The Dark Watchers of the Santa Lucia Mountains

The Santa Lucia Mountains dominate central California's Coast from San Luis Obispo to Monterey. I can say from experience that the mountains are generally pleasant, providing both beautiful scenery and a quiet place to retreat from life's demands. However, legend holds that they are also haunted by strange, pitch-black specters that appear at a distance and seem to watch those who wander into the mountains or sometimes simply stare off into the distance. Their nature and purpose is unknown, but they have long been reported by people venturing into the mountains. The story is the same - someone will be climbing a slope or hiking a trail or beating a path through thick vegetation, and look up only to see a large, human-like figure garbed in a black hat and black robes, with no skin showing, looking down at them or else slowly surveying the area. If the witness moves to approach the figure, or tries to call the attention of others to it, it vanishes.

Image from weirdus.com

These specters, known as the Dark Watchers, are well known in local folklore, and even appear in John Steibeck's short story Flight and Robinson Jeffer's poem "Such Counsel You Gave to Me." It has been claimed that the Chumash who lived in the southern portions of the mountains, down around San Luis Obispo, have stories about these beings that date to before European contact with the area. They certainly were a well-known phenomenon by the 1930s, when Steinbeck and Jeffers were writing.

Commentary: This type of story is the reason why I love ghost stories as much as I do. While there's nothing bad reported to have happened to the people who have witnessed the Dark Watchers, they nonetheless are sinister, creepy, and just generally oogie. Just imagining seeing one of these things as you're going for a walk in the woods is enough to send a chill down your spine.

Oh yeah, this is the good stuff.

As noted above, it is clear that the stories of the Dark Watchers were in circulation by the 1930s, but it is often said that the Chumash who lived San Luis Obispo county had old stories about them. This may be, but the compilations of Chumash stories that I am familiar with (and because of my job and my training, I am familiar with most of what has been written about the Chumash) do not include stories of the Dark Watchers or anything similar. On the one hand, it can not be expected that the ethnographers who were collecting stories managed to get everything, so that there are stories out there that have not been captured by anthropologists is a certainty. However, it is also a common tactic for people trying to make a claim seem legitimate to falsely claim that there were Native American stories concerning it. So, there may have been stories about the Dark Watchers amongst the Chumash (and the Salinan, who occupied much fo the rest of the Santa Lucia Mountains), but I will remain a bit skeptical of this claim until I see it from a reliable source and not simply posted on websites.

I am tempted to call this a variant of the shadow people stories that have become popular in recent decades. Certainly it bears many of the same traits, and is nearly identical in appearance. However, as the Dark Watchers pre-date the popular shadow people stories and have taken on a local cultural significance, so for reasons of talking folklore, I am going to treat them differently, even though they likely have the same explanations.

Special Video:

...and here's a short film about the Dark Watchers:



Sources: Local lore, Weird U.S., Published book, Blog

The Shoemake Lake/Shoemake Road Ghosts, Salida, California

Near the small town of Salida, California, on Shoemake Avenue, there is a seasonal pond, caused by rainwater settling in a small natural basin, locally known as Shoemake Lake. It is said that several years ago, a woman was driving a car with her two children in the back seat, when she lost control (presumably because of water on the road) and drove into the pond. The children drowned, and the mother may have drowned as well.

Since then, if you visit this spot when there is standing water, you may just see or hear the ghostly children, and possibly the mother.

Image of the area via Google

Commentary: Despite growing up in Salida, I only recently heard this story when my sister and I began talking about ghost stories over the phone. Yep, me, the gatherer o' ghost stories, didn't hear about one from his own home town until after he had been living elsewhere for a good fifteen years.

I have been trying to figure out why I hadn't heard of this story before, and I have two basic ideas. 1) this may be a new story, and as a result is not something that I would have come into contact with as a teenager or child; or, more likely 2) I left Modesto just as people were beginning to routinely go onto the internet (I moved out of Salida in 1996, when computer ownership nationwide was something around half of what it currently is), and as a result access to stories such as this were limited to word-of-mouth, and, frankly, I wasn't the most socially adept teenager, resulting in less opportunities for me to hear the good stories. Interestingly, this story still hasn't made it online (well, I guess it has now since I'm posting it here, but...well, you get the idea).

