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.”
CHAPTER 4
The Whaley House
OLD TOWN SAN DIEGO
The Whaley House is incredibly loved by the community and honored for the pioneering family that once lived there—and it’s one of America’s most haunted buildings.
ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE PARANORMAL has heard of the infamous Whaley House, one of the most visited of California’s historic houses. It’s also a home occupied by spirits—the entire Whaley family and their pets—seem to have made an appearance at one time or another. Built in 1857 for the sum of $10,000 in materials and labor, the wood-and-brick structure was extravagant for Thomas Whaley, a man with big dreams and modest means.
The Whaley family became pioneers in the San Diego area. Born in New York City in 1823, the enterprising Thomas Whaley came to San Diego via San Francisco, where he had a storefront on Montgomery Street during the forty-niner Gold Rush days. His store was successful, perhaps too much so, as it burned down in what was suspected arson. This incident became typical of the Whaley family’s luck. Thomas Whaley was never a wealthy man for any period of time; his luck seemed to ebb and flow in between mysterious fires and family tragedies. His wife, Anna Eloise DeLaunay, bore him six children, none of whom carried the family name forward as Whaley probably envisioned they might when he made the harrowing sea journey to San Francisco.
When Thomas and Anna arrived in Old Town, they found little societal infrastructure. The area was rough-and-tumble—actually, downright lawless—and so unlike San Francisco or New York City. Life on State Street was difficult at best, but they made a life worth living; existing journals and letters show their love for one another.
The land where the Whaley House now stands, purchased for $1.50, was once where a gallows stood, its rope bringing swift justice to those criminals whose bodies were then buried on the same street just a few blocks away (see El Campo Santo chapter). Despite the hardships, the family seemed to thrive for years. Just as Whaley was gaining traction, his store was destroyed in a fire—again. Some say the work of an arsonist. In 1867, he moved the family back to San Francisco while he worked a lucrative job in Alaska and was able to support them in the lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed.
In 1869, Thomas Whaley leased several of the rooms of Whaley House and turned the unused space into revenue; the largest room of the home was converted into a county courtroom—it had also been a dairy, a Sunday school, a morgue, and a store. The rooms upstairs were converted into a theater. Later, the family was once again reunited
