Ghosthunting Southern California. Sally Richards
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.
CHAPTER 7
Cabrillo Bridge
SAN DIEGO
Dirt hiking trails go beneath the underbelly of the Cabrillo Bridge, where there is reported residual and intelligent paranormal activity.
The sumptuous proportions, the proud dignity of the bridge, encourage great expectations, and one is not disappointed. While admiration is aroused for the engineering skill that made this bridge possible, the thought persists that the real architect of this colossal concrete viaduct was a much higher power than the official engineer.
—Eugen Neuhaus, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley and San Francisco Art Institute, from the book The San Diego Garden Fair, 1916
IF YOU LIVE IN SAN DIEGO you’re no doubt familiar with the Cabrillo Bridge that extends from Balboa Park and serves as an overpass to the major freeway. Visible from Highway 163, the majestic high arches were stunning feats of civil engineering for California in 1915. I couldn’t imagine the route to Balboa Park without it. One of San Diego’s few iconic structures, the bridge has survived earthquakes, fires, reconstruction, and even the increased weight of constant traffic; the bridge was originally built for pedestrians.
The engineers could not have foreseen the auto traffic that would crowd the bridge, nor could they have envisioned the suicides that would take place there with leapers’ bodies hitting oncoming traffic below. The bridge’s safety railings were not installed until 1950, and even today they don’t cover the entire span. Determined jumpers who want the San Diego city skyline as their last view still jump from the bridge—or at least hold up traffic for several hours until they are coaxed down.
Although you’d never guess by looking at the bridge, it seems to have been a magnet for bad energy over the years. Some places are like this—the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. People on the ledge about suicide seem to tempt fate by going to places with easy access to a big drop that will end their excruciating dilemma, although survivors of Golden Gate suicide attempts all say they regretted the action the moment their hands let loose of the rail. There are only two people who survived a jump from the Cabrillo Bridge. One survivor landed in the man-made lagoon below (before Highway 163 was built under it), and the other became a paraplegic. In 1935, after hearing there had been survivors, one man who didn’t want to take chances on surviving actually hung himself from the bridge.
Built at a cost of $225,154, the bridge is 1,505 feet long and roughly 120 feet high and was constructed in anticipation of the Panama-California Exposition, a two-year event that took place when San Diego’s population was only 36,000. The bridge is the main access across Cabrillo Canyon, land formerly known as Pound Canyon, where horses and cows grazed in the late 1800s. The Laguna de Puente, a lagoon that once pooled underneath the bridge, was created by city workers and supported wildlife, including deer (I’ve lived here for eight years and have not seen a single one within the county) and small animals. It wasn’t long before the Department of Health drained the lagoon because of the incredible amount of mosquito larvae found there.
Entering Balboa Park from the west on the bridge, visitors are greeted by giant century plants and San Diego’s coat of arms mounted on the crown archway entering the inner park. The archway is designed with reliefs of Doric-order architecture and icons of the Atlantic and Pacific, which represent the joining of the two oceans by the Panama Canal. Everything you see at Balboa Park today was saved due to the philanthropic hearts (and deep pockets) of San Diegans who invested heavily in restoration. The world-class San Diego Zoo was created by one of those mitzvahs—a dentist heard the abandoned animals roaring for food (their keepers had just left them locked up when the exposition ended) and designed a plan to create the zoo. Big-name help also came to the aid of the park. Before Balboa Park was built, this area was home to the Tipai-Kumeyaay tribe. The Kumeyaay tribe now owns the US Grant Hotel—Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., the president’s son, was on the board that commissioned Balboa Park for the exposition. Indeed, things do come full circle.
Cabrillo Bridge is a beautiful site in the daytime, but night is when things from the other side of the veil are noticed more frequently, only because most of the tourists have left and traffic has slowed. I believe paranormal activity can be seen all the time, as I often catch evidence during the day. I suggest visiting this location, at least for the first time, during the day. I won’t hide the fact that this bridge has seen more than fifty suicides in her time, a few tragic murders, and even an airplane crash. This is a dodgy place to hang out after the sun goes down, so think personal safety when you’re there and be aware of your surroundings.
In my paranormal investigations, I’ve found if there’s any Native American residual energy, it’s usually peaceful. It’s not only the spirits of jumpers we were looking for during my team’s investigations. People are murdered in and around Balboa, and accidents occur. In addition to several workers killed during construction of the park, “Sky Dragon” Joe Bocquel died in the crash of his pusher biplane beside the Cabrillo Bridge on November 4, 1916, while performing at the Exposition. Fatal car, pedestrian, and bike accidents are common on nearby Sixth Avenue and on Highway 163. So, is this bridge/park a beacon for negative energy? Did something occur on this land so long ago that it caused the area to forever be a portal for unnatural deaths? I do get a sense of dread just walking across the bridge, and walking under it is one of the most depressing feelings I’ve ever had.
In May 1994, a young actor from The Old Globe Theatre was killed in a random drive-by shooting as he walked across the bridge with his girlfriend. In the 1930s, a young woman was stabbed nine times by a culprit believed to be the Coast Fiend Serial Killer in the nearby Balboa Park parking lot, close to one of the investigation sites we set up.
On September 14, 1984, two San Diego police officers, including the first woman in the department to die in the line of duty, went into “end of watch” status—a phrase emergency workers use to describe death on the job—where far too many of our police officers go.
The officers removed two girls, aged fifteen and sixteen, from the company of two men in their mid-twenties. The men were drunk, and a later investigation showed that they had also asked the girls to take methamphetamine that they provided. Making sure the girls were safe in their unit car before they went any