The story has obvious parallels with La Llarona, but so far I haven't heard a telling of it that contains the same warnings of danger as one gets with La Llarona. It also has obvious legend tripping potential.

Regardless, it's a good little story, and as far as I can tell, I'm the first person to put it on the internet. So, yay me?

Oh, and the odds of drowning in what amounts to a big but shallow mud puddle because your car skidded into it? I'm going to go out on a limb and so that it's close to zero. I wonder if the story was originally cooked up for the larger body of water known as Miller Lake located to the west.

Sources: Local Folkore

The Birkdale Palace Hotel

The Birkdale Palace Hotel, in Southport, Merseyside, England, was opened in 1866, and was a huge building by the standards of the day, boasting 75 bedrooms and a magnificent reception area. Occupying a 20-acre parcel of land, the hotel was the model of a mid-19th century luxury hotel. In 1880, the building was modified and refurbished, and the grounds reduced to five acres.

Image from www.archiseek.com

During the 1880s, further modifications included the installation of baths (complete with pipes to bring in salt water from the ocean - bringing in "special" water, weather salt water or mineral water or some other such type, was a common practice in the rather highly pseudo-scientific health spas of the late 19th century), elevators, and electric lights. In 1884, a railway station was built adjacent to the hotel, which remained open until 1952. In the 1920s (some sources say as early as 1919, which seems somewhat unlikely though not impossible), flights from Blackpool began landing at the local airfield.

During the 1940s, the Red Cross converted it into a rest home for U.S. Army Airmen. It went back into use as a hotel in 1945.

It closed as a hotel in 1967, but was used as a filming location for What's Good for the Goose and The Haunted House of Horror (subtle title, there) in 1968 and 1969. The hotel was demolished later that year, though the coach house had since become the Fishermen's Rest pub and remained standing and open. A housing estate now sits on the ground that once were home to the hotel.

The pub itself has a bit of history. A group of 14 lifeboatmen drowned while trying to save other people in 1886, and their bodies were brought to the pub and laid out until more permanent arrangement could be made. Now, 14 brass mermaids on the bar commemorate them, as does the arrangement of some of the bar furniture.

The popular stories about the hotel claim that hauntings began almost immediately after construction (though whether or not these stories date to that time or are later inventions in unclear), when the original architect arrived to find that the hotel had been built the wrong way around (facing away from, rather than towards, the ocean), and climbing to the roof to commit suicide by leaping off. His ghost was said to be seen riding the elevators (one would assume after they were installed, 15 years after the suicide, probably because they were novel and kinda' nifty to a bored ghost) and wandering the second floor. During the 1969 demolition, the construction crew allegedly heard voices and other strange noises coming from the elevator shaft, and reported that the elevators continued to move on their own accord even after their power had been cut. When the demolition crew finally cut the elevator's cables, they reportedly had to hammer at the elevator to get it to drop.

This same construction crew reportedly found themselves locked into their hotel rooms on several occasions (what, the rooms lock from the outside?), strange noises would wake them up at night, shouting and fighting could be heard in unoccupied parts of the hotel, and that they would often hear the clack of women's heels walking on the non-carpeted floors, and the voices of people in the lobbies. Though, they were quick to admit, that these latter sounds might have been from young unmarried couples who would sometimes sneak into the hotel to use the empty rooms for a tryst.

It is also alleged that in 1961 a 6-year old Southport girls' body was found underneath one of the hotel beds, killed by a hotel porter, and that at some other point in the 1950s or 60s, two sisters culminated a suicide pact in one of the hotel's rooms. While these rumors are repeated in the talk of ghost stories, there is little information regarding ghosts directly associated with them.

The Fisherman's Rest, the former coach-house-turned-pub, is also said to be haunted. The hostelry is said to be haunted by the spirit of a little girl, though how she makes herself known is not clear, and most of the haunting of the pub is said to be of the "I felt like something was watching me" variety, with no actual physical manifestations.


