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CHAPTER 6

Mount Hope Cemetery

SAN DIEGO

Mount Hope Cemetery’s reminder of what happened to Calvary Cemetery

THERE’S AN HISTORICAL JEWEL existing between two realms in San Diego—that of the living and that of the dead. Mount Hope Cemetery is 115 acres of rolling hills, green grass, and tall palms swaying in the gentle breeze. The City of San Diego does a beautiful job maintaining the 142-year-old property.

The city’s landmark is serious about schedule and security; I’ve even been locked in with my car—earlier than the posted closing signs—as have several members of my team. I’ve also heard of people getting locked into the mausoleum, and they would have stayed there all night had they not been able to use their cell phones.

The cemetery is filled with old surnames prominent in San Diego’s history—early settlers such as Charles Whaley and his family (see Whaley House chapter) and “The Beautiful Stranger,” Kate Morgan, whose mysterious death at the Hotel del Coronado was never questioned by her grandfather (see the Hotel del Coronado chapter). Instead, he discreetly wired funds to bury her. Noir writer and La Jolla resident Raymond Chandler calls this place his eternal home. Even suicides are welcome. It wasn’t always that way; for centuries they were strictly persona non grata on holy ground. As long as you have the funds, there’s a place for everyone here—as long as there are still plots available, that is.

Buried near Thomas Whaley is Alonzo E. Horton, another local household name (the Horton Plaza mall is named for him). He’s the person who first proposed to the settlement of San Diego that groundbreaking begin on a new public cemetery. Before then, and even after, small cemeteries were popping up all over the area—at least one hundred of them accounting for thousands of bodies, many with no records of death or birth. One of the only ways we even find out about these old cemeteries now is when someone is putting in a sprinkler system and hits a femur or skull with their shovel. Only a few dozen of the originals remain today. Horton made the proposal in 1869, and a year later the first interment took place. Mount Hope Cemetery was established outside the growing city for health reasons—bodies had a way of leaching into the water supply because embalming hadn’t quite yet caught on, coffins didn’t have the permanent seals they have today, and cement vaults were not required. The founders believed it would take a while for the population to grow around the large cemetery property.

The Beautiful Stranger’s gravesite. Note the focus anomaly: the engraving on the stone is blurry, as if there was something over it that caused it to be out of focus. The hole below the stone, however, is perfectly in focus.

The cemetery has grown to 169 acres, with no room left to expand. It sits side-by-side with Greenwood Cemetery, a private cemetery and mortuary (they share a fence line) founded in 1907. Mount Hope plots that originally sold for $5–$20—nothing to shake a stick at back then—now cost a minimum of $1,700 if you buy online with a 15 percent broker’s fee (not including all the other death accoutrements, which will easily heap on another $10,000).

Although Mount Hope is a lovely place, it’s not in the safest of neighborhoods. In February 2012, a man was stabbed near the cemetery and left for dead. He was transported to the hospital, where he died a half hour later. Recently, the neighborhood received funding to install solar floodlights on peoples’ homes to keep crime down. The area has beautiful Victorians of all sizes, and I expect that one day, in about forty years or so, the area will be gentrified like the rest of San Diego’s outlying neighborhoods.

It’s a beautiful setting, though, and one you wouldn’t expect to be disturbed by the silent commuter trolley that glides right through the center of the cemetery on rails. The jam-packed trolley is in curious juxtaposition to the marble angels.

In the 1970s, six hundred tombstones were removed from Calvary Pioneer Park, dumped in Mount Hope’s ravine, and bulldozed over (see Calvary Cemetery/Pioneer Park chapter). The headstones were left in piles for eighteen years until there was public outcry. Eighteen headstones were then cemented into the ground next to where the trolley passes by, at the foot of a steep cliff on the cemetery property.

My Ghosts Happen Meetup group held “family day” at Mount Hope, where members’ friends and families could get to know each other, go through and learn the history of the park—and the kids could all play with each other and run through the grass, trees, and tombstones like in the good ol’ days. In the 1800s, when the first large urban cemeteries were designed by gifted architects on the East Coast, the properties served as many major cities’ first public parks and housed the finest American art of the time, created by now-famous names. Many cemeteries, such as Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, founded in 1838, opened their grand gates to the public on the weekends and charged an entry fee for those wishing to hear band music, eat picnic lunches, and stroll through the grounds. For many, it was a welcome break from the crowded cities filled with garbage and pollution from burning coal. Today, Green-Wood still holds events for the public, such as tours, author lectures, and concerts, and puts those funds toward rehabilitating the marble tombstones and statuary being destroyed by lichen, slime, and sooty mold—a problem in all old cemeteries.

