Haunted San Pedro

By Brian Clune and Barry Conrad

Discover the paranormal secrets behind this bustling Los Angeles port—includes photos!
 
Home to one of the busiest ports in the country, San Pedro plays host to visitors from all walks of life—and death. Locals swap supernatural stories of shipwrecked ghosts, lost lighthouse keepers, suicidal lovers, and more.
 
The spirit of a native Gabrieleno man wanders the grounds of the Wayfarers Chapel. The phantom smell of a Civil War officer’s cigar smoke wafts through the halls of the Drum Barracks. A dedicated employee of the historic Warner Brothers Theatre still fixes jammed film reels and tests equipment in the projection room. In this spine-chilling account, historian and paranormal investigator Brian Clune delves into the history and mysteries of these spooky seaside haunts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781439657638

Brian Clune

Hollywood is supposed to be the place where dreams come true, but it's also where nightmares come to life. Spirits haunt the halls of renowned studios, legendary cafés and lavish estates, while rumors of curses lurk in the shadows of the rich and famous. It's said that stars like James Dean, Carrie Fisher and Prince once predicted their own deaths, while slain screenwriter Paul Bern tried in vain to warn Sharon Tate about her own fate. Ghosts reportedly linger in the corners of the El Coyote Café, and the Falcon Lair boasts sightings of Rudolph Valentino long after his death. Join author and paranormal historian Brian Clune for a star-studded tour of the dark side of Hollywood.

Book preview

Chapter 1

SAN PEDRO

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

Just outside Los Angeles, attached to the giant city by a twenty-eight-mile narrow strip of land known as the Harbor Gateway, is the port town of San Pedro. This thriving town was once a city of its own with a city hall, its own fire and police departments and one of the busiest harbors in the country. It was also a navy town for the Pacific Fleet. It was annexed by the sprawling city of Los Angeles in 1909 because the metropolis wanted its port facilities and the revenue that came with it. Today, the Port of Los Angeles is the busiest port in the country and surpassed only by Hong Kong and Singapore as the busiest harbor in the world, with millions of tons of goods passing through its docks yearly, headed to all four compass points of the United States and beyond.

San Pedro sits at the southern tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and was originally inhabited by the Tongva-Gabrieleno Native Americans. They had lived on the site for thousands of years, as well as in other wide-ranging areas around the Los Angeles Basin. They had been there for so long, in fact, that they believed they had been there since the beginning of time itself.

The Tongva were masters of the sea and called themselves Lords of the Oceans. This was not just an over-blown ego speaking but also a true belief in themselves and their tradition of building and sailing their oceangoing canoes, or ti’ats. Catalina Island (named Pimu by the Tongva) was only twenty-six miles across the San Pedro Channel, and the Tongva would paddle their canoes across the sometimes-treacherous ocean to trade with their fellow tribesmen, who called themselves Pimungans. They would trade for shells, mollusks, island fish and seafood and give the islanders goods that were not available on the island itself.

The view from atop Point Fermin of Catalina Island—sometimes the last sight of those too despondent to live.

Catalina was not the only island that the San Pedro natives traded with; at this time, all the Channel Islands were inhabited as well, as were many colonies spread up and down the coast of California, and the Tongva plank canoes sailed far and wide, trading with them all. The Tongva lived in relative peace, and it is said that they blessed the land of Palos Verdes, which they called Chaaw, which made it the most beautiful place on earth. However, all of this would change around 1542, when the first Europeans arrived.

Juan Cabrillo was a Portuguese explorer sailing under the flag of Spain and was the first European to discover the natural harbor at the northwest end of the bay. He named the area Bahia de Los Fumas, or Bay of Smokes. He gave it this moniker due to the smoke he saw coming from the Tongva hunters’ cook fires as they prepared meals in their camps. The following day, Santa Catalina Island was discovered, along with its inhabitants. Cabrillo explored as much of the harbor as he could, but because the water was very shallow, this exploration was limited. The harbor carried the name Cabrillo had given it for 50 years, until 1602, when Sebastian Viscaino, who was officially mapping and surveying the coastline of California for Spain, sailed into the bay and renamed it Ensenada de San Andres in honor of Saint Andrew. Viscaino mistakenly thought that he had arrived on the feast day of Saint Andrew, but in actuality, it was the day in honor of Saint Peter, the bishop of Alexandria. It would take 132 years for his mistake to be known, but when Cabrera Bueno discovered it, he immediately changed the name to San Pedro in honor of the martyred saint, and we have known it as such ever since.

