With Halloween near it was perfect timing for our good friend Lance to come down from Mt Laguna and share some of the spooky lore the local back country and desert hold for us. Lance is a lifetime San Diegan, wildland firefighter and amateur historian and one of my go to experts on the local area. It really was a great chance to visit with him and Jennifer for the evening with our other friends coming to join us for camp stories out monthly meetup in the shop for sharing the outdoors, like open mic night for hiking. This was also a big deal because it was the last one for 2019 since we do it the last Friday of the month November and December seems like a good time to take a break, ha-ha.
So it was a good group and I really enjoyed hearing what lance had to Share. I really didn’t know it but there is quite a bit of haunting going on in the back country. Anza Borrego for one seems to be a hot spot, Desert USA actually has some cool write ups about these stories so it was pretty cool to have a place to read more about them. The Lady in White for one is a neat story about a wait for it… lady in white who haunts Vallecito Station, now is it just me or does everywhere seem to have a ghost story about a lady in white, ha-ha. But it is a neat story and a sad one about a women on her way to meet up with her fiancé who struck it rich in the gold rush only to die at a stage stop.
Speaking of stages Carizzo Wash has a phantom stage, there are Ghost horses in Vallecito as well so I am assuming they are a part of the ghost pony express or something. Now speaking of mysterious type stuff Borrego also has ghost lights that have been seen all the way back to 1858 on Oriflamme Mountain which could also very easily be aliens as well so all very creepy and mysterious. Another weird one is the Ghost dancers at Yaqui Well which is pretty creepy and a summer time hunt.
But of all the stories Lance shared my two favorite where the Giant Skeleton who roams the desert at night some say with a lantern and some say with a fire burning in him. Accounts have him ranging from eight feet to close to twenty feet tall and is an ominous sign for desert travelers. But the coolest is the Red Ghost, in 1883 a woman was trampled to death by a camel ridden by the devil… no one believed the eye witness accounts of the specter rider upon a camel. Now for more on this story, fact being stranger than fiction and some explanations of what happened check out Strange Remains. This is worth the read and a really neat story.
So, we had a blast at the camp stories and hope you can make It up to the next ones. We are super stoked too because now we have some cool new ghost stories to tell around the fire and the all take place in our back yard. I wanted to take a moment to thank Lance and Jennifer for coming down to Camp Stories and really appreciate Lance sharing with us and making it such an interesting evening.