Commentary: This is an interesting one in that many of the stories of the hauntings persist well after the hotel was torn down. Whether or not these stories pre-date the demolition of the hotel, I do not know, but I will try to find out and will update this entry if I do. Regardless, unlike many a haunted hotel story, this one is not being kept alive by hoteliers hoping to make money off of the deal.

The allegedly earliest ghost story, that of the architect, is pretty clearly false. The architect did not kill himself, but dies of a lung disease (likely tuberculosis) several years after the construction of the hotel. What's more, there is no evidence that the hotel was constructed facing the wrong way around - and with a building project such as this, it stretches credulity that A) it would be built the wrong way around (the foundation engineering, if nothing else, would likely prevent this), or B) that such an occurrence wouldn't leave a distinctive paper trail. Remember, this is the 19th century, when bureaucratic paper trails were really getting their steam up.

It is also interesting that the ghost stories for this place do not appear to be particularly well known. Though the sources state that they are a strong part of local folklore, and I have no reason to believe that they are not, the stories are not well represented on line, or (as far as I have been able to tell) in print. I have found references to it on Wikipedia, a historic architecture site, and a smattering of other sites, all of which appear to have liberally cut-and-pasted from each other. This is another case where it appears that plagiarism and laziness are slowing the evolution of the ghost story.


Sources: www.archiseek.com, Wikipedia Bookrags.com, UFO Digest (UFO Digest has ghost stories?)

Phizzel Goblin

Make sure to read the commentary after you read the story...

The Phissel family originated in Germany, and were caught up in the religious wars that caused chaos in Europe during the 17th century. It is said that, at some point, the family became cursed because of their involvement in the religious wars. The family was forced to leave Germany, and moved to Ireland, but the women of the family died during the journey. The men established themselves in Ireland, and eventually re-married and produced a few new generations of Phissels. By the 19th century, the spelling of the family's name had changed to Phizzel, and they found themselves in the midst of the potato famine. What remained of the Phizzel family, one man, his wife, and his son and daughter, headed for the Americas. The curse struck again, and the wife and daughter died during transit.

Settling initially in New York, the Phizzel men eventually headed to Missouri, finding a home in Cape Girardeau. Eventually, the elder Phizzel died, and the younger Phizzel, Jeremy, maried and had two children of his own: a son and a daughter. The family moved into a house near the river (which some stories say that Jeremy Phizzel won in a card game during which he might have shot one of the other players dead).

One night, Jeremy's son ran from the house, terrified. He had just witnessed his father killing his sister and mother, and had barely escaped himself. Jeremy ran after his son, shouting "come and join your sister!" The son led Jeremy on a chase to the edge of the river, where, thinking quickly, the boy through a branch in, making it look as if he had jumped into the water. His father dove in afterwards, surfaceing a moment later, still shouting "come and join your sister!" The river's strong currents quickly overcame the man, though, and he began to sink. The last sound that the boy heard his father make was a gurgling noise as he drowned, that sounded something like the word "goblin."

The boy, scarred from this experience, began wandering the river banks, subsisting on whatever food he could find. Although generally reclusive, he would sometimes jump out at people walking by on the river and shout "Come oand join your sister! Goblin, Goblin" and thus became known as the Phizzel Goblin. Though he must have died long ago, his father having chased him to the river's edge over a century ago, people still claim to encounter his spirit on the riverbank.


Commentary: The Phizzel Goblin is an April Fools Day joke concocted by Gene Fitzpatrick and Bryan Minogue of the excellent Hometown Tales podcast. Absolutely nothing in the story above is true, it was written for the April 1, 2006 episode of the podcast. However, if you didn't look at the date that the episode dropped, there is nothing in the podcast that would tip you off immediately. The story is a bit sillier than normal, admittedly, but it makes use of tropes from well-known urban legends and ghost stories: a family that has been cursed (a'la Dudleytown), a child with developmental disabilities (in this case probably purely psychological in nature, due to emotional trauma) growing up without parents (similar to a story known as "The Retarded Farmer"), and a location where one is likely to see a creature that wishes to get you (similar to La Llarona). Although someone listening to the episode may think that Gene and Bryan are "winking" at the audience, and they may very well have been trying to, the show is similar enough to their usual episodes, in which they discuss actual urban legends, bits of local history, ghost stories, etc., that it's not at all clear that they aren't simply recounting an actual urban legend in their usual delightfully goofy style. Even a few things that should be tip-offs (such as the fact that, despite settling in an area and presumably producing several generations, there was always just on Phizzel nuclear family) are common enough to ghost stories and urban legends that they didn't stand out as cues that the story was a joke.

