Tag Archives: haunting

Cahuenga Pass is Haunted

T is 70 years old. He is a retired teacher. He was born in Southern California and raised in Hawaii. He was 7 years old when his family moved there in 1959. He is very animated and speaks very quickly. He told me about the bad vibes he gets at Cahuenga Pass in conversation.

“There was a battle uh… like in the 1800s… something like that, I always have weird vibes in the Cahuenga pass. I think it was the battle of Cahuenga Pass, it changed the leadership of where the valley was going at the time… the end of where like Universal Studios is, that’s the haunted part. A Mexican governor, no one liked him, and a wealthy landowner, no one liked him either… they were fighting over it. Only two people were killed, not the governor or the landowner go figure, but the two that died, they’re the ones that haunt the place. I always got bad energy from the pass. I feel I attract ghosts too easily.”

There were two battles for Cahuenga pass in the 1800s, T’s story refers to the original Battle of Cahuenga Pass, the second was known as the Battle of Providencia (or the Second Battle of Cahuenga Pass) There are stories about the pass being cursed. Apparently, parcels of stolen treasure are buried somewhere along the pass but everyone who’s ever come close to finding it has suddenly and mysteriously died! So maybe it is cursed and haunted. For more information see https://bizarrela.com/2016/11/cahuenga-pass/.

Ghost of Minecraft

Background: The informant is a 25 year old male who lives in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. He was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. The informant has been playing video games for about 15 years, is on video game chat platforms, and watches videos reviewing games over the year.

Context: The informant was talking with me about the new minecraft updates. He has not played Minecraft in a few years but still remembers the story.

Text:

MC: Yeah, it reminds me of when I used to play Minecraft, which hasn’t been for years. Well, there were these Youtube videos that came out about random structures being built in a server, or tunnels randomly appearing. Eventually, there was a picture taken of the culprit, named Herobrine. There was a big myth that Herobrine was the… ghost of the Minecraft creator’s dead brother, somehow having infiltrated his way into the game and wreaking havoc in servers. There’s no evidence of this, though.

Me: What does he look like?

MC: Just like the Steve skin, looking like a human. I believe he has white eyes though, which isn’t normal for the game. That makes it seem more like a ghost coming to life.

Me: So, there were a lot of stories that came out?

MC: Yeah, a lot of streamers and Minecraft players started sharing about how they would encounter someone in their single player world — which isn’t supposed to happen – and he would always quickly run away. Whenever they would explore their world, they would find tunnels, and leaves cut down from trees, and more. It just kept spreading that some uncoded entity was in the game. I know a few streamers did fake encounters with Herobrine to get views.

Me: Did you ever encounter Herobrine?

MC: Not me, but, yeah, it was all over the place. It’s faded out of popular consciousness somewhat, but Herobrine is still alive in the Minecraft world.

Analysis:

Informant: The informant seems unsure what to believe in regard to the Herobrine story. They have never seen Herobrine, themselves, and cannot confirm if it’s true or not.

Mine: Herobrine’s story incorporates many different ideas. For one, the concept of the creator’s dead brother entering the game and embodying Herobrine is the equivalent of a modern day horror story. It is haunting but not in the real world, which asks more questions about how ghosts work, especially if they can inhabit any space, even virtually. It may signal that the brother has something left to do on the Earth, or wants to message his brother and the best way is virtually. It’s the equivalent of a ghost texting. Herobrine also demonstrates how folklore can be utilized for one’s personal gain. Streamers used the ghost story in order to boost their own views, taking advantage of a lot of people’s real beliefs in the existence of Herobrine. By making a prank out of it, they essentially mock the entire belief of hauntings. However, their mocking of the game may be a way for them to beat their fears, almost like a modern day exorcism.

Mount Diablo

Mount Diablo is a mountain on the Diablo range in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. This mountain has been the reported site of many ghost hauntings, paranormal phenomena, and cryptozoology.

C: This is more like, local history than folklore, but Mount Diablo was like the big mountain range in the area. And everyone was like, “Oh! Why’s it called that?” Um–

L: Cause Diablo!

C: Cause Diablo! It was like . . . The Native Americans called it something because of like, the plant life on it–or something– and “Ah, demons” says the Spanish. This mountain has demons and thus said “Mount Devil”.

