Author Jeff Dwyer has done his homework when it comes to Santa Cruz hauntings. The dead are accessible to humans of all ages, and the North Bay writer’s Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Monterey and California’s Central Coast (Spirit Publishing, 2010) holds tantalizing tidbits for anyone tired of celebrating Santa Cruz’s high holy day by dressing up as a pirate.
Santa Cruz Memorial Cemetery plays host to a spirit with a fair amount of street cred. The highly active and belligerent White Figure (or White Lady, as she’s known to some) is one of only a handful that keeps to the cemetery stereotype. The grounds contain almost 100 acres of rotting corpses, but the White Figure most often appears as visitors enter the gates, harassing them well into the depths of the cemetery.
Hotels are homier than graveyards, but the Cliff Crest Bed and Breakfast Inn on Beach Hill could prove even more frightful than floral wallpaper and scratchy divans. Jennie Jeter was the wife of a lieutenant governor and lived 74 years in the same room, and there have been reports of mysterious furniture re-arranging, suggesting she might never have left.
Across town the Mission Santa Cruz was the scene of a murder most foul, but understandable. Consecrated in 1971, the mission drew in Native American Indians with kindnesses that ended in enslavement, and a retaliating attack found Father Andres Quintana beaten to death and his testicles smashed with stones. Thrashing the mission laborers with a metal-tipped whip was asking for it, but the pain of Quintana’s death stapled his soul to the fate of wandering this hill in perpetuity.
It’s not uncommon for trauma to link soul and place, and the tragic drowning of 8-year-old Sarah Logan gave the Brookdale Lodge its own resident ghost. She has been spotted on the bank of the creek she died in, running through the lobby and asking visitors for the whereabouts of her mother, clothed in a white knee-length dress with a cloth belt. A second drowning occurred in the Lodge swimming pool.
The Red White and Blue beach is in the ghost club too, and since the 1950s at least a dozen reports a year have been filed regarding a pale apparition stalking the beach, an old sailor wearing rain slicker and hat. Visitors to a Victorian built by the sailor have seen objects fly from tables and shelves and heard disembodied footsteps and the sound of breaking glass, the residue of apparent ill-feeling towards tourists stomping his ground and parking in his driveway.
Halloween is reputed to be a fortunate time for ghost sightings, but be patient during a ghost hunt—spirits don’t always appear for days, weeks, or months. So keep a video camera handy, and see you in Paranormal Activity 3.