The area remained mostly undisturbed until 1769, when Spain decided that it should make an effort to populate California and began creating settlements. This expansion coincided with Father Junipero Serra’s work of creating a mission system extending the length of Spanish-held territory. Each of these missions was to be spaced out a day’s ride from the next to not only bring Christianity to the natives but also to provide a place of rest for weary travelers. Two of these missions—San Gabriel (1771) and San Juan Capistrano (1776)—were supplied twice a year, and the supply wagons would return with tallow and hides produced by the missions to San Pedro, where they were loaded onto ships to be delivered to other Spanish holdings. Spain also brought in over eleven families to help settle the area, and they set up their small town twenty miles north of the harbor near the Tongva village of Yang-na. They named this settlement El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles Porciuncula on September 4, 1781. Unfortunately, Spain made it illegal to trade with anyone other than Spanish colonies, and this restriction encouraged smugglers to bring in goods from all over the world to be sold to the settlers; in fact, smuggling became the mainstay of trade for the new settlers. The first American trading ship, the Lelia Bryd, made port call in San Pedro in 1805, and even though the trade restrictions were still in place, the distance from Spain along with loose enforcement allowed trade to thrive.

Juan Jose Dominguez was a member of the 1769 Portola Expedition to Alta California, and as a reward, Mexican governor Pedro Fages awarded him the first land grant recorded in California. This grant became the 75,000-acre Rancho San Pedro. The boundaries of this new rancho spread from Redondo Beach to Compton and Long Beach and included San Pedro proper, as well as all of Palos Verdes. The rancho flourished under Dominguez’s guidance even after the Mexican war for independence and New Spain became part of Mexico in 1821; however, over the years a dispute erupted between Dominguez and the Sepulveda family. Around 1835, the tensions between the two parties worsened, and Governor Jose Figueroa, in a bid to settle the dispute, granted Juan Capistrano Sepulveda and his brother Jose Loreto Sepulveda 31,600 acres of the Dominguez Rancho. This included all of Palos Verdes and the town of San Pedro as well. This new rancho became known as Rancho Palos Verdes.

By 1835, San Pedro had become the most important port on the West Coast, yet the ships still had to moor about a mile off shore, and their passengers and cargo had to be transferred by small boat into the port proper. These tiny boats not only had to battle the ocean tides but several small islets as well, some of which would just appear out of the bay at low tide and could cause havoc with the small craft coming into port. One of the worst of these was Dead Mans Island, aptly named for how many ships broke up on its rocky shore during storms. The Sepulvedas built a crude dock near present-day Fourteenth Street and Beacon, which became known as Sepulveda’s Landing.

In 1851, a young man by the name of Phineas Banning arrived in San Pedro with dreams of becoming rich. Banning had come from the East Coast of the United States and had arrived at the port of San Pedro just after the United States gained control of California following the defeat of Mexico in the Mexican-American War. He immediately saw the potential for the harbor and the growing city of Los Angeles as well. Banning fought tirelessly to grow the port, lobbying the federal government in Washington, D.C., and going so far as to dredge the harbor using his own funds to allow large oceangoing ships to dock within the confines of the harbor itself. This allowed for easier offloading and loading of the vessels, as well as a much safer environment, which greatly improved the port’s image around the world. Once the government decided to officially recognize the Port of San Pedro (now the Los Angeles Harbor), the growth of the area became rapid, and by the time of the American Civil War, the harbor was one of the most important links in the supply chain for Union troops. Washington sent larger and larger contingents of the army and navy to help protect it, as well as the other major ports of California. Today, the Los Angeles Harbor is not only an integral part of America’s transportation system but its busiest port as well.

Chapter 2

THE DOMINGUEZ RANCHO

In 1784, King Carlos III of Spain granted seventy-five thousand acres of land to Juan Jose Dominguez. This was the first Spanish land grant in California and was granted to the family because of the service given by Dominguez to the Crown. The area stretched from what is now Redondo Beach to Long Beach and Compton to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, including the Los Angeles Harbor, Terminal Island and Wilmington. The area became known as Rancho San Pedro. Dominguez built his home inland from the coast, and this adobe became the center for the whole area. It is said that the adobe is haunted by at least one spirit and perhaps