My husband, Jeff, and I brought our youngest daughter to play with the other children in the group. It was a beautiful day for a stroll through the park. Roadside Paranormal case manager and investigator, Leo Aréchiga, brought his four children along.

“Our group was having a family outing at the historic Mount Hope Cemetery. Carmen, my beautiful wife, came along and the grown-ups were in the children’s section talking and looking at the older gravestones,” Leo recalls. “At some point, two of my kids had walked off to explore by themselves when I heard my ten-year-old daughter call out for me. I looked over and she insisted I come quickly. I walked toward them and they came running to meet me. Both my daughter and her nine-year-old brother had serious looks on their faces. The story that followed still haunts my children to this day.

“According to my two kids, they were walking in the same direction on opposite sides of the street,” Leo continues. “My son was heading toward a certain grave to read the inscription, and his sister decided to join him. Now, I don’t know if something was drawing them closer, or it was just coincidence that both of them were walking to that same dead child’s resting place, but as they grew closer to it, my son felt something stop him in full stride and push him back! It scared him to the point were he couldn’t speak while he tried to make sense of what had just happened to him. The sensation he felt was that someone or something pushing back on his shoulders so that he couldn’t take another step! He wasn’t only stopped, he was pushed back and fell. As I listened to him tell me his story, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical. But, my daughter had witnessed the whole thing. She saw an invisible force stop her brother dead in his tracks, then watched him fall back. When my daughter ran to him, with fear on his face he said, ‘Something pushed me!’ I strongly discourage my children from lying, and I’m convinced that they truly had a paranormal experience that day.”

In my own experiences, I’ve found plenty of paranormal evidence during the day at Mount Hope, and I find it much easier to keep track of the equipment instead of looking around in the dark for it. Apparently, it’s also much safer. One day, one of Roadside Paranormal’s lead investigators, Jennifer Donohue, and I went out to the cemetery. We were walking through the parklike setting when she and I broke off in different directions. I went over a hill by the headstones that have been placed by the trolley car rails, and she was on the hill above conducting EVP sessions. It was an overcast day, and what I’ve noticed on days like that is that sound travels oddly when copious amounts of negative ions are present.

I was taking pictures at the bottom of the cemetery’s bluff, and all of a sudden I heard what sounded like a woman’s jovial laughter. I thought someone was right behind me. But no one was there. Then I thought maybe Jennifer had run into some kind of crazy, laughing woman wandering the cemetery. Just then, Jennifer called down to me, but I couldn’t quite hear her. I called up I’d be right there.

“I heard a man’s loud laughter behind me. It was so loud and random. I nearly jumped over the bluff when I ran up to the edge and called down,” Jennifer says of the incident. “I looked over the bluff and shouted out. I wanted to know if anyone else had heard it.”

I went up the bluff to see what was up. Jennifer asked me if I’d heard someone laughing—it took us a minute to figure out I’d heard a woman laugh, and she’d heard a man. The spirit I heard just sounded like she was having a really good belly laugh, but it did scare the hell out of me—sounded like it was right behind me. We looked around—the park had just opened, no one else was anywhere near where we were.

“I had my recorder on,” Jennifer says. “I was doing EVPs. I headed back to the tombstone I’d left my recorder on—I just kept thinking, Glad I had my recorder on! I went to play it and found out my recorder went off—right in the middle of my sound file. I’d not been holding the recorder at the time; it was propped up on an old tombstone. Neither of the laughs was audible.

“I pulled out the batteries and checked them,” Jennifer continues. “They’re the kind that you can touch and it tells you how much battery life you have left. The batteries were fine. I’d just put them in that morning. They were new and had only been running about an hour. The recorder had not been turned off, the recording had been ended, pretty tough to do, as I usually have to be quite precise in ending a file. Were they mocking us? Maybe. Were they trying to scare us? Perhaps. All I know is that the laughter I heard sounded genuine. As long as they were having a good time, I think it’s all good. They made contact with us, so there was certainly something they wanted to convey. I’ve been doing this a long time, and the EVPs I usually get are so morose, mad, sad, or pathetic sounding—they’re looking for help, or giving one-word answers. This was something special. I like to think they’re having a good time wherever they are, and this gave me food for thought about the subject. Maybe death isn’t so bad after all.”

