El Campo Santo Cemetery

The Cemetery was a little akward. It's out there in the open and anyone can come and join the group when you're there. Sometimes they'd follow us all the way to the Whaley House. I tried to keep the stories as somber as possible, and mostly I just let people walk around on their own. I found that doing jokes in the cemeter and any of the actual houses just detracted from their haunted mystique and made light of the tragic stories.

I never really felt anything happen in the cemetery, and no one ever seemed to claim to sense ghosts there. I've heard that ghosts usually do not haunt cemeteries. They tend to haunt places where they died, or lived before they died. There was at least one person who was executed either in El Campo Santo, or the other cemetery in San Diego, but no one claimed that he was still arround.

Still, people claimed to see orbs, and ghostly images in photographs taken there. We'd see pictures at the Whaley House that showed orbs and clouds and the like taken at the cemetery. And Yankee Jim, who was burried in El Campo Santo is supposed to haunt the Whaley house.

The trip from the cemetery to the Whaley house was always a dread of mine. There I was in a cape and hat, holding a lantern and leading a bunch of tourists down San Diego Avenue getting all sorts of looks from people. There was this one shop that sold things that changed color in the sun. This place employed young women to stand outside and announce to passers by that everything in the store changed color in the sun. It got old fast.

The craziest thing that happened on the trip to the Whaley house happened to me when I was still pretty much green as a tour guide. I had this charter of about eight people who had paid a lot of money to take this tour. They wanted to go into a bar before we went to the Whaley House, and I let them when they said they'd only stay for five minutes. I can't believe I fell for that one. No one ever stays in a bar for only five minutes.

So there I was waiting for them to leave when in walks Mr. W, the docent at the Whaley House. This guy was a real nut job. He was pretty furious that I had "let" them go to a bar. The way I saw it, these people had payed a lot of money to have fun, and they were adults with the freedom to make their own decisions. I wasn't their keeper, they were just paying me to tell them stories. Mr. W was furious, but that didn't stop him from giving them an extended tour of the house. He even let them go upstairs. The guy was a total ham. Always hungry for attention and always talking talking talking. He pretty much hated me from that moment on. He left a deranged voicemail for my boss and we all sat around laughing at it one day. We put up with him for a long time because he was genuinely creepy and the people seemed to like him.

Mr. W certainly made the Whaley House interesting. My favorite story about him happened outside the Whaley House when we were letting people inside the house.