THE MURDER MANSION

On the night of December 6, 1959, Dr. Harold Perelson, from Los Feliz, California, beat his wife to death with a hammer, severely beat his 18-year-old daughter and then committed suicide by drinking a glass of acid. The murders became a twisted puzzle to the neighbors in Los Feliz. It was not bafflement about the murder themselves; they were easily solved. The real mystery was why the mansion sat empty and untouched – left exactly as it was on the night of violence – for the next fifty years.

No one knows why Dr. Perelson committed his dark deeds. But on the night of December 6, 1959, the wealthy Inglewood heart specialist bludgeoned his wife, Lillian, to death with a hammer and then seriously injured his daughter, Judye, while two other children slept soundly in the house. Judye survived her beating and, although bleeding badly, ran down the hillside to a neighbor’s home at 2471 Glendower Place to ask for help. In the meantime, the two younger children woke up and asked their father about the screaming. Dr. Perelson told them that had only been having a nightmare and should go back to sleep. A few moments later, he drank a glass of acid and died in agony. The police arrived a short time later and all of the Perelson children were removed from the house and eventually, went to live with relatives back east. The motive behind the brutal murder/ suicide was never revealed, although some have speculated that Perelson was in financial trouble.

But that bloody night was not the strangest part of the story…

About a year later, in December 1960, the Perelson’s Spanish-Revival mansion was purchased by Julian and Emily Enriquez through a probate auction. And while the couple, who lived in Lincoln Heights at the time, visited the mansion on occasion and even stored some things in the house, they never moved out – and they never removed any of the Peterson’s belongings. In fact, it was left exactly as it had been on the night when Perelson killed his wife and committed suicide. Curiosity-seekers, and even some reporters, who peered through the dusty windows stated that not only was the Perelson’s furniture, dishes, books and clothing still in the same place where it had been left, even the Christmas tree and unopened gifts were still in the living room.   

The mansion, which was built in 1925 and was quite beautiful in the days before its slow decline, boasts four large bedroom, three bathrooms, a conservatory, maid’s quarters, a large ballroom and a sweeping view of Los Angeles. Over time, though, the house has fallen into disrepair. Neighbors do what they can to keep the grounds in order and a burglar alarm has been installed to keep away intruders, but other than that, the house remains frozen in time.

But the lingering question remains with many – is it truly empty?

It’s no surprise that rumors have spread about the house being haunted. Trespassers who have attempted to enter the house have left, muttering about “ghosts.” A friend of some neighbors who lived nearby was bitten by a black widow spider when she broke into the house on a “Nancy Drew moment.” Two nights later, the alarm on the back door at the neighbor’s kept going off without explanation. There was no one there. “It was like the ghost was following us,” the neighbor later remarked.

 A few years ago, the city required current owner Rudy Enriquez to replace stucco that had peeled from the sides of the house and front walkway walls and repaint the place. Enriquez inherited the mansion when his mother died in 1994. Since then, he has been approached many times by potential buyers but has steadfastly refused to sell. He tells everyone he hasn't decided what he wants to do with the property.

Enriquez, a 77-year-old retired music store manager who lives in the Mount Washington area, said he remains uncertain about his plans. He told a newspaper that he has no interest in staying or living in the house – although that lack of interest has nothing to do with the mansion’s violent past, he said.

So, why does the once beautiful home remain a time capsule to the rampage that took place there in 1959? No one knows. But it is a haunted place. If not haunted by ghosts, then haunted by the tragedy that occurred within its walls.

When the police found Dr. Perelson lying dead next to his wife’s blood-soaked bed, he was still clutching the hammer that he had beaten her with. On a nightstand next to his bed, detectives found an open copy of Dante's "Divine Comedy” with a passage clearly marked...

"Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost . . .” it read, perhaps defining the dark struggle that had taken place within the mind of the man who killed murder.

Heaven's Gate!

“HEAVEN’S GATE”

Riding the Comet to Insanity

On this date, March 26, 1997, America was stunned with the news that a UFO cult in San Diego had committed mass suicide, convinced by their leader that they were going to join a UFO that was flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp Comet, which was then crossing the sky. Most who read of the bizarre cult were stunned that anyone could believe such things, but strange cults were nothing new – especially in California. It was in California that the infamous Jim Jones got his start, leading to a mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana. It was also in California that Charles Manson led his bloodthirsty “family” on a murder spree that effectively ended the peace-loving hippie movement of the 1960s – and still haunts us today.