In other words, if you were going to try to design an urban legend, you wouldn't be able to do much better.

And so, if one types "Phizzel Goblin" into Google, you will find message boards, urban legend sites, and Q&A forums where people are trying to find more information about the Phizzel Goblin. Enough people figured out that it was a joke that there aren't too many people who believe otherwise, but there are still occasional people who go looking for more information on this "legend" of the Mississippi River. In other words, the Phizzel Goblin is the funny cousin of the Blair Witch.

Mr. Fitzpatrick, Mr. Minogue...well played, sirs.


Sources: Hometown Tales Podcast...and as evidence that some people bought it, look here, here, and here

The Blue Lady of the Moss Beach Distillery

In 1927, a restaraunt called "Frank's Place", named for it's owner Frank Torres, opened in Moss Beach, California. By all accounts a glamorous place with great food, a wonderful atmosphere, and a steady supply of prohibition-era liquor, Frank's Place attracted the hoi polloi of the Bay Area.

One of the regulars, a young woman, found herself attracted to the piano player, who returned her affections. It wasn't long before the two were making time to see each other. As one might expect, the young woman's husband did not take this situation well. One night, as the pianist and the young woman were walking on the beach together, they were attacked. Nobody ever reported quite what happened, and the management's connections to local law enforcement kept the story from being looked into, but what is known is that the pianist was injured, but returned to play the piano the next night, the husband vanished and was never heard from again, and the young woman was dead from knife wounds, the blue dress that she had been wearing now soaked in her blood.

Since that time, numerous strange events have been associated with the locale, now known as the Moss Beach Distillery. The young woman is said to be routinely sighted, usually wearing a cut, torn, and bloody blue dress, but occasionally said to be seen looking healthy and with her dress intact. In the women's restroom, people have reported hearing laughter and a woman speaking when nobody was present. Guests sometimes report seeing the face of the woman appear in a mirror, also in the women's restroom. Throughout the establishment, lamps are said to swing or otherwise move on their own, it has been claimed that objects have been seen levitating, and furniture has been reported to move. Women have reported losing ear rings only to have them to be found stashed together in various parts of the building. Phones have rung, but when answered nobody was on the other line. People report having been touched by an unseen force, sometimes lightly, sometimes more forcefully, and often playfully. And rooms have been locked from the inside without anybody within them who could have locked them.


Commentary: Shortly after I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1998, I obtained a car and began routinely driving up Highway 1 to San Francisco - the long-way to get there, but the most scenic route. On these trips, I passed through Moss Beach and always saw the signs for the distillery, several of which advertised the presence of the Blue Lady. Naturally, I was curious, but being as how I was always making the trip on my own, and I have never been particularly comfortable eating at a nice resturaunt by myself, I never did stop in to see what was up.

I never did forget the place, though, and have been intending to look into the ghost story for some time. Two years back, my girlfriend ended up looking into it for me, rather accidentally. I had been working on a very stressful project for several months, being out of town for ten days, home for four, and then out again for another ten. My client was hostile, the working conditions were physically tough, and the job itself was extremely boring*. She felt that I needed to relax, and thought that I would enjoy going up to the distillery for a nice dinner out and a bit of time in an allegedly haunted building. We ended up not going because, after having driven five hours to get home, I didn't want to drive another four-hour round trip to go to dinner. After we had decided not to go, Kay told me that she had gathered some information about the place from people who had lived in the area, and that these folks all claimed that the distillery made the story up in order to attract more customers, especially tourists driving up California's portion of the Pacific Coast Highway (AKA Highway 1).

I didn't know how true this was. While there was no doubt that the distillery was playing up the "haunted house" angle to draw customers, it is also not uncommon for an establishment to do this with existing ghost legends. So, the fact that the distillery was going out of its way to make people think that it was haunted did not necessarilly mean that there wasn't an existing ghost story prior to the current advertising campaign.

