Photographs by Kathy De La Torre

Pat Ramirez, owner of Lisa's Tea Treasures, says the doorbell in the shop sometimes rings mysteriously.

Ghost Story

Things go bump in the night in the Village Lane corner of Los Gatos

By Suzanne Cristallo

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I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things; that they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings. I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do; For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.

-- Joyce Kilmer

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Old houses seem to be the favorite stalking grounds for restless spirits, their old walls enclosing the secrets of many lives lived there. Owners of several Victorians in town tell stories of friendly, mischievous visits, to which their listeners respond with prickly necks, displays of bravado or knowing glances.

But spirits might be more likely to gather in a cemetery, or where one once was ... a place like the Village Lane area of downtown Los Gatos.

When Elaine Chiccino, owner of the Kid's Trading Company, a buy, sell and consign children's store in that area, discovers that that part of town was once a cemetery, she can only say: "I've wondered about it."

And then she explains why. She tells of locking the shop up tight, and the next morning--with no doors or windows disturbed--arriving to find the radio blaring on a station she never used. It happened more than once. "One time, it was so loud, it broke one of the speakers," she recalls.

And then there were those other times--once or twice a month over six months--when she would arrive in the morning, unlock the door and find balloons, all blown up, bobbing on the floor. "There even were those latex gloves blown up among them," she says, mystified. So, naturally, she called the police. "The policeman who came and took my report suggested we must have been drinking." Since then, Chiccino has installed a burglar alarm. "It's only happened a couple of times since then," she says.

Chiccino says there was no drinking.

A look back at local history just might suggest an alternative theory about who's blowing up balloons and playing loud music--not to mention other mysterious happenings in Village Lane shops.

According to the long memory of H.P. Smead, a one-time resident of Brooklyn Street in Los Gatos, as recounted in a letter to the editor in the Feb. 13, 1958, Los Gatos-Saratoga Times-Observer, a hard storm hit Los Gatos in the late 1860s. It filled the small cabin of an old lady living just below the Los Gatos Grammar School (now Old Town) with a surge of chilling water. She died several days later of pneumonia.

She had no relatives, so some local farmers got together, and one John Mason donated a tract of orchard land known as the Almond District for a cemetery. He made the unusual stipulation that if in the future the land were no longer needed as a cemetery, it should revert to family ownership.

The land was bounded by N. Santa Cruz Avenue on the west, Highway 9 (then called Cemetery Lane east of Santa Cruz Avenue) north as far as the highway median strip, east to the parking lot which once was the railroad track and south to Petticoat Lane.

Two teenage farm boys dug the old woman's grave, the first of 100 or more which would occupy the plot until the early 1890s.

Several of the townspeople bought 20-by-20-foot family plots. Among those marked on the original cemetery map are names familiar today: J.W. Lyndon arrived here in l857, an astute businessman who became the second-largest taxpayer in town and built the Lyndon Hotel in the spot where Lyndon Plaza now stands; James Kennedy, onetime sheriff and planter of the orchard near Kennedy Road; the Lundys, remembered today with Lundy Lane; and the N.E. Johnsons of Johnson Avenue, whose house--the oldest in town--still stands on Los Gatos Boulevard.

Of some significance was the grave of James Eubanks, whose listed cause of death was "dislocation of neck, and secondarily hanging"--the wages, it seems, of whiskey and murder.

An account of the murder was printed in an article in the Jan. 23, 1891, edition of the Los Gatos News headlined "Father Kills Daughter." "Whiskey was responsible," the paper noted, "for many of the desperate deeds of early days in Los Gatos." When Eubanks ran short of funds for his favorite drink and asked his daughter, an employee of a restaurant, to give him change, she refused. "He returned and shot her with a shotgun. She fell in the doorway dead." He was hanged in 1891.

The cemetery was "truly a spooky place," wrote Times-Observer columnist Dora Rankin, "all overrun with shrubbery and a mass of oak trees. At the very corner [of Highway 9 and Santa Cruz Avenue] was a little grave with the inscription 'Willie has gone to God'." She wondered who "Little Willie" was.