Marshall Applewhite – Insane Heaven’s Gate leader

California – and Southern California area in particular – was filled with sects and churches in the early 1900s, with ministers like “Fighting Bob” Shuler and Aimee Semple McPherson gaining followers and garnering headlines, but they were far from alone. Starting at about the same time that the film industry discovered Hollywood and made its home among the palm trees, scores of “spookeries” and “fairy farms” began showing up, too.

Decades before the hippie movement made “free love” an international phenomenon, love cults flourished all over Southern California. The first word of them spread in the middle 1920s and began making news a few years later, like one “nest of love” on Santee Street where women were forced to “speak in tongues,” perform “devil dances,” and engage in “soul mating” with “spiritual husbands.”

In 1939, the High Priestess Regina Kuhl captured the attention of the authorities when she was caught indoctrinating male students at L.A. City College into her “Temple of Thelma.” The temple was  set up in the basement of one of the dorms and there, she would don robes, chant some suggestive passages from an Aleister Crowley book and “embrace the power of the lifted lance” – or more simply put, engage in sex with multiple partners.

In 1946, Henry “King Daddy” Newson was arrested for running his own sex camp called Ten Oaks. According to newspaper reports, he molested sixteen underage girls over the course of two years. In his defense, he claimed that he was teaching them the “beauty” of sexual intercourse. Several of the girls claimed that he controlled their minds through hypnosis.

THE BLACKBURN CULT

The religious group known as the Blackburn Cult, the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, or the Great Eleven Club, was started around 1925. The group’s founder, May Otis Blackburn, claimed to receive revelations directly from God and believed that she had been charged by the archangel Gabriel to write books that revealed the mystery of heaven and earth, life and death. Apparently, Gabriel thought the goal of teaching the earth should be accomplished though strange rituals that involved animal sacrifice, copious amounts of sex between followers of the cult, and by stealing thousands of dollars from naïve believers.

The horrible state of Willa Rhoads’ body after it was found beneath her parent’s house in 1929. (LAPD Crime Photo)

The cult began to fall apart in 1929 after police officers made a gruesome discovery at the home of the Rhoads family on Vermont Avenue. Under the floor of one of the bedrooms was a specially built, refrigerated “sleeping chamber” that contained the corpse of their 16-year-old daughter, Willa. The girl’s body was covered in spices and salt and was surrounded by seven dead dogs. The Rhoads later confessed that they had placed the girl in the tomb at the direction of May Otis Blackburn, who convinced them that she would be resurrected when the archangel Gabriel came to earth.

 

Group leaders were indicted later that year for theft and were also investigated in the disappearance of several members. The indictments made newspaper headlines when the strange rituals of the cult were revealed to the public. May Otis Blackburn was charged with 12 counts of grand theft and the cult collapsed after she was sent to prison for stealing $40,000 from group member Clifford Dabney.

MANKIND UNITED

Eerily foreshadowing the modern cult of Scientology (on which a religion is based on the writings of a science-fiction novelist) was the Mankind United sect, which was created by another science-fiction writer, Arthur Bell. During the height of the Great Depression, Bell penned a book called Mankind United, a turgid, repetitive text that was filled with bold type and large blocks of capitalized text. It told the story of a malevolent conspiracy that ran the world (the "Hidden Rulers" and "Money Changers") who were not only responsible for war, poverty and injustice – they were also aliens living on earth.

Opposing them was another group of aliens, the “Sponsors,” who had arrived on earth in 1875. According to Bell, the benevolent Sponsors were shortly going to announce their presence and would put in place a world-wide utopia, based on universal employment and a financial system based on credits. The workday would be four hours a day, four days a week. Needless to say, all of this sounded pretty good to tired, worn-out people who were struggling to put food on their tables.

In order for the Sponsors to put their plan into place, they had to receive massive support from the people. The plan would be promoted by the “Pacific Coast Division of North America, International Registration Bureau” – which was, of course, run by Arthur Bell. He announced that when 200 million people accepted the Mankind United plan, the Sponsors would overthrow their rival alien groups and, within 30 days, the new utopia would begin. 

