Northern Santa Barbara County is known more for its barbecue and wine than for its haunted houses or eerie cemeteries, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some ghoulish ghost stories worth telling.
To get in the trick-or-treat spirit, the Sun writers each researched and wrote a local urban legend. Read below, if you dare, and you’re sure to get a spine-tingly scare.
Santa Maria’s star-crossed actress
In the 1920s, the seductive jazz tunes of big-city speakeasies had yet to make their way to the sleepy agricultural town of Santa Maria. Everyday life centered on the ranch, the farm, the hearth, and home.
But the small-town lifestyle wasn’t enough for Jeanette, a beautiful and popular student at Santa Maria High School. Jeanette dreamed of leaving her family’s farm and moving to Hollywood to become a great film actress, like Mary Pickford or Clara Bow.
To prepare for her acting career, Jeanette joined her school’s drama club. But to her disappointment, she only got small roles in the school’s showcase. She was about to give up her hopes of becoming a leading lady when she was cast as star-crossed Juliet in Romeo and Juliet her senior year.
Thrilled to be playing such an iconic role, Jeanette pored over the script and learned every single line by heart. She rehearsed well into the evenings with her fellow castmates, and she even designed and sewed her own costume.
But when opening night finally arrived, Jeanette was nowhere to be found. The stage manager and some students went to look for her as audience members started filing into the Ethel Pope Auditorium. The drama teacher was about to send out the understudy when Jeanette suddenly burst through the stage door, already wearing her costume and full stage makeup. Without saying a word, she took her place in the wings and the show began.
Jeanette performed every line of every scene perfectly that night. Some of the audience members even commented on the realistic nature of Juliet’s famed death scene. But at the curtain call, as the auditorium thundered with applause, Jeanette was once again nowhere to be found. Confused but nonetheless thrilled by the performance, the audience, cast, and crew left the auditorium.
The next morning, the drama teacher received a tearful phone call from Jeanette’s mother. Jeanette, the mother explained through sobs, never made it to the auditorium last night because she had been hit and killed by a car while riding her bicycle to school.
The teacher hung up the phone, stunned. If Jeanette was dead, who had performed as Juliet the night before?
Today, Jeanette is a bit of a legend at Santa Maria High School, though most of the students and staff call her Ethel Pope’s ghost or just plain Ethel. Teacher Amy Calvert and her drama students swear they can sometimes feel someone watching them from the auditorium balcony as they rehearse after school. Several students have even reported seeing a woman standing in the doorway at the back of the theater … or even hanging from the catwalk.
—Amy Asman
The phantoms of Highway 246
One of the more quaint and scenic sections of roadway in Santa Barbara County, eight miles of Highway 246 wind through the Santa Ynez Valley and the towns of Santa Ynez and Solvang, connecting Highway 154 with the 101 freeway. Stagecoaches once regularly took this route, which today passes by serene horse ranches and wineries, lined at one point with rows of cedar trees planted by a local farmer.
But some locals say the picturesque stretch of blacktop holds more than its share of dark, spectral secrets.
In one version of a popular story, a woman, weary from a long night of gambling at the Chumash Casino, took the highway west to return home. Along the way, she was surprised to spot a young boy, about 6 or 7 years old, crying and walking by himself on the side of the road.
The driver, wondering what on Earth a child would possibly be doing all alone on the highway at such a late hour, stopped to ask the boy if he needed any help. The boy looked at her with big, ethereal eyes. His skin was deathly pale; he was shaking, and his hands were cold. He appeared lost and disoriented.
The driver asked the boy where his parents were, but he said nothing, and the woman offered to take him to the sheriff’s substation in Solvang to track down his parents. Along the way, she reassured him that everything was going to be all right. However, when they finally reached the station, the driver turned to the passenger seat, only to find the boy had vanished without a trace.
Asking around town, the driver discovered that years ago, a mother and her young son were traveling by car along the same segment of Highway 246, when a drunk driver swerved into their lane, striking them head-on. The mother survived, but her son, who was named Cameron, was killed at the scene. Cameron’s ghost has been wandering the road, searching in vain for his mother ever since.
In another variation of the story, the mother, described as being in her mid-20s with long hair, died in the crash; her son survived. To this day, she still walks the road’s shoulder at night, hoping to reunite with her lost son once he too reaches the spirit world.
The boy and his mother aren’t the only spooky apparitions reported by drivers along the stretch of highway. Some locals claim they’ve witnessed a ghostly horse-drawn carriage, oftentimes a hearse, plodding along the roadway in the dead of night. The hearse, they say, is heading westward to Point Conception—the gateway to the afterlife for the Chumash Indians—carrying the souls of the newly dead.
Others say that if you’re driving the stretch after midnight, you can sometimes spot a ferocious, unearthly black dog crisscrossing the highway, howling at the moon. Perhaps, the legend goes, the dog is not a ghost at all, but a hound from Hell.
So the next time you’re headed down Highway 246 after dark, stay alert; you may witness a brief glimpse of the other side.
