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
