze 477 bodies into an area that became even smaller in 1889, when a streetcar line was built through part of the cemetery. In 1942, the streetcar route was paved over and became San Diego Avenue. What you may not notice is that there are graves under the streets and sidewalks and lots surrounding the cemetery.

The sacred grounds have been under siege by the city government ever since it stopped making money, but thanks to the outcry from the community, it was saved and didn’t go completely under like Calvary and Buena Vista cemeteries. You’ll notice brass medallion markers in the street that read GRAVESITE, marking the location of twenty or so graves that were paved over and discovered again in the 1930s by scientists from the Geophysics Group of Escondido. Nearly all of the original markers in the cemetery have now been removed by vandals, fallen apart, or gone missing at some point. Most of those standing today are modern replacements.

Although the cemetery is hardly in a low-traffic area—business owners and homeowners are within earshot night and day—it seems somehow isolated. Last time I was there, I counted four wireless night cameras trained on the area, so you are never truly alone there, at least not on video playback. But during the night, you see many people carrying digital recorders as they question the dead. Sometimes, on a good night, the living interact with the dead. On a bad night, the living interact with the living—which can be much scarier than any ghosts I’ve ever encountered.

Maritza Skandunas, medium and founder of San Diego Ghost Hunters, was with her team at El Campo Santo one night doing EVP work when an odd incident took place around 2 a.m. They were in the rear of the cemetery when they heard noises out front.

“All of a sudden we turned around and this guy—he had to be on drugs—he’d been walking with his head down and was out in front on the other side of the wall. He hadn’t realized we were there. I don’t think he was really even aware of his surroundings. He was probably nineteen. He reached over the wall and we saw his hands come over and grab the cross on a grave right out in front and just pull it out of the ground. We said to each other, ‘Someone is stealing a cross!’ and went running over—that’s when he took off running down the street. We chased after him. There were two guys closer to where he was that saw what was going on and ran after him,” says Skandunas. “He dropped the cross and we grabbed it and took it back. It just seemed like he didn’t even know what he was doing when he did it.”

Vandals are always visiting the cemetery; it seems like there is always someone doing something to desecrate the area. Late one night I visited the cemetery with Jennifer Donohue, Roadside Paranormal lead investigator and medium, to find two mason jars filled with “charms” and what looked like animal intestines floating in some kind of liquid buried in one of the children’s graves. We could see the lids and began unearthing them by hand.

We had our digital recorders on and lying on the ground while we were digging them out. The full moon would be over the next day, and the Satanists would probably be back for their “spell jars.” So we set them on the wall as a sign to let them know their plan had been foiled and they were not welcome in the graveyard, and to let the community know that something was afoot.

We’d set our recorders down when we first started the digging, and with the task at hand we’d forgotten to pick them up again. We went down the street to a late-night bar to get some coffee to go for our drives home. When we realized what we’d done, we went back for them—both recorders had been physically turned off. You’d think if someone was going to take the trouble to turn them off, they might have also taken the recorders (worth a few hundred dollars each).

Later, when we played them back, we found that each recorder had picked up different sounds. Jennifer’s recording began with unusual sounds as we approached the grave. What sounded like a child having a coughing fit was barely audible in between the cars going by. Had the noise been in our own ambient surrounding, we would have noticed. A few minutes later, Jennifer was speaking with the spirit of the girl who was buried there, consoling her and apologizing to her as she pulled out one of the jars. On the tape, just as Jennifer acknowledged that she’d pulled out the jar and that we were taking them away, the coughing (it was all fairly faint) stopped all together. In the twenty minutes it took us to get coffee and realize we’d forgotten the recorders, we heard ourselves leave and then heard what sounded like someone walking heavily around in the leaves (there was no wind that night) and a grunt. Then Jennifer’s recorder shut off.

When we were digging up the jars, a man’s voice could be heard on my recorder, but none of the coughing came through. The voice sounded like it was saying “yup” or “up” sporadically. We also heard what sounded like earth being dug up with a shovel, occasionally hitting rocks. It took us no more than five minutes to dig up the jars. Even after we left, the sounds of digging and the male voice continued for about fifteen minutes—five more minutes after Jennifer’s recorder had stopped. Why had the recordings stopped? Why had they stopped at separate times? They had to have been physically turned off. The batteries were still fine, and the recorders were in good repair. They were in the same position as we’d remembered leaving them. It’s a mystery. My recording actually sounded like a grave being dug, or shoveled over. Was it the old gravedigger, Rafael Mamudes? Of all those interred in El Campo Santo—the criminals executed by gunfire as they stood directly over their graves, the murderers and murdered, the famous and infamous, and just ordinary people trying to make their way in lawless Old Town—I’d say that Rafael Mamudes is probably one of the most memorable (see tinyurl.com/mamudes).

