Some Haunted Places in CV

In honor of Halloween I’ll write up a few of the rumored ghost stories I’ve heard over the years. Whether you’re a believer or not, I think everyone has either experienced the paranormal themselves, or knows somebody who has … or at least thought they had.

The paranormal is a pervasive part of our culture. It’s in our legends and our literature. The Crescenta Valley is particularly ripe for hauntings. The Native Americans who lived here who didn’t die of painful European diseases were ripped violently from their culture. Many of our first residents were TB sufferers who, after being shunned by family and friends, died lonely and gasping for breath in local sanitariums. Scores of people died violently when the flood of 1934 ripped through the dark night.

Two stories come from the top of Briggs where many TB victims died. A resident there told me they had been awakened several times by a man standing over their bed, sometimes lifting the bed slightly, who would soon fade away. Their house is exactly where Utley Sanitarium was. My daughter and a friend were driving down Briggs one night when two figures in white robes darted across the street directly in front of her car. She braked hard and the two figures, illuminated in her headlights, ran straight into, and through, the side of a parked motorhome. The two girls screamed all the way down the hill.

A legendary ghost haunts CV High School’s auditorium. The story goes that a few decades ago on (of course) a dark and stormy night while a play was being performed, a homeless guy snuck in the side door to get out of the rain. He hid in the equipment room below the stage and there he died. His ghost has been encountered by generations of kids.

Several years ago I did an interview with a resident of Mountain Oaks. She told me that a regular visitor in her home was the ghost of one of the many Native Americans who were exploited by the Spanish for their labor. This one had been put to work cutting granite in the Verdugo Mountains, had been hung from a nearby oak tree for some minor offence, and buried near her house.

I’ve written about the ghosts of Rockhaven Sanitarium before. Their manifestations take a unique form. The ghosts seemingly make physical objects appear. I’m a docent there and we’ve had several items show up that were never there before. The items are always things that would have meant something very personal to whomever they came from – rosary beads, a program from a granddaughter’s dance recital, a valentine, once even a piano. All of these have appeared just before a tour, as though the past residents were reaching out saying, “Look at this, everyone! This was important to me.” We’ve had several ghost-hunter groups tour the grounds. They aren’t allowed (by the City of Glendale) to do full investigations with all their equipment, but many of the ghost-hunters report sensing “great confusion” on the part of the spirits there. That fits as many Rockhaven patients had Alzheimer’s.

On the retail side of ghosts, we have the current Montrose Starbucks. It was originally a bank with a below-ground vault. Generations of retail workers there, when it was later a dress shop and other retail ventures, report various “encounters” in the former vault. Lastly, there is the La Crescenta Ralphs supermarket. It sits smack on top of what was once Kimball Sanitarium, a true old-school insane asylum. I’ve heard several second-hand stories that the workers who stock the shelves at night regularly have the experience of someone whispering in their ears. A few have seen a woman in a wedding gown walk down one of the aisles toward the back of the store where she disappears.

I’m not going to judge if these stories are true or not. To me they’re just fun to tell and re-tell. If you have any of your own local ghost stories, send them in. If I get enough I’ll do a post-Halloween recap, involving some more fun local haunts.

  mike lawler