Of course, there were no Sponsors, no evil aliens, and no “International Bureau.” The whole thing had been concocted by Bell and it never numbered more than a few thousand followers, if that. The only true beneficiary of the group was Bell, who had several luxurious apartments and mansions, including a swanky place on the Sunset Strip that had an indoor pool, a pipe organ, and a cocktail bar. Bell was spotted in all of the most swinging nightclubs and spent cash freely. He received about $50,000 a year in tax-free income, which adjusted for inflation would be the equivalent of nearly $1 million today. His followers, on the other hand, worked in various cult businesses full-time, including hotels and shops. They were paid less than $40 a month, worked up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week – which was quite a bit more than the utopian work week they had been promised in Bell’s book.  

The cult gained the attention of the authorities during World War II. Bell incorporated as a church (the Church of the Golden Rule) to obtain tax exemption and began making even more bizarre claims, such as the idea that he could be beamed to several different places at once, that the Sponsors had advanced technology that allowed the dead to be resurrected on other planets, and more. None of these turned out to be quite enough to gain popular support and in 1951, Bell’s group folded and the cult faded away completely. As some would later discover, though, he was simply a man ahead of his time. If he had started his church a few decades later, he might be able to count some of the biggest stars in Hollywood as his members.

FOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD

One of the most famous cults in Southern California was Krishna Venta’s WKFL (for Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love) and it began as a quiet monastery in Canoga Park in 1948.

The Fountain of the World, as the group became known, first got the attention of the press in the 1940s and 1950s for its members’ habit of dressing in robes and going barefoot. Male members were required to grow beards and wear their hair long. The Fountain was marginally controversial because one of the requirements for membership was that one donate all his or her worldly assets to the group prior to joining. For most, this was irrelevant since they had very little to start with. 

The group was responsible for a multitude of positives, including fighting wildfires, offering shelter to those in need, and feeding the homeless. The group gained national exposure in 1949 when the newswires picked up the story that Fountain members had been among the first on the scene to offer aid to the victims of Standard Airlines Flight 897R, which had crashed into the Simi Hills, killing 35 of 48 persons onboard. Krishna Venta also taught his followers to set up free food services for the poor, offer free room and board to the homeless, and help emergency relief groups in times of need.

But things at the commune were stranger than most people knew. In addition to promoting charitable works, Venta also claimed that smoking was healthy, that human beings were evolved from aliens, that he was 244,000 years old and would never die (he did), that he arrived on earth in 1932 on Mount Everest, and led a convoy of rockets here from the extinct planet Neophrates. He also claimed that he was none other than Jesus Christ himself. To prove it, he liked to show his detractors that he had been born without a belly button, proof that he was Jesus, an alien, or something.

Krishna Venta had been born Francis Herman Penovic in 1911. He was married in 1937 and divorced seven years later. He was arrested in 1941 after sending a threatening letter to President Roosevelt.  Later, using the name Frank Jensen, he committed a series of crimes including burglary, larceny and kidnapping. He also spent a few months in a mental hospital. In 1948, he changed his name and founded his religion. He also got involved in the California legal system again when he was ordered to pay child support from 1945 to 1951. He claimed a religious exemption but the court ruled against him in 1955.

Venta died on December 10, 1958 in a suicide bombing instigated by two disgruntled former followers (Peter Kamenoff and Ralph Muller) who, although never offering any proof to support their claims, charged that Venta had both mishandled cult funds and been intimate with their wives. Krishna Venta is buried in Valhalla Memorial Park in Burbank.  His grave is unmarked but near that of Oliver Hardy, of Laurel and Hardy fame. A monument to Venta still exists in the canyon in Canoga Park where the commune once stood.

A branch of the Fountain of the World cult was also established in Homer, Alaska, in the years prior to Venta's death. Cult members were referred to as the “barefooters” by locals. But Fountain membership at both sites declined rapidly following Venta's death, and the cult ceased to exist entirely by the middle 1970s.

HEAVEN’S GATE

Undoubtedly, the strangest of the modern-day “alien” cults in Southern California was Heaven’s Gate, a UFO religion that was based out of San Diego and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. At some point in the early 1970s, Applewhite became convinced that he was an alien who was transported to earth and reincarnated into the body of a man – named Marshal Applewhite. From that point on, he believed that it was his mission to teach everyone he came into contact with about the creed of transcendence. With the help of his partner, Bonnie Nettles, he gathered a number of followers and convinced them to give up everything that they owned (including their children) and to prepare themselves for the trip to the “Evolutionary Level Above Human.” Applewhite’s preparation included months of extreme psychological mind control experiments, starvation, and celibacy. Some cult members even went as far as to castrate themselves.