Roadside Paranormal investigator Michelle Myers was at Mount Hope with people from some other teams when they became aware of something much more disturbing than the experiences Donohue and I had.

“During our walk through the cemetery, we kept getting glimpses of low shadows darting between bushes and behind tombstones,” says Michelle. “At one point, we heard a low growling. Later we broke up into two groups, my group set up with digital recorders and a video camera next to Kate Morgan’s grave [see Hotel del Coronado chapter]. About twenty minutes into the investigation, my lead investigator stood up to meet the other lead investigator, who was walking toward us, then stopped next to a tree. I saw the figure she went to meet and didn’t think anything of it until she hurried back to us and grabbed her walkie-talkie. When she’d reached the place she thought others were standing, there was no one there. She radioed the other lead, and he reported he had not left his investigation site on the other side of a hill, which his group members confirmed. When both groups met back together, the other group also reported having seen and heard figures around them as well.”

Despite the paranormal activity here and the sometimes disturbing aftermath of Santería rituals (sacrificed animals and candles), I’ve found walking the rows at both Mount Hope and the cemetery next to it, a lot of residents still enjoy the parklike atmosphere during the day and go for walks there. It’s ideal for kids: green grass, shade, and mysterious gravestones to read—and you won’t usually find pedophiles there like you have to worry about at the parks. My daughter and I stopped by one day to take photos. I’d gotten her a point-and-click camera easy enough for her five-year-old hands to use, and she was eager to get to work. She walked up to a mom with two children and asked her how old her children were and if she could take pictures of them. The mother told her one was six and the other seven, and encouraged her to play with them.

I introduced myself, and she invited me to sit down and have a juice box and almonds. She told me that she’d lived nearby in a house that belonged to her parents. Four generations of her family had lived nearby since the early 1900s. The house where she was living was an older, smaller Victorian, and when her parents moved to Santa Clara, they asked her family to live there until they decided to come back.

I asked her if she’d ever seen any ghosts in the cemetery and she laughed. She told me when she was a child her grandparents would take her there to play; apparently on nice days some of the old-timers would bring chairs and a table and set up a chess game. The women would come over later with a late lunch, and the children would play all day there. Her great-grandmother had always given them plenty of warnings not to run around the tombstones and always made her bring her rosary in her pocket when she went to the cemetery … she’d always wondered about that. One day she asked her great-grandmother why.

Her great-grandmother told her about a child who’d come with his mother and her friends from New Town, now San Diego’s downtown, in the late 1800s by wagon. They had friends in the area they would visit every so often. One day the boy had been roughhousing with some of the other boys. The boy’s foot hit a tombstone as he ran, and he flew over the tombstone, hitting his head very hard on the corner of another tombstone. His mother was tending to him with a wet towel on his head to clean up the blood and bring down the swelling. She put his head in her lap and he fell asleep. No one knows why, but the child died in his sleep within an hour or so. The cemetery director felt so badly for the mother that he gave her a grave, coffin, and tombstone free of charge. The mother was consumed with grief, and a month later she rode her horse out to the cemetery and hung herself.

The mother had been a poor single parent whose sailor husband had died on a ship and had been buried at sea. The cemetery director recognized the dead woman as the woman who had lost her son the month before, so he gave her a secret burial in the children’s section in the same plot as her son. He did not supply a tombstone, however, as it would have enraged other parents if they found out that a suicide had been buried in the children’s section.

The woman told me that she’d not seen any ghosts at the cemetery. She mentioned that when her daughter was about three, she told her mother that she saw other children in the cemetery all the time and would talk about her “friends” to her father when they got home. When her mother mentioned that she’d not seen any other children that day, her daughter was adamant about them. The woman said that her daughter stopped seeing them around the time she turned five. She called the children over and gave them all juice boxes, and she showed me what her daughter was wearing around her neck. She laughed and pulled out what was on the cord. It looked like a vintage rosary. “I guess old habits die hard,” she said and tucked it back under her daughter’s T-shirt.