Mystery of Tunnels in San Juan Resurfaces : One Found Under 1880s Egan Home

When gallery owner Sue DiMaio began renovating the 19th-Century home of Judge Richard Egan, she was ready for anything--except what she found.

Clearing out the basement of the 1880s-era home, workers uncovered the remnants of a long-sealed tunnel that appears to snake off under Camino Capistrano, the downtown roadway that used to be called El Camino Real.

Historians say there was a maze of tunnels in old San Juan, most of them irrigation and drainage ditches, known in Spanish as zanjas , connected with the 215-year-old Mission San Juan Capistrano. But experts are not sure where the latest find leads or what it might have been used for--only that it adds to the rich history and mystique of this mission city.

Pamela Gibson, a San Juan Capistrano native and author of “Dos Cientos Anos en San Juan Capistrano,” (“200 Years in San Juan Capistrano”) mentions tunnels in her book and even played in one as a child. And another tunnel in the city would not be unusual, she said.

“It’s really not surprising at all,” Gibson said of the possibility of another tunnel underneath San Juan Capistrano. “We know of at least three others, one of which went through my grandfather’s property on El Camino Real.”

But until DiMaio began renovating the solid-brick, 3,000-square-foot home built by the colorful Judge Richard Egan in the early 1880s, no one had heard of any tunnels that were not somehow connected to the mission. When workers began clearing out the dark basement, however, they found two brick archways inlaid into the foundation on the sides of the home and a crawl space that leads off to the front of the house, toward Camino Capistrano.

The crawl space was explored by several workers who told contractor Dave Emery that it leads to the street, where it stops abruptly.

“You can get back into it a ways and then it stops,” said Emery, owner of Modjeska Canyon-based Builders Investments. “It looks like it leads to the El Adobe restaurant, across the street.”

Nicholas M. Magalousis, museum director at the mission, inspected the basement but could only guess about the crawl space and what the arches signified.

“It appears that the slight arches built into the building were planned for something, maybe some sort of anomaly of the zanjas ,” Magalousis said. “It could be something that Judge Egan designed, but it’s very hard to say what.”

Historians do know that the old home, called Harmony Hall by Egan, nicknamed “the King of Capistrano,” was a centerpiece of the downtown even back in the late 1800s. Directly across the street and what is now El Adobe, was a stagecoach depot and Egan’s courthouse, complete with a downstairs jail, said Jim Sleeper, an Orange County historian.

“The old jail is still there; it’s a wine cellar for the restaurant now,” Sleeper said. “It’s unlikely a guy would build a tunnel from a jail into his own house, but Judge Egan did some unlikely things.”

Only speculation remains on the exact locations and purposes of the three tunnels that twisted about the mission area of the city, several hundred yards north of the Egan home, Gibson said.

“The only documentation ever found for the purposes of the tunnels was that they were used for drainage, which makes sense,” Gibson said. “As late as the 1870s, there was still some problems with rustlers and bandits, often renegade Indians who had left the ranchos and become outlaws. It was documented in Robert Glass Cleland’s book, ‘The Cattle on a Thousand Hills,’ that some of the missions had tunnels dug for hiding or escape. But whether or not that is true, who knows?”

Although their whereabouts have never been precise, Gibson said, one of the tunnels ran along the east side of El Camino Real, behind what is now a Sizzler restaurant, crossed what is now Ortega Highway and then cut into the mission near the Serra Chapel.

That tunnel, Gibson said, was apparently destroyed as businesses went up around the mission.

Another was found on the west wing of the mission, on the north side, and headed toward Trabuco Creek--lending credence to the theory the tunnels were used as drainage ditches. A third was located near Trabuco Creek heading toward the mission.

Dave Belardes, a fourth-generation San Juan resident and tribal chairman of the Juaneno Indian Band, said tunnels and zanjas found in the area are of varying sizes and depths, but no one has completely mapped their courses or fully determined how they were used.

“All we know is that they were down there,” Belardes said. “They could have been dirt, or brick, in any size within reason. Some are very small; some are major channels.”

DiMaio, who turned the old house into an art gallery that opened last month, has not personally inspected her basement. But after several months in the old home, she is not surprised at anything she finds.

“We’re really quite sure the place is haunted,” she said.

Historic House Yields Underground Surprise While renovating a 19th-Century house, workers discovered two brick archways inlaid into the basement foundation. A crawl space leads off toward Camino Capistrano. Historians say there was a maze of tunnels in old San Juan, most of them connected with the 215-year-old Mission San Juan Capistrano. But they are not sure if this one is related.