Although mostly unknown to the mainstream media, Heaven’s Gate was known in UFO circles and had been the subject of criticism by respected UFO writer Jacques Vallee. In Messengers of Deception, he described an unusual public meeting organized by the group and expressed concerns about many UFO contactee groups' authoritarian political and religious outlooks, including the views of Heaven’s Gate. 

The group's end coincided with the appearance of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Applewhite convinced 38 followers to commit suicide, which he claimed would allow their souls to board a spaceship that they believed was hiding behind the comet. The cult believed that the planet Earth was about to be “recycled,” or wiped clean, and that the only chance they had to survive was to leave it immediately.

The Heaven’s Gate crime scene photos

On March 26, 1997, 38 members of the cult, along with Marshall Applewhite, were found dead in a rented mansion in the upscale San Diego community of Rancho Santa Fe. As the Hale-Bopp comet approached the earth, the group members drank citrus juice to ritually cleanse their bodies of impurities. The suicides were then accomplished by ingesting phenobarbital, mixed with vodka, and by tying plastic bags around their heads to induce asphyxiation. The cult members were found lying neatly on their bunk beds, their faces and torsos covered by a square, purple cloth – and plastic bags secured over their heads. Each member carried a five dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team."

Strange Tales of Southern California cults, weird murders and hauntings can be found in Troy Taylor’s book BLOODY HOLLYWOOD. It’s available in an autographed edition from the website or as a Kindle edition.

Mulholland's Fall

MULHOLLAND’S FALL

THE ST. FRANCIS DAM COLLAPSE

At just three minutes before midnight on this date, March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, which had been designed as a reservoir for the Los Angeles water supply, suddenly failed, releasing eleven billion gallons of water into a narrow valley in northeastern Los Angeles County, destroying everything in its path. Over the course of the next four hours, a roaring wall of water swept through the night, traveling 55 miles from the San Francisquito Valley, through the Santa Clara Valley, and on to the Pacific Ocean.

The dam had been built between 1924 and 1926 under the supervision of William Mulholland, chief engineer and general manager of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply. The concrete gravity-arch dam should have been impregnable, but Mulholland’s mistakes during the planning -- which he took complete responsibility for -- led to disaster. The devastating flood killed more than six hundred people and its collapse is one of the worst American engineering failures in American history.

The collapse of the dam marked the end of Mulholland’s career and the catastrophe has left an eerie haunting in its wake.

The St. Francis Dam before the disaster

The St. Francis Dam was built by the city of Los Angeles and was the brainchild of William Mulholland, an Irish, self-taught engineer who had fought his way through the ranks of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (then called the Bureau of Water Works and Supply). He had made a name for himself as a man with a penchant for thriftiness, an enormous capacity for innovation and for having the ability to bring in projects on time and under budget. His skills aided him in designing and building the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which at the time was the longest aqueduct in the world, bringing water 233 miles from the Owens Valley to L.A. The city had been built in the desert and the water was critical to its dreams of growth and glory. The aqueduct brought in fresh water, but the city always demanded more, forcing other, smaller ones to be built.

But the promise of more water was overshadowed by the deceit and corruption involved in taking away the water rights of the Owens Valley farmers and residents who also needed the water. Mulholland's financial backers became rich off of the water bonanza while the people of Owens Valley suffered financial ruin. Some called it "The rape of Owens Valley." At the opening ceremony for the aqueduct, Mulholland uttered his most enduring quote, "There it is. Take it.”

The aqueduct and the series of small reservoirs built in the 1920s proved insufficient to quench the city’s rabid thirst and it was obvious that a larger reservoir was needed. When building and designing the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1911, Mulholland had considered sections of the San Francisquito Canyon – beginning about thirty miles north of L.A. – as a potential dam site. Conveniently, the aqueduct ran along the canyon and two generating stations in the canyon used aqueduct water to provide power for the city. Mulholland quickly saw the potential of the canyon to serve as a reservoir that would provide ample water for L.A. in case of a drought or if the aqueduct was damaged in an earthquake.