Here lies the tale: Willie's sister, Nellie Turner Denning, responding to a 1958 article in the Los Gatos newspaper about the cemetery and the mystery of "Little Willie," stated, "He was buried in Los Gatos about 70 years ago ... he was about 11Ž2 or two years old." In another letter to a friend, she elaborated: "He had only been home one night from Children's Hospital in San Francisco when he died. He was born clubfooted, was in hospital long enough to have an operation on his feet and was going to be wonderful and able to walk soon, [but would have had] to wear braces for a short time. We were so happy. He was a beautiful baby with golden ringlets all over his head. ... He died with pneumonia. ..."

By 1889, the cemetery was running out of room and the town by then surrounded it. A 13-acre-plus piece of land was purchased 3 1/2 miles from town on Almaden Road by a group of citizens callings themselves the Los Gatos Cemetery Association (now called Los Gatos Memorial Park). Sometime thereafter, the town board passed an ordinance prohibiting further burials in the old cemetery--which had continued into the early 1890s--indisposed as they were to moving newly-interred bodies.

However, an old man insisted that his wife be buried in the old cemetery family plot instead of the new cemetery, according to George Bruntz in his The History of Los Gatos. To avoid being served an injunction by the town, he and his friends buried the body at midnight on Saturday when town offices were closed and no injunction could be served until after the body was buried.

Paul Mason--the last living member of the family that had donated the cemetery land--also refused to bend to town will. He refused to move his family graves. They remain to this day buried deep under the buildings along Village Lane along with a score of others including, quite probably, Little Willie. Little Willie's sister, Nellie, commented that the family, which had moved to San Francisco, had never been notified of the grave removals.

Gravestones for the unmoved remains were left, facing downward, but not necessarily on the original graves. "Should anyone look for the graves that had tombstones left, I doubt if they would find anywhere near the number that was left in the old cemetery," wrote Smead in his 1958 letter to the editor, adding, "I will say, they did not comply with the full letter of the U.S. laws in regard to discarded cemeteries."

But what was left was soon forgotten, and the town grew on.

The newly relocated remains were joined by a host of others in the fresh ground of the new Los Gatos Cemetery. Through the 1890s, the list grew to more than 500 burials in the new cemetery. The list was submitted for historical reference to the Daughters of the American Revolution by then-cemetery director Edward Yocco, owner of the Los Gatos Meat Market, who later would acquire majority control of the cemetery corporation stock.

The interment list noted names, occupations, marital status, birth and death dates, birthplace and, in many cases, cause of death. Indicative of the times, the leading cause of death--80 out of 414--was tuberculosis or "phthisis," followed by heart disease, cancer, pneumonia and nephritis. Meningitis, bronchitis, paralysis, diphtheria, apoplexy, uremia, cholera, hemorrhage, dropsy, dysentery and alcoholism claimed others. Cholera infantum and whooping cough claimed the very young. But it was the accidents and suicides which drew a picture of the times.

Among the untimely deaths by accident, four souls departed after being struck by trains, and five drowned. There was a bull goring, a nail puncture in the heel and a gunshot wound resulting in tetanus. One man was thrown from a buggy, two others were run over by wagons, one was asphyxiated by gas and one was dispatched with the "premature explosion of powder" in a Fresno mine. Curiously, one notation indicated death by "Columbian spirits poisoning."

Suicides were not infrequent among new arrivals to Los Gatos, singles and the elderly. Four poisoned themselves, three by strychnine and one by carbolic acid. One drowned in Massol Creek; another hanged himself; one stepped in front of a train "due to temporary insanity"; another shot himself; and another axed himself in the neck.

The Grim Reaper was inventive in the way he helped release souls from this world, but their graves remain behind--some marked and remembered, others unmarked and forgotten.

In the 1950s, a crew digging a new sewer line along Village Lane, the street that now bisects what once was the cemetery, made an unusual discovery. According to Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf, recalling a news article on the subject, "It was a cast-iron coffin--a child's coffin with a little window where the face would have been. It was in the old shape--flat on top and narrowing down from the shoulders, about four feet long." Wulf recalls that the casket was moved to the new cemetery and placed in an unmarked grave.