Since then, I have found out a bit more. When a group of people from the show Ghost Hunters arrived to do an episode, they found speakersm trick mirrors, and lamps with motors that were made to move seemingly on their own. Considering that the Ghost Hunters folks have been known to engage in their trickery and showmanship to make their television show more exciting (and to make mundane evenings look like exciting "ghost investigations"), I was rather surprised that they, of all people, were the ones uncovering this (I also have wondered if the distillery management might have had something to do with the stuff beign uncovered as part of a publicity stunt, but I really have no idea). Still, there you go.

So, was there truly a legend of the Blue Lady, prior to the distillery getting into gadgetry and showmanship? Perhaps, I don't know. However, there can be little doubt that they have done a good deal to provide the experiences via technology that people were wanting through supernatural activity.

Alot of people, I have noticed, are bitter about this sort of thing, viewing the distillery owners as frauds. I don't agree. I view this as being something akin to telling a story around a camp fire, but on a grand scale. If someone experienced these weird haunting symptoms and decided to look into it, the trickery would eventually come out. Speakers, trick mirrors, and motors all have tell-tale elements that would eventually be revealed to a real investigator. People coming to the distillery were either coming for a good meal, or a good scare, and the distillery clearly treated this as entertainment and not a serious matter to be dealt with. I have a hard time seeing this as being anything but a good business person providing some fun to people who desire to play out a ghost story.





*I've noted before that I am a professional archaeologist. Basically, when someone is doing environmental review to get permits or government money, they hire me to help keep them in compliance with federal and state historic preservation laws. In this particular case, we were dealing with hundreds of historic-era archaeological sites that consisted entirely of broken glass and early 20th-century cans. It was amazingly boring. Oh, and the tempuratures were usually well over 100 degrees fahrenheit before noon.

Sources: Wikipedia, Wikipedia, again, Moss Beach Distillery Website, Mindreader.com

El Rey Theatre, Manteca, CA

A once-beautiful example of Art-Deco architecture and interior design, and one of the truly grand movie houses of the 1930s, the El Rey Theatre in Merced California opened it's doors in 1937. It functioned for 38 years, finally closing due to a fire that essentially gutted the interior. Ironically, on the night that it burned, the film that it was showing was The Towering Inferno.

The building stood empty, a burned-out shell, for over two decades until the Kelly Brothers purchased it and turned it into a restaurant and micro-brewery. But, of course, that's not the end of the story.

Since the Kelly Brothers establishment opened in the late 1990s, stories have begun circulating that spirits left from the old theatre days haunt the building. Customers claim to have seen people in clothing from earlier decades walking about, only to inexplicably vanish. Firefighters, in gear and uniforms from the 1970s, are sometimes seen wandering the building. It is said that hot spots appear in different spots around the building, as if in memory of the fire that destroyed the theatre. When a grease fire erupted in the kitchen in 2003, many people developed the belief that this was a result of the ghostly hot spots igniting the grease*.



*And not, oh, say the fact that there was flammable grease being heated ON A STOVE.

Discussion: I grew up about 15 miles south of Manteca. When I was a kid, it was little more than a small town near a sugar refinery that caused the downtown area to smell pretty horrible most of the time (earning it the nick-name "Man-Stinka'"). During the 1980s, and accelerating in the 1990s, a large number of people who worked in the Bay Area decided to purchase house in the Central Valley, and towns such as Manteca, Salida, Modesto, Stockton, and Dublin grew rapidly. While far from a thriving metropolis, Manteca has grown to be a small city with a more diverse population than it once had.

The growth of these Central Valley towns and cities has had numerous effects, both positive and negative. On the one hand, it has resulted in more money being available for local development and has made them nicer places to live, on the whole. At the same time, the fact that so many of the new residents spent much of their day commuting meant that they had less loyalty to local businesses, and often served as absentee-parents, both of which created their own set of problems. However, as the urban centers have grown, more people have found local work, and a greater commitment to the community has formed.

