There’s some dark corner in the human mind that wants to believe
in the haunted realm
– especially during Halloween. As much as they make our nerves
tingle with fear, ghost stories also hint that death might not be
the final stop for us mortals.
The South Valley has quite a few interesting tales of the
haunted world. A former resident of San Juan Bautista even put
together a Web site detailing his and other locals’ experiences
with those visitors from beyond.
There’s some dark corner in the human mind that wants to believe in the haunted realm – especially during Halloween. As much as they make our nerves tingle with fear, ghost stories also hint that death might not be the final stop for us mortals.
The South Valley has quite a few interesting tales of the haunted world. A former resident of San Juan Bautista even put together a Web site detailing his and other locals’ experiences with those visitors from beyond.
Jorge Villasana, a computer systems administrator for the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, tells on-line his encounters with South Valley spirits. (The “Uncle Jorge Paranormal Activities” Web site can be found at www.profindpages.com/report/Jorge_Villasana_Report.htm)
“I’ve had a little gift of psychic abilities since I was a little boy,” he said. As he grew up in his parents’ home at 705 First St. – built in the late 1800s in the mission town – his family often experienced seemingly unworldly phenomena.
“The noises – a lot of noises at night,” he described it. “Light would turn on and off. My parents would be watching TV with us and the light would go on and off. There was movement of dishes and silverware. Chairs would move like someone was pushing them. That was all the time with that house. We kind of got used to it, but there was always a little fear of ‘what is it?'”
Villasana’s younger brother David had died in a car accident in November 1958, and his parents often explained the strange activities as coming from this sibling’s spirit.
“David, would you please stop that!” his mother would shout.
As a child, Villasana sometimes would feel cold breezes when there wasn’t a draft. Or he’d perceive someone sitting on the foot of his bed while he lay fearful under the blankets.
“I just sensed that it was a very small woman,” he said.
After Villasana left the U.S. Air Force in 1980, he and his wife rented his childhood home from his parents. The paranormal activity didn’t stop.
“During that time was when I first saw an apparition – a real thin young lady,” he said. “I know it’s for real.”
The ghostly woman looked as if she might have weighed perhaps 100 pounds, he said. She had “blondish or grey hair” and wore a nightgown of a style that might have come from the 1910s or 1920s.
Villasana also believes the former San Juan Bautista rodeo grounds just east of the mission plaza are haunted – possibly by the ghosts of Native Americans buried in the mission’s cemetery. When he was a child during rodeos there, he noticed horses and cattle acting strangely – as if their attention had been caught by some invisible entity passing by.
He said walking around the grounds, he feels the presence of ghostly people.
Downtown Hollister also has at least one haunted site. Many locals believe the Union Bank building at the corner of San Benito Street and Fifth Street could possibly have some strange passageway to the other world. During the 1930s and 1940s, the upper floors of the building were used for medical and dental offices as well as single-person boarding rooms.
One Hollister resident, who asked to remain anonymous, reports he experienced weird and inexplicable incidents on the turn-of-the-century building’s second floor once while making repairs there last year.
“This was in daylight during the fall,” he said. “I started smelling cigarette smoke, which is wrong because no one was smoking.”
He heard footsteps outside the room he was in. “I go, ‘OK. That’s it.’ So I started looking.”
The worker went through every room of the building. He found no one. Then things really started to get bizarre. “I go into one room, and it’s like an ice-box,” he said. “It’s super, super cold.”
As the man made his way through the building, he heard murmurs as if from distant voices. He called the manager of the building to ask if anyone else was there. The manager told him, ‘You’re the only one working there.'”
The worker went back to the “super cold” room with a digital camera and started taking pictures of each wall. When he downloaded the photographs in his computer, he noticed one with a strange light “flash” on the wall facing west. When he tried to adjust it digitally, it created a “vortex” of radiating circles.
“Whether or not that was any kind of spook or specter…” the man said, then paused a moment. “There’s a lot of talk about that building being that way. Who knows?’
Gilroy also has plenty of ghost stories. Resident Jim Rogers once taught in the schools here and recalls hearing high school students describing their encounters with a rather terrifying paranormal entity up at Mt. Madonna County Park on Hecker Pass.
“It use to be a parking place for kids,” he said. “Supposedly, there’s some ghosts up there that scared the kids.”
The teenagers would be necking in their cars when they would be frightened by a one-armed ghost with a hook banging on the window. The frightened kids would drive home only to find the hooked arm still in the window.
“It might be just a ‘lover’s lane’ type of story,” Rogers said with a grin.
Another Mt. Madonna ghost is a bit more benign, he said. The 12-year-old daughter of local pioneer Henry Miller, “the Cattle King,” might possibly roam the ruins of her father’s summer home. Some misty days, park visitors have claimed they saw a young girl riding a horse that disappeared into the fog.
“She died by being thrown from a horse in Gilroy sometime in the 1800s,” Rogers said.
Other possibly haunted sites in Gilroy include the Pacheco Pass Highway east of Gilroy. Witnesses claim they’ve seen a woman in Victorian dress searching for her child along the road. They say the sighting is accompanied by the thunderous rumble of a stage coach rolling by and the snorting breaths of hellish horses.
Around midnight at the Bonfante Gardens amusement park, employees insist, the beautifully decorated small carousel in Claudia’s Garden sometimes starts playing its calliope music and turning. When employees check, they find that the power switch is off. A ghost? Or a mischievous prankster?
Those notorious things that go “bump in the night.” Are they just creaky floorboards – or the shadow selves of dead people walking among us?
Morgan Hill: A ghost-free zone?
Although many local historians and long-time residents of Morgan Hill were contacted for this article, none knew of any ghost stories in this community. Is the Mushroom Capitol of the World truly free of hauntings? If you are a resident of San Martin or Morgan Hill with some interesting ghosts stories set in these two communities, please feel free to share them with us by e-mail at
cv*****@sv**********.com
. Who knows? We might publish them in these pages soon. Boo!