In 1924, construction was quietly started on the dam so as to not attract the attention of the farmers who were dependent on the waters from San Francisquito Creek. The Los Angeles Aqueduct had already been the target of frequent sabotage by the angry farmers and landowners in the Owens Valley, who felt the city was stealing their water. Mulholland wanted to avoid costly repairs and delays caused by sabotage at the new dam – and avoid the scandal that surrounded by the building of the aqueduct – so almost no publicity was generated about the new project. The dam was named the “St. Francis,” an anglicized version of the name of the canyon in which it was built.

The official plans for the St. Francis Dam describe a curved, concrete gravity dam. The basic principle of this type of dam was simple – the mass of the structure had to be great enough to hold against the pressure of the water behind it. However, rock at the dam site, both the red conglomerate rock and the sandstone on the western side of the canyon and the mica schist on the eastern wall, were less than ideal for construction. The conglomerate lost strength when it was wet and mica was a porous rock that was unstable under pressure. When water seeped into the rock below and alongside the concrete dam, pressure pushed it upwards, reducing its effectiveness against the water pushing behind it. There are several ways to counter this effect, but Mulholland used only one technique, installing drainage wells to reduce water in the material beneath the dam. In addition, during construction, the width of the dam was decreased and the height increased. Mulholland, the self-taught genius, had ordered these important changes, even though they were never formally studied by trained engineers. It was later determined that the unstable rock along the eastern side of the dam was what caused it to give way.

The St. Francis Dam project was a disaster in the making, although apparently no one ever noticed – or they were afraid to speak up. As the reservoir filled during 1926 and 1927, several cracks appeared in the dam and its supports, likely caused by temperature changes and the contraction of the concrete. The cracks and leaks were inspected by Mulholland and his assistant, Harvey van Norman, but they dismissed them, stating that there were to be expected in a concrete structure the size of the new dam. By March 1928, the reservoir had reached full capacity. The water had risen steadily and uneventfully for almost two years but by the middle of March, motorists traveling along the east shore reported cracks and a sagging roadbed near the dam’s east support. On March 12, the road was reported to have sagged more than one foot.

That same morning, the dam keeper, Tony Harnischfeger, discovered a new leak and immediately alerted Mulholland. He inspected the leak, along with his assistant van Norman, but convinced that it was relatively minor and normal for a concrete dame, Mulholland pronounced the structure absolutely safe.

At three minutes before midnight on March 12, the St. Francis Dam catastrophically failed. No one actually saw the dam collapse, but a motorcyclist named Ace Hopewell was riding about one-half mile upstream from the dam around this time and reported that he felt a rumbling and the sound of “crashing, falling blocks.” He assumed that the sensation was either an earthquake or one of the landslides that were common to the area and didn’t realize at the time that he would be the last person to see the dam intact – and survive.

Dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger and his family were, most likely, the first casualties caught in the wave of water that tore through the dam. The wave was at least 125 feet high when it hit their cottage in San Francisquito Canyon, about one-quarter mile downstream from the dam. Thirty minutes before the collapse a motorist passing by the dam reported seeing lights in the canyon below the dam (the dam itself did not have lights) and many believe that the lights could have been Harnischfeger inspecting the dam immediately before its failure. He may have been nervous about the cracks that had been discovered earlier in the day. The body of Leona Johnson, who lived with the Harnischfegers and was later mistakenly reported to be Harnischfeger's wife, was found fully clothed and wedged between two blocks of concrete near the broken base of the dam. Neither the body of the dam keeper or that of his six-year-old son, Coder, was ever found.

The remains of the dam in two photos taken after the disaster occurred. 

As the dam collapsed, eleven billion gallons of water surged down San Francisquito Canyon, demolishing the heavy concrete walls of Power Station No. 2, destroying the Harnischfeger home, wiping out a camp of migrant workers and destroying everything else in its path. The flood surged south through the canyon, flooding parts of present-day Valencia and Newhall. The deluge then followed the Santa Clara River bed to the west, flooding the towns of Castaic Junction, Fillmore and Bardsdale. The water continued west through Santa Paula in Ventura County, emptying the victims and debris that it carried with it into the Pacific Ocean, 55 miles from the reservoir and dam site. When it reached the ocean, the flood was almost two miles wide. Bodies of victims were recovered from the ocean, some as far south as the Mexican border.

