FOOTFALLS BY MY DESK AND A GUARD GHOST ON THE STAIRS

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                    FOOTFALLS BY MY DESK AND A GUARD GHOST ON THE STAIRS 

by

Alijandra Mogilner

 I live and work in Old Town San Diego, California; probably one of the most haunted places in the nation.  I have seen odd things at the famous Whaley House and heard stories about El Campo Santo, the cemetery a couple of blocks beyond the Whaley House, as well as it’s neighbor called Jail House Place which is the site of the old cobblestone jail.  It makes sense, of course, that we have ghosts.  It really is the place where modern day California began.  Spanish soldiers and missionaries arrived in April 1769.  Before that the Kumeyaay nation had a village on what is now called Presidio Hill that overlooks Old Town.   The homes of the First Nations people were destroyed as the fort was built and the villagers were forcibly removed to live as slaves where the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala now stands 15 miles away in Mission Valley.  Hanging Judge Roy Bean was a guest at that cobblestone jail; incarcerated for dueling. Wyatt Earp and his wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, lived in the area running saloons in New Town and Wyatt refereeing fights in Old Town and along the Mexican border.  William Henry Dana, who wrote Two Years Before the Mast, stayed at the Machado Stewart home not 100 yards from where I work.  There were plagues, and rapes, and gunfights; escaped slaves, a war, and a disastrous fire – all the grist for the mill of whatever forces create a ghostly presence. 

 While there is at least one book devoted to Old Town ghosts and large sections of others dealing with ghosts in the area. I didn’t really think much about these fellow residents.  That is, I didn’t think about them until I went to work at Racine & Laramie, Ltd. the historic reconstruction of the 1867 tobacco shop that is located on the plaza in the state park.  The store uses as much of the original building as possible including the foundations. Reconstructed from photographs, it is as close as possible to the original – including all the fixtures inside. There’s a backbar with bullets still buried in the doors from a shoot-out a century and a half ago; prints on the wall from the Civil War; pipes thousands of years old. 

My first encounter with anything strange was while I was working at a desk on the mezzanine.  It was a hot summer day and the oft shuttered window was open to vent the hot air and let in and the cool breeze that blows off of the nearby San Diego Bay.  I had been working an hour or so when I heard distinct footfalls on the stairs.  At first, I thought one of the store clerks was coming up to get something, but no one appeared when the foot steps reached the top.  Instead, after a brief pause, the foot steps continued toward me, then curved and seemingly stopped in front of the window.  There was no feeling of menace, no cold spot I could feel, but the steps were too distinct and followed too much of a pattern to be the creaking of old boards or the settling of a building.   When I asked my new boss, Geoffrey Mogilner, about it he said he had experienced the same thing.  The footsteps always went to the window and stood there as if someone was looking out at the view.  He said he had always felt like the presence was friendly and hoped it was Juan Rodriguez, the man who had built the original building, and that he approved of what had been done in rebuilding his home. 

Racine & Laramie was originally the home of Juan Rodriguez, who had been a leather jacket soldier in the Army of Spain, and his family.  One of the first ten buildings in the town, the adobe house was built in the 1830s.  Juan Rodriguez was stationed at the Presidio and had been given the land as compensation for military service when he retired.  When the family moved to a timber home down the street, the building was used as the office for the alcalde (a type of powerful mayor) and a city council known as the ayuntamiento.  By 1867 Alexi Racine and Charles Laramie had arrived from Ontario, Canada.  They took over the building and remodeled it into a store.  They left the vara-thick adobe walls,[1] added a second story made of wood and replaced what was probably a tile roof with shakes.  The men opened the first tobacco store in the town advertising "cigars, tobacco, stationery and furnishing goods."   Just short of a century after that first opening in 1868 Geoffrey Mogilner carefully rebuilt the building over the original foundations using both archeology and photographs as a guide.  He used what original materials he could and furnished the place with authentic fixtures from the period.  Even the shop fixtures have histories.  For example, the back bar in the cigar room still has bullets in it from a shootout over a woman.  As a result, I suppose I should not have been surprised when there was an unexplained phenomenon.  It turned out that there certainly were enough choices for who my visitor was – not just Juan Rodriguez. 

Groff wasn’t the only person with tales of a ghostly visitors in the store. A former manager, tells of a well dressed man who seems to hang around the stairs.  Visitors to the store sometimes see sparkles, a bit like those from a Fourth of July sparkler, drifting down from the corner of the mezzanine over the jars of tobacco that are displayed for people to try.  The cigar room has a lounge area and guests have been sure a man wearing a hat was sitting in one of the chairs only a minute before.  In fact, a group called San Diego Ghost Hunters has been kind enough to provide us with a photograph of a ghostly image of what may well be that man.  Taken from the pipe store into the cigar room, you can see a man with a mustache wearing a soft fedora.  Out of place and time, hovering by the table in the cigar lounge, the gray-white image is not a reflection of a modern patron.  Based upon the surrounding fixtures, the pale stranger is just over five feet tall. 

San Diego Ghost Hunters, a group that primarily works with historical societies, will be doing more investigation.  Members of the group have already visited several times and have a variety of photos and personal experiences in the building so they are quite confident of finding electronic as well as visual proof of the hauntings.   However, they are not the only investigators that have visited the shop.  Robert and Anne Wlodarski, Lonnie and Alex Sill include Racine & Laramie in their book, Ghosts of Old Town San Diego State Historic Park after a visit here.

I don’t know who they were, but in mid-2007 a group of what were apparently professional ghost hunters came into the store; at least they were fully equipped with cameras and some kind of electronic equipment.  Despite the fact that they were unexpected, and unwelcome on a busy business day, they managed to get to the stairs -- but not any further.  We didn’t have to throw them out; they went running.   They claimed they had been attacked by a ghost on the stairs.   No one at the store has ever experienced anything hostile from the ghost on the stairs, or anywhere else for that matter.   If you visit Racine & Laramie please cooperate with the staff if you want to go ghost hunting, if for no other reason than we apparently have a guard ghost that can even send professionals running. 

[1] A vara was a Spanish unit of measure that ranged from 30 to 36 inches.