And what of the many left behind, unclaimed by families scattered and gone? Are there among them the restless, the unavenged, those taken before their time? Through recent films like Stir of Echoes and The Sixth Sense, Hollywood would have you believe that some of the dead stay trapped between the physical world and the afterlife, destined to remain until a mortal can help them correct some wrong. Is it all as dreadful as that?

Not according to some local business people. They are the folks whose shops have been built atop the old cemetery. Some of them have had experiences they cannot explain, energies they cannot pinpoint--balloons and loud music, suggestive of a festive evening in a children's store, for instance. Through their descriptions of those episodes, one could suspect that a sense of humor might be part of the spirits left behind, that they are grinning ghosts with teasing tempers, bent on entertaining themselves to fill an infinite void.

"The alarm keeps going off," says Cesar Rivera-Valdez, an optician at Eye Contact on N. Santa Cruz Avenue, in response to the question, "Anything weird ever happen to you here?" He hardly pauses before answering. "Even after I've checked it to be sure it's unarmed, a minute later it will go off."

Valdez has been in the building six months. He has noticed that sometimes the light goes on while he is watching the controls, indicating the system is activating itself and causing him to scramble to turn it off before the alarm sounds. "The system electrician is here every two weeks and says there's nothing wrong with the system," he says.

Just up the street at Lisa's Tea Treasures, employee Judy Phillips is hearing bells. "The little ding-dong on the door goes off a lot," she says, "when no one is there."

And at the nearby Hers, a makeup and retail store, owner Rebecca Sells has experienced anything but laughable situations. "I swear this place is haunted!" she exclaims. In the first four months after moving in, she had two floods two weeks apart and a fire a month later.

And down the alley at Beaux Chaveaux, a hair salon, owner Jean Tufnell recalls telling a friend three years ago that her shop was built on top of a cemetery. "At the very moment I told him that," she exclaims, "this whole block blacked out and it was pitch black!"

Down the way at Joplin & Sweeney Music Company, co-owner Greg Burger mulls the question a bit while someone strums a guitar in the next room. In business here 15 years, he vaguely recalls something about doors. "Oh, yes," he brightens. "I came back after locking up one night, and all the lights were on, and the doors were wide open." No, there was no chance it was his partner--just no explanation and nothing taken.




This TV set, bolted 8 feet high to a cement wall at Omo 24 Hair Studio, crashed to the floor during the night recently--but nothing was broken.




Around the corner on Village Lane, Paulo Candido, at his hair studio, Omo 24, looks stunned with news of the old cemetery. "I'm tripping," he gasps. Something strange had happened the night before. "This TV stand--bolted to a cement wall eight feet up--came down during the night. I found the TV facedown on the floor, and it wasn't even scratched--it works fine," he marvels. "I can't explain it."

At the popular Double D's sports bar and grill on the corner of N. Santa Cruz and Highway 9--near where Little Willie used to lie--co-owner Dean Devincenzi, 41, laughs. "I've never seen anything out of the ordinary, but then lots of crazy stuff happens around here. If stuff did happen, I never put two and two together."

Up the way toward Petticoat Lane, Patti Van De Wark at the corporate offices of Somerset Auctions giggles. "My drawers fall open all the time," she laughs, "but I think it has more to do with design."

Across the lane fronting on the parking lot, Shaida Locasio of Sirens Salon, recalls that it was at this location in 1971 that her mother went into labor with her while visiting a friend who had lived there. "I was conceived on Halloween," she giggles while coworkers prepare to string skeleton lights around the shop. "But it was just this morning when we were washing windows, I saw a woman with dark hair out of the corner of my eye. I mentioned it to my coworker because the woman was in the garage. We looked again, and no one was there."

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Thanks must be given to William A. "Bill" Wulf whose extensive collection of maps, news articles, letters and memorabilia were the basis for much of the historical information presented here.

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