According to a sign staked on Mamudes’s grave, he was born in Hermosillo in the Mexican state of Sonora. He was a baker, a miner, a traveler … and a murderer. He owned the land where the old jail once stood. He murdered his wife, but the priests saw fit to give him only the task of ringing the church bells at the appropriate times to pay for his crime. I’m assuming this was done in the days when the mission priests were in charge of administering local justice. Other than the bell ringing, life for Mamudes (sans wife) seemed to go on as usual. Although his birth and death dates remain unknown, the gravedigger was believed to be more than one hundred years old when he had to face his wife again. He’d been known as a handyman with a shovel, who dug everything from wells to graves. I hadn’t really given much thought to him, or even connected him to the sounds of the digging, until I spoke recently with Skandunas and heard her Mamudes story.

Skandunas and her team were in El Campo Santo one evening in 2000 doing EVP sessions, when they got an interesting response from him. “We were sitting at the bench near his grave, and he answered us with his name,” Skandunas says. “When we first started talking with him and were near his grave, I felt like he had his hands around my throat. Even on EVPs we’d talk to him and at first we’d hear a lot of yelling, so we gave him a wide berth. As more people started talking with him, he started to lighten up a bit.”

There is a spirit of a child at El Campo Santo that likes tugging on clothes. Janine Haynes, cofounder and paranormal investigator of S.P.I.R.I.T. SoCal, had quite an experience that manifested itself in a photograph. “I hadn’t been out to Old Town in years and was walking through the graveyard, and this one grave in particular kept drawing me to it. I was standing there and felt a tug on my sleeve, and I turned around to tell my sister not to be tugging on me in the cemetery. She wasn’t there—I went running off to the front of the cemetery where she was. She told me to go back and take a picture, and I did. I only had my cell phone with me, but there between the wrought-iron bars was a little kid peeking though!”

I’ve seen the eerie picture and brought it up in some evaluation software—it wasn’t Photoshopped. I would have included it in this book, but it would have lost its nuances in the printing. Over the decades since the cemetery has been closed to burials, many specters have made appearances, and there is never a shortage of paranormal investigators who’ve felt challenged to meet them face to face.

“I spent the better part of a night there hoping to confirm the reports of ghosts and supernatural sounds,” says author and paranormal investigator Richard Senate (see ghost-stalker.com for his classes, lectures, and tours in Ventura County). “I didn’t really expect to find much and if I did, I was targeting perhaps the most famous resident—Yankee Jim Robinson, who was hanged for the crime of stealing a rowboat while drunk. Crime and punishment were harsh in those Gold Rush years, and his death was seen, even then, as beyond the usual standards of the day. I was stationed next to Yankee Jim’s grave with all of my many tools hoping to capture a fleeting glimpse of the hanged man. It was dark there, and I recall the place seemed to get colder as the hours passed after midnight.

“I tried to capture an EVP, and all I was able to record was my own sneezing and the tires of passing cars,” says Senate, author of the upcoming Phantomology: the Art of Ghost Hunting, about his thirty-three years as a ghosthunter. “It was close to two when I saw the figure. I turned back toward the rear of the cemetery and saw a movement, first out of the corner of my eye. I glanced back at the spot where I had detected the movement. I guess it was maybe fifteen minutes later that I looked back to that spot, only this time a sudden chill raced down my back—there was something there! It wasn’t a shadow, but a fully formed woman in a long nineteenth-century-style dress. It was all black in Victorian mourning style, with long sleeves and ruffles around the skirt. Her head was bent low, and she wore a sort of bonnet with a low brim, also black. She was moving silently across the ground. I felt a terrible sadness about the specter; it was silent and visible for about ten or twelve seconds and then was gone. I felt she was still there in some form, perhaps visiting the graves of lost children or a beloved husband. I never got an image or anything related to poor Yankee Jim, but I did see the form of a woman—confirming that old Campo Santo is indeed haunted.”

The phantom woman is a ghost that’s been sighted over the decades since the cemetery closed; this affirmation was nice to hear from such a trusted source in the paranormal community. El Campo Santo is one of the most active locations in San Diego, but also one of the most watched over, considering the amount of traffic it gets from the paranormal community, which checks in on a regular basis.

“Treat them with respect,” says Skandunas, with advice for anyone going to the Old Town cemetery. “El Campo Santo is their burial place. Honor what they were in life—bring positive energy with you. Be respectful. Walk in letting them know you’re only there to communicate with positive spirits; surround yourself with positive light. And when you leave, say that they are not allowed to follow you home.”