And that's part of what I like about this story. The construction of micro-breweries in the Central Valley is very much a result of the arrival of more affluent people from the Bay Area, the yuppification of the Central Valley, if you get what I mean. It is a very definite break in both character and culture with the Central Valley's past, which has its up side and its down side. This story, though, symbolically connects the old with the new. By having the ghosts of the past literally show up in a new type of business, it provides a folkloric continuity that I think is needed in much of the Valley.

Sources: Weird Fresno, waymarking.com, Strangeusa.com, Shadowlands, Cinema Treasures, Local Newspaper

AC/DC and Satanic Reincarnation

This one is not technically a ghost story, but it does involve someone returning from the grave, is interesting and, I think, deserves to be listed here.

As a kid, probably around the age of 12, I remember talking with one of the other kids in the neighborhood as we walked to the store one day. A car drove by, windows rolled down, hard rock blaring from the stereo's speakers. The other kid, has name was Ryan, looked at me gravely and said "that's Satanic music."

Being the sort of kid that I was, I looked at him with a smirk, and made a smart-ass comment. He rolled his eyes, and repeated his claim that the music was Satanic.

So, I asked "Really? You don't listen to it, how do you know it's Satanic?"

We stopped walking, he turned to me, and said "my uncle used to listen to that kind of music. And there's this one band, AC/DC, where their singer died. The band had songs about going to Hell to party, and about how everyone should use drugs and talk to demons, and things like that. My uncle said that he was pretty sad when the singer died, but a year later, the group put out a new record*, and they had this new singer. But the new singer looked and sounded and acted just like the old one, and he was singing this song about how he was back! My uncle said that it was pretty obvious that the song was about how he had died, and then Satan broght him back to continue doing the Devil's work!"

I rolled my eyes, and we continued walking. But the story stuck with me, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember it now, 23 years later. I think that part of what gave it its staying power, as silly as I thought it was, was Ryan's insistence that the story of AC/DCs Satanic reincarnation was true, and the distress that it seemed to cause him.


Commentary: I grew up in a small town to the north of Modesto, California. Like most towns in California, the residents were primarily Christian, and many were from one or another fundamentalist church (that is, of the minority who routinely attended any church), and a few of these churches were known for their "bunker mentality" approach to the world, where anything not from the church itself was considered suspect if not outright evil, and likely to assault the "godly" (which was, of course, members of that church, and pretty much nobody else). As a result, it is no surprise that there were a fair number of people who were convinced that horror movies were evil, D&D was a Satanic primer, Secular Humanists were trying to take over the world and abolish Christianity**, and rock music was, quite literally, music from Hell itself.

In this context, it's not surprising that Brian Johnson, the singer that replaced Bon Scott, was thought by some who are part of this particular Christian sub-culture to be a satanic reincarnation of Scott sent by Satan both to tempt more to Hell and to provide Satan with a prominent mouth-piece on Earth. Of course, when you consider that Johnson was not only alive, but had an active musical career, well before Scott's death, this reincarnation hypothesis falls apart, but paranoid sub-cultures have never been known for their adherence to reality.

I don't know if Ryan really had an uncle who told him this, as I have since heard the story told by different people in different places. It's entirely possible that multiple people developed this particular hair-brained hypothesis, helped along by AC/DC's lyrics and the fact that both Bon Scott and Brian Johnson both sing as if they are in the pained and advanced stages of throat cancer. Regardless, it was one of the claims that tended to serve as "evidence" of a massive Satanic influence on the "secular world."

This is, in no small way, a continuation of the rumors of violin virtuoso Paganini's alleged Satanic connections, which were both part of his commercial success and fed the worries of the delusional paranoiacs of his day.

Ironically, while the rumor of Scott's Satanic reincarnation was developing amongst this sub-culture, AC/DC fans were busy pointing to difference between Scott and Johnson and arguing over who was better. Two divergent sub-cultures...so it goes....






*It was the late 80s. We still referred to music albums as "records" even though they were coming out primarily on CDs.

**I remember often hearing this as a kid. Weirdly, as an adult, I discovered that there really was a group that identified itself as Secular Humanists, was relatively small in numbers, with no actual political power, and possessing an agenda so mellow that it's hard to imagine anyone who actually knew it having much of an objection to it. These people were often confused when they were informed that they were actually in control of the world's governments.