Many more were never found at all.

To this day, the exact number of victims remains unknown. The official death toll in 1928 was 385, but the bodies of victims continued to be discovered all of the way until the middle 1950s. Many bodies were swept out to sea when the flood reached the Pacific and were not discovered until they washed ashore. The remains of another victim were found deep underground near Newhall in 1992, and the current death toll is estimated to be more than six hundred victims. This number does not include the itinerant farm workers camped in San Francisquito Canyon, the exact number of which will never be known.

The wall of water wiped out homes, small towns and (below) even shifted an entire railroad line from its course.

Immediately following the disaster, Los Angeles officials wanted to put it behind them as quickly as possible.  Because of this, official investigations and hearings were short and cursory. Mulholland publicly announced that he was willing to shoulder all of the blame. He said that he “envied those who were killed” and went on to say, “Don’t blame anyone else, you just fasten it on me. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human, and I won't try to fasten it on anyone else.” Although he did imply that the dam had been cursed or that it had been sabotaged, a coroner’s inquest ruled that the disaster was caused by the faulty rock on which the dam was built and blamed the governmental organizations that oversaw the dam's construction and the dam's designer and engineer, William Mulholland. However, Mulholland was cleared of any charges, since neither he nor anyone at the time could have known of the instability of the rock formations on which the dam was built.

At the time, Mulholland managed to escape severe criticism and he won accolades for his courage and the responsibility that he took for the disaster. It was not until much later that evidence emerged that his arrogance and negligence were the real causes of the dam’s collapse. Perhaps because of his lack of formal education, Mulholland relied more on experience and guesswork than on scientific study and data. He discounted or ignored contemporary knowledge about the dangers of the uplift in the rock and failed to implement a wide variety of safety measures that were available at the time. Too proud and independent to hire expert consultants, as was the custom on large engineering projects, Mulholland forged ahead and never submitted any of his plans for an independent safety review. His authoritarian management style made sure that none of his subordinates would question his judgment.

The catastrophe haunted Mulholland and it marked the end of his career. He retired several months after the disaster and retreated into a life of self-imposed isolation. With almost no contact with the world, he died in 1935 at the age of 79.

With thousands of homes destroyed and hundreds of people dead, the St. Francis Dam Collapse remains a dark event in American history and was one of the worst disasters to ever take place in California. The calamity left an indelible mark on the landscape of Southern California --- and many believe that it earned a place in the annals of the supernatural, as well.

The exact number of victims in the disaster will never be known. 

Over the years, San Francisquito Canyon has remained a sort of blighted spot near San Fernando. The area where the dam keeper’s cottage was once located – and where many migrant workers were camped – has been turned into a public park. But it’s a place where remnants of the past still make themselves known today.

It’s been said that just about anyone who has lived in San Francisquito has a ghost story. In 1986, a local historian was videotaping in a small cemetery and his friend came out of a gulley with a mysterious acid burn on his arm. When the pair got back to town, the historian found his videotape was completely blank, even though frequent inspections during taping showed the video was good. He went back for a second shoot and this time, his camera caught fire in an odd case of spontaneous combustion. The owners of the property weren’t surprised. They mentioned that a half-ton watering trough had been mysteriously moved in the middle of the night -- with no tracks. Another time, a man was painting his barn and he happened to look up and see the wet palm print of a child impressed on the wood. There were no children anywhere nearby at the time.

The large park located in the canyon is said to be one of the most haunted spots in the region. Here, where an unknown number of itinerant workers met their death in the floodwaters, visitors who have braved the place after dark say that many of the flood victims have remained behind. According to reports, strange things occur here at night, especially when it’s foggy. Eerie voices are sometimes heard, people are touched, pushed and caressed by invisible hands and on other occasions, shadowy forms are seen walking in the mist. When approached, they always vanish.

Who are these mysterious apparitions? Are they the doomed workers who perished in the flood? Or could they be the spirits of victims whose bodies have not yet been discovered? That particular mystery remains unsolved.

The story of the St. Francis Dam collapse – along with other stories of American disasters and the hauntings that following in their wake – can be found in the books AND HELL FOLLOW WITH IT and A PALE HORSE WAS DEATH by Troy Taylor & Rene Kruse. Both books are available in print from our website or as Kindle and Nook editions.