10 Eerie & Mysterious Ghosts of the Pacific Coast

The communities of the Pacific Northwest and Southwest are known for their modern urban styles, where today companies with cutting-edge technology continue building the world of the future in cities from Seattle to Silicon Valley and LA to San Diego. But it was not so long ago that towns and communities along the Pacific Ocean were small, gritty, and lawless, where many people sought to make their fortunes, but instead came to a sad early end.

And some say a number of those forgotten adventurers, many whose lives ended prematurely, still haunt many areas along the Pacific, as if searching for spiritual answers or simply looking for peace in the afterlife. With that in mind, here are 10 eerie tales of spirits and ghosts along the Pacific Coast, some steeped only in legend, others grounded in at least an inkling of truth.

Related: 10 Eerie Ghost Cities Left Behind by the Soviet Union

10 The Burnley Ghost

Edwin and Elise Burnley established the Burnley School of Professional Art in 1946 in Seattle, where they taught graphic design and illustration. Then, in the 1960s, people began reporting supernatural events, such as doors opening on their own, hollow footsteps made by no one visible on stairs, and phones being dialed by seemingly no one.

Local legend suggests it is the ghost of a teenage boy who died falling off a steep stairway at the back of the school. An attempt to contact the spirit of the dead boy was met by a loud crash in an upstairs bathroom. A broken window was found with a rock purportedly too heavy to have been thrown that high by human hands from the ground below.^[1]

9 The Haunting of Lone Fir Cemetery

A restless ghost reportedly roams the Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland, established in 1846 and named for a single evergreen tree on the property. The ghost is said to be Emma Merlotin, a beautiful French girl who moved to Portland in 1850 and married a man who eventually ran off with another woman.

After her husband left, Merlotin began a career as a high-class prostitute. That didn’t end well. She was brutally cut to death with an axe. Worse, her murder was never solved, despite the authorities removing one of her eyes under the false belief that the last image of her attacker might be imprinted on a retina.

She is said to haunt the cemetery dressed in 19th-century French clothes, but if approached, she screams and throws up her hands, as if reliving her shocking death. Her grave marker remains there still.^[2]

8 The Spirits of Battery Point Lighthouse

Crescent City in California boasts one of the first lighthouses built on the California coast in 1856. And it has seen its share of tragedy, including a tsunami that hit the area in 1964. The giant wave claimed eleven lives and destroyed twenty-nine blocks of the town. Some say the spirits of those whose lives were lost came back to shore and now haunt the legendary lighthouse.

The last residents to live in the lighthouse, Jerry and Nadine Tugel, reported that bedroom slippers turned around in the middle of the night, and footsteps were heard up and down the lighthouse tower. House cats would sense something unseen and would only go in certain rooms or only walk on furniture of a room without ever setting paws on the floors. Paranormal experts suggested permanent ghost residents were a man, a woman, and a child.^[3]

7 The Lady in Lace

The Monterey Peninsula, just south of San Francisco, is known for its scenic 17-Mile Drive between Carmel-by-the-Sea and Pacific Grove. This pictorial road through the coastal forests following the Pacific Coast also passes the famous Pebble Beach golf course. Just be careful if it gets foggy because one might encounter one of the more beautiful ghosts, the Lady in Lace.

Though some claim the ghost to be a jilted bride who wanders in her wedding gown along the cliffs and near the Ghost Tree, many others believe her to be one Dona Maria del Carmen Barreto, who, it is said, owned four thousand acres but sold them when her husband was killed. Some say she comes back regularly to enjoy the scenic view, although how much could you really enjoy it through all that fog?^[4]

6 Monterey Custom House Murder Victims

The Custom House in Monterey was where lonesome sailors would reside after a long voyage around South America. It is said that the ghosts of many sailors who passed away far from home now reside here.

It was also used as a personal residence in the late 1800s, and one family reported a toddler not yet able to crawl being moved from his bed basket and laid in ashes in the fireplace. (The hair on my arms stood up researching about that one.) Yet another woman said the ghost of a Mexican man told her how he and his boy were murdered over buried gold. His one wish was to be dug up and given a proper Catholic funeral.^[5]

5 The Curse of James Dean’s Car

This next entry is not quite a ghost story, but it is so hair-raising that it bears mention here. James Dean was killed in a car crash in 1955 at a dusty California crossroad near Paso Robles that still barely qualifies as a one-horse town, even 70+ years later.