Thoughts:
It’s a chicken and the egg scenario of what came first — the paranormal sightings on the mountain, or the name of the mountain itself. Undoubtedly, one influenced the other into existence. It would be almost criminal to not have spooky stories about a place called Mount Diablo.

For more stories about this Mountain Range, please visit: https://museumsrv.org/post-1421/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20famous,guise%20of%20an%20old%20hidalgo.

The Curse of the T.B. Scott Mansion

Background:

The informant likes telling this story because he experienced it himself and believes in its truth. It happened in the town of Merrill, Wisconsin. He lived in the mansion from 1971 to ’72 during his years in junior college and learned the story while he was there, later adding on to it his own experiences.

Context:

This story was told to me after I listed off a number of genres that could be defined as folklore to the informant, and was told for the purpose of collection. Usually, however, the informant likes to tell this story to his children and grandchildren on occasions one would think to tell similar scary stories, like on Halloween or during camping trips.

Main piece:

“I lived in the mansion for a year and a half. The story goes he was a prominent, well-known lumberman in the community. He built a mansion overlooking a river on this bluff. In the course of building this mansion, he hung himself in the bell tower–he really did. Every person who then owned the mansion had some horrible stuff happen: the son, before the house was completed got in a physical fight with the architect and he got stabbed and died. An the wife was on a buggy ride one day, and she felt this impending doom and darkness upon her and they got her home and she died. Supposedly the curse was–on the property–a white man promised to marry the daughter of an Indian chief but the white man didn’t go through with it. The daughter ended up dying from smallpox and so the chief cursed the land-this was all true. So Mrs. Scott died after the buggy ride. So the house was sold to this guy from Chicago, he was at the train station in Milwaukee coming to the house in Merrill and he was stabbed by the Black Hand-the mafia- and never even got to see the house. Later there was a guy that was caretaker for the property, he had one arm and ran a popcorn stand in town–popcorn Dan, they called him. He was English and he was going back to visit family, so he booked a passage back–and it was on the Titanic! he went down with the ship. Then the next guy that bought the mansion went insane! He suffered major financial losses and went to a mental asylum. And the next guy, he had an office in the mansion but–he went into Merrill one day and disappeared, nobody ever saw him again. Now the house and property is cursed and nobody wants to buy it. So the house was offered to a convert of nuns–the Order of the Holy Cross–if they would establish a hospital for the community. And for a while, none of them died so everyone thought the curse was over. So later it turned into a junior college, and my friends and I went there. There was about 10 or 11 of us that lived there. And nothing weird besides like flickering lights ever happened. But after we moved out one of the guys–Jim–I was in a band with him, died of an aneurysm. After that one died in a car accident, and another in a motorcycle accident. And then the fourth one died of a drug overdose. So out of ten guys in their early twenties, four of them die. After the second one died all of us who lived there were like ‘holy shit,’ what’s gonna happen to us. When the third and fourth ones died we were all scared. They tore the mansion down this year.”

Analysis:

This piece was really fun to collect, as I had no idea how long the history of the house was or how cursed it truly seemed to be. Whether or not curses are real, it was interesting to see how a piece of folklore can be revitalized after lying dormant for years. Although everyone thought the curse to have been lifted by the Order of the Holy Cross, it came back to haunt the next group who lived at the Scott Mansion. Along with this, I think that although it’s tragic to hear that as a young man my informant experienced so many of his close friends passing away, it’s also fascinating that he was part of this story–knowing that I’m able to collect a tale of haunting such as this from one of the folks who took part in the narrative has made it feel much more authentic.

San Antonio Haunted Train Tracks

Context:

The informant–ZG– is an 18 year old male born and raised in San Antonio Texas. The train tracks to which the informant is referring are located near the San Juan Mission and have become a popular tourist destination for self proclaimed ghost hunters.

Piece:

A story that I heard growing up and I actually did witness was south of San Antonio. There’s these railroad tracks, and supposedly in the eighteen hundreds a train was coming by and it killed all these small children. I don’t know what they were doing playing on train tracks. That was their fault. But if you go at night and you set your car in the middle of the train tracks–the train tracks are no longer in use–the ghost children will push your car across the train tracks. My mom and I went back in 2014 or 2013. We had this huge pickup truck. And we went over and, we parked on top of the train tracks and it’s actually like a line of people. And what do you know we put our car in neutral and… Wow! Our car was pushed across the train tracks from the little children. It was incredible.