—Jeremy Thomas
Close encounters of the Guadalupe kind
Friday evening I found myself driving through the cold empty fields on the outskirts of Santa Maria. All my friends were having a blast at Applebee’s and I was out on assignment. Being an intern, I get all the jobs that nobody else wants. Someone had called in with a “tip” about a glowing red building in the old town of Betteravia, and I was sent out with the camera. It would probably end up being some kids playing with fire, but I kept hoping I’d get the drop on some meth production operation. That scoop would be worth missing the half-price appetizers.
I turned off on Stinton Road and parked under the trees. As the day was dying the wind was coming alive. I waited for a semi to pass and hopped the fence when the coast was clear. I wanted to bring my sweatshirt, but it was white and would stand out so I shivered and stalked toward the town.
I waited while the sun set, and it got increasingly colder. Three hours of sitting in the dark, and there was nothing more than the occasional rumble of a passing truck from the road. No light flickered from inside the buildings, no hoodlums materialized. I gave up.
I was heading for my car when I saw a figure beside the road. He was waving his arms at a passing car, trying to flag it down.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
He was an older Hispanic man and rattled something off in Spanish.
All I caught was “Guadalupe” and “casa.”
“You’re headed home to Guadalupe?”
He nodded. What could I do, say “see ya!” and take off?
“I’ll take you,” I said heading for my car. I unlocked my door and was reached over to unlock his, but was shocked to find him already sitting in the passenger seat. My dad always told me to remember to lock my doors.
After a silent drive, we came to the south end of Guadalupe.
“Where to?” I asked.
It took me a few minutes to decipher that he was headed for the Far Western.
My cell phone vibrated on the center console as I pulled to a stop by the bar. The call was from a number I didn’t recognize. As I set my phone down I caught a glimpse of the guy disappearing around the side of the bar. What a wasted night, I thought. And not even a thank you.
I could have taken Highway 1 all the way into Orcutt, but decided to swing by Betteravia just in case something was going on. I found myself in a foul mood. I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much that the guy hadn’t even said thank you. He had been gone in a flash—I hadn’t even heard him get out.
With no cars behind me I slowed way down as I passed old Betteravia looking for lights. Movement caught my eye on the road. There was an old Hispanic man, waving his arms, trying to flag my car down.
Suddenly, I remembered locking my doors at work that morning. What I didn’t remember was hearing my doors open or shut when I picked up this man, the same man I had just dropped off in Guadalupe.
I floored it and drove by without looking. My fellow Sun staffers were never going to believe this story.
—Michael McCone
Ed. note: We didn’t. While our esteem for Michael as a storyteller rose, he still gets the jobs nobody else wants.
A restless soul among the trees
In certain parts of this blustery city called Santa Maria, the wind’s full-bodied push eventually snakes itself through the eucalyptus trees that line darkened roads on the outskirts of town. On lonely, moonless nights it threads through fallen branches and hanging leaves, creating a mournful wail. Or does it?
The shrill, sad sound reaches its brittle tendrils into your soul as if searching for something, only to shatter inside you like shrapnel. When you hear it, it sends a shiver up your spine that never leaves you. Once you hear it, you are forever filled with the question—even if you never ask it aloud—“What is that?” You can tell yourself it’s the wind, but you’ll ever after search for
the answer.
If you follow the wind to the southwest part of the city where Foster and Blosser roads meet, you’ll come to an area protected by a canopy of eucalyptus. Here you’ll feel overwhelmed by an indescribable energy. Some say that energy comes from the woman whose resting place is marked by those trees—only she has yet to rest in peace. When a soul is restless, so shall be all those souls around it.
The woman was murdered, her body hidden among the trees. No one knows the exact spot, because her ghost roams the two roads adjacent to her resting place. Perhaps she’s searching for her murderers, or maybe she wants to get a message to her family.
Maybe it’s the leaves of the eucalyptus hanging down over her, the fingers rustling and slapping and rubbing like nature’s eternal wind chime, that keep her restless. Maybe it’s the eerie sound of the wind sliding thin and sinewy through the trees and into her bloodied ears that keeps her on the move.
Maybe you can ask her yourself one day. A “No Trespassing” sign marks the area she most often visits. If you dare, you can walk through the trees, and you might, as many residents have, catch a glimpse of her, gray and wispy, yet almost as real as you and me. Many people have seen her walking along the road, but she almost always disappears behind a tree. If you hurry, you may catch up to her before she disappears, but what would you do if you actually caught up to her?
If you don’t chase her, don’t think she won’t know you’re there. If you drive past the corner of Foster or Blosser roads in those nether hours between night and dawn, she may indeed pay you a visit. Many people through the years have reported seeing a woman in the rearview mirror of their cars, sitting in the backseat. When she catches their eye, she begins to laugh the hysterical laugh of the undead, and then she vanishes.
What can be so funny in the world of the undead that can make a spirit laugh so? Has she done something mischievous, as spirits are known to do—or can she be laughing at something she knows that you don’t?
—Shelly Cone
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2011.