What is rather ominous and tragic is that legendary actor, Alec Guinness—yes, the Alec Guinness of Obi-Wan Kenobi fame—once said he met Dean on a Hollywood street, right next to the Porsche Spyder in which Dean was killed. And on the day Guinness and Dean met, Guinness begged Dean not to drive that car. Guinness had felt a menacing premonition. He told Dean that if he drove the Spyder, Dean wouldn’t survive the week. Seven days later, Dean was dead.

And there is more. The crushed remains of the Spyder seemed to have an evil personality of its own. A doctor and racecar driver, Troy McHenry, was killed in a racecar using the transmission and suspension of Dean’s totaled Spyder. And it is also said that the remains of the car fell on a driver carrying it to an auto show.^[6]

4 The Entity Haunting

Only a few miles from Santa Monica is a Culver City neighborhood where a woman was supposedly once haunted by a sinister presence who refused to leave her. The woman, a single mother with four children named Doris Bither, reported she was regularly attacked by three entities, two small ones and a third larger, who would do unspeakable things. Even Bither’s children were repeatedly abused by the spirits over several years.

Bither eventually caught the attention of two UCLA students and a psychology professor studying the paranormal. They confirmed her story, witnessing a frying pan seemingly thrown out of a cupboard by no one, and even noting that it wasn’t the location that was haunted, but Bither herself, as the evil presence followed her and had its way with her, even after she moved from the house in Culver City.

Despite criticism of confirmation bias and inadequate proof and procedures, this is one of the few relatively credible instances of paranormal activity ever recorded. At least one of the UCLA students is now a respected hypnotherapist.^[7]

3 The Grey Ghost

Most people have heard of the Titanic. Some may not know that the Queen Mary, another famous ocean liner, was larger and more luxurious than the “unsinkable” Titanic. Nicknamed the “Grey Ghost” for its speed, the Queen Mary first sailed in 1936, later coming to her final rest in Long Beach, southern California. It is now a hotel and, of course, it is said to be haunted.

A particular spiritual resident is reported to be an eighteen-year-old former crewman who was crushed during a drill of the ship’s watertight doors in 1966. He is reported to roam up and down the area leading up to the door, where he will disappear if sighted. Still another well-known otherworldly denizen is purportedly that of a young girl named Jackie, who drowned but doesn’t know it.

She is often seen playing and running around the ship, and sometimes her legs dangle from a piano bench, only for her to disappear when someone checks to see who it is. Another one of the rooms is supposed to be where a woman died in the 1940s. Later occupants have claimed their bedsheets were yanked off by the image of a man, who disappeared immediately after.^[8]

2 The Ghosts of San Juan Capistrano

Mission San Juan Capistrano was the seventh of the twenty-one missions the Spanish built in the late 1700s–early 1800s. In addition to the swallows who fly away and return every year, the mission also has its own spooky residents.

An earthquake devastated the mission and the town around Christmas time in 1812. A local legend says that a little girl named Magdelena, who was walking in church with a candle to ask for penance, was one of the many who lost their lives when the church collapsed on them. On nights of a crescent moon, she is said to appear in the windows of the church’s ruins, holding the candle to light up her face.

There are also claims of a headless soldier, a Spanish version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and of an axe-wielding monk, who each roam the mission.^[9]

1 The Beautiful Stranger

As the oldest European-settled city in California, San Diego also has a long history of spine-chilling hauntings. Perhaps none is more mysterious and sad than the Beautiful Stranger, said to be the phantom of a striking young woman named Kate Morgan, who arrived at the Hotel Del Coronado on Thanksgiving Day in 1892, and would later take her own life.

Kate was from a wealthy family and married Thomas Morgan in 1886. But they were apparently unhappy, punctuated by the loss of a newborn son in 1890. She caused a scandal two years later by running away to Los Angeles with her husband’s stepbrother. That, too, appears to have been a difficult relationship, for they seemed to have broken things off.

At some point, she traveled by train to San Diego, where witnesses saw Kate arguing with a man who left her on the train somewhere along the way. She would spend a few days at the Coronado under the name Lottie A. Bernard, presumably waiting for her estranged lover, before buying a handgun, going to her room, No. 3327, and ending her life.

That room is now said to be regularly haunted by Kate, who flickers lights and turns TVs on and off, accompanied by close-windowed winds and drops in room temperature. She is also apparently fond of the hotel gift shop, where people claim to have witnessed items fall from shelves for no reason, only to land on the floor upright and unbroken.^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen