Santa Cruz cemeteries share important yet haunting history

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I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe the past can haunt us. And in Santa Cruz, believers in both kinds of spectral forces will find plenty of food for frightening thought.

At Old Holy Cross Cemetery, for example, three bronze plaques list the baptismal names of some 2,100 Ohlone people who died during the punishing regime of the Santa Cruz Mission, founded in 1781. They suffered from introduced diseases, forced labor and other privations.

“You have the Spaniard missionaries who are doing this in the name of God and obliterating an entire culture. It’s a horrific history,” notes local historian and paranormal investigator Maryanne Porter, author of the 2016 book “Haunted Santa Cruz, California.”

“One priest in particular, Father Andrés Quintana, was well-known for using a wire-tipped whip to beat the young Ohlone to the point they were bloody,” Porter said.

In 1812, some of the oppressed Ohlone finally struck back at Quintana.

“They strangled him and then crushed his testicles with rocks,” Porter explains. “It was pretty brutal, and then they escaped.”

Local historian Norman Poitevin helped research the missionaries’ records on the Native Americans and nearly 400 other people whose bones lie in the mass grave on the clifftop Old Holy Cross Cemetery in Live Oak or potentially in another mass burial site near the original mission.

After the mission was destroyed by earthquakes in the mid-1800s, construction began on a new church in the late 1880s, prompting the relocation of many jumbled remains and broken headstones to an unmarked field on the Live Oak bluff, Poitevin explains.

In 2014, Santa Cruz philanthropist Bill Simpkins offered to find the exact burial site at Live Oak and place a marker on it if Poitevin would identify those in the grave. Through painstaking work, he and other researchers found records of their original Ohlone and Christian names, although only the latter appear on the cemetery plaques.

“We worked with related Native Americans, and they said they didn’t want us to use their real names,” Poitevin explains. “They said they don’t mention the person’s name after they’re dead.”

The co-author of a 2015 guidebook to Old Holy Cross Cemetery, Poitevin still gives occasional tours of the site, bringing his drawing of a man shot and killed by bandits in the gulch below the cemetery on Feb. 11, 1865. While the unfortunate Andrew Jackson Sloan was not buried at Old Holy Cross, Poitevin notes, “every time I do a tour and we get back to where it overlooks Arana Creek, someone has seen a ghost down there.”

The murder took place about 100 yards south of what is now Jeffery’s restaurant, visible from the rear of the cemetery. The first appearance of the Ghost of Arana Gulch, as Sloan’s alleged apparition is called, made front-page news in Santa Cruz in 1895. Further news reports of a ghostly man in a long duster and broad-brimmed hat in the gulch followed in 1913, 1932 and the winter of 1953, according to Poitevin.

In the 1953 episode, when Boy Scouts camped at the back of the cemetery overlooking Soquel, “there was a thin fog and streetlights came on, and a shadowy figure moved under the streetlamp and appeared to glide as it merged with the woods,” Poitevin recounts, citing the work of his late co-author and Live Oak historian Phil Reader. As for the terrified Scouts, he adds, “they all ran home.”

Sloan’s grave actually lies in Evergreen Cemetery, about 3 miles west, next to Santa Cruz’s Harvey West Park. Created in 1858 by donation of land from the Imus family, the cemetery had deteriorated due to neglect and damage from a 1955 flood by the time the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History took ownership in the mid-1990s. For decades, the overgrown conditions lent it a spooky aura that enthralled local teens.

“They knew it was a place for bad behavior,” said historian and retired professor Traci Bliss, a native of Santa Cruz and descendant of the Imus family.

The author of “Evergreen Cemetery of Santa Cruz” and frequent tour leader there, Bliss said that before volunteers began consistent efforts to clean and maintain the 8-acre grounds, cemetery tours often focused on ghost stories to her dismay.

“In 2010-2011, the most often-told story was of ‘a woman of ill repute,’ Marie Holmes, who was 20 years old and had only been in Santa Cruz for six months when she committed suicide by taking carbolic acid,” Bliss said. “She had a daughter that she had left elsewhere in the United States and she was so forlorn … and this is how our pioneer women are represented?”

Despite published second-hand reports of Holmes’ apparition, none of the volunteers or historians at Evergreen Cemetery “has ever met anyone who has heard of these sightings or mentioned seeing a ghost,” Bliss said. “There are so many women who did extraordinary things despite the restrictions on Victorian women, and it’s their stories we should be telling. … I try to tell about the people who were buried there who made an enduring difference and whose stories were truly dramatic.”

Along with Hispanic settlers, Indigenous people and Yankee pioneers, those people include Chinese American laborers, whose graves lie under a memorial gate erected in 2014 by former Chinatown resident George Ow Jr.

“In Chinese folklore, if something is not settled during a lifetime, you have hungry ghosts, like angry spirits,” Ow explains on the cemetery’s website. “By acknowledging these spirits, we’re kind of like feeding them.”

And now that the headstones are gleaming white and the parkland is manicured, Bliss notes, the appetite for ghost stories on Evergreen Cemetery tours also seems to have abated.

“It doesn’t lend itself anymore to these stories that people have wedded themselves to but don’t necessarily have any basis in fact,” she said.