Touring the Skeletons in San Diego’s Closet

Can I interest you in a walk among the celebrated dead of San Diego on Halloween?

For $5, how about an irreverent stroll among the potted persons at Mt. Hope Cemetery, the city’s municipal resting place? It’s the idea of Adam Productions, the special events firm.

Death styles of the rich and famous, that kind of thing. Just show up at the Market Street graveyard at 2 p.m. Saturday, with pencil and paper if you care to do some rubbings of famous headstones.

Like maybe, “J. W. Huggins. Dead.” Or Alonzo Erastus Horton, Gold Rush scoundrel Sam Brannan or Alta Hulett (the nation’s first woman attorney). Or my favorite: “Ada Wyllis. A Good Wife.”

You’ll hear things (heavy on the ghostly/ghastly) that are not on the Gray Line tour. Like the fact that one of the palm trees planted in Horton Plaza by Kate Sessions crashed down and wiped out a teen-ager.

Or that religious fanatic Cordelia Caddles met her maker by imbibing carbolic acid in 1895, and that her home at 9th and J may have been haunted by spirits who succeeded in burning it down.

“If it (the tour) is received well, we may repeat it on Thanksgiving, on the 100th anniversary of Kate Morgan’s death (at the Hotel del Coronado), or maybe during holiday season with an Ebenezer Scrooge angle,” says Adam’s Chris Canning.

Canning will lead the tour along with Downtown Sam (who never uses his last name).

“We’re just telling it like it is,” Downtown Sam says. “Some of the ghosts died grisly deaths, but that’s the facts of life.”

One grave they’ll point out for sure is the black marble marker for one Raymond Thornton Chandler.

In a delightfully ghoulish little volume called “Permanent Californians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of California,” Chandler’s final post-booze years in La Jolla are described thus:

“Like a man who was married to a whore with plans to reform her, he spent the rest of his life trying to upgrade the detective novel into literature.”

I realize that quote really doesn’t have much to do with the Mt. Hope tour. But I like it so much I thought I’d throw it in anyway.

Talk About Scary!

Strange sights and sounds.

* Rudy Murillo is going to a Halloween party where they’re giving a prize for the scariest costume.

Murillo figures he’s a sure winner. He’s going as President James Stockdale.

* Yes, the marquee at the Mann’s Valley Circle in Mission Valley has “Consenting Adults,” with the smaller notation “Applications Being Accepted.”

* The Lord is my parking attendant.

Sign in the parking lot of First Presbyterian Church in Uptown: “We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us But They Will Be Towed Away.”

* The Navarro radio-television ads aren’t the only way the name Silberman is entering the campaign.

Somebody has slapped “Silberman” bumper stickers on some Susan Golding for Mayor signs.

* KNSD (Channel 39) has endorsed Golding.

* Terry Considine, running for U.S. Senate in Colorado, was the San Diego developer who wanted the convention center built at the El Cortez Hotel in the 1980s.

* Professional courtesy.

Dennis Fetko, who does the “Dr. Dog” segments on dog behavior for KGTV’s “Inside San Diego,” is in Sharp Memorial Hospital after an auto accident.

He’s been getting lots of get-well messages, plus a visit from “Hearts,” the hospital’s “therapy dog.”

* The manly art of politics.

State Sen. Lucy Killea (I-San Diego) in a campaign letter blasting opponent Jim Ellis: “Jim Ellis isn’t fighting like a man.”

Political Barking

KFMB radio’s Mark Larson says he’s got the best political poll of all.

He held an on-air “Barking for Bucks” contest with categories for dogs owned by Democrats, Republicans and independents.

In the bark-off, the Republican dog barked 29 times, (“Probably that Republican work ethic.”), the independent dog barked 25 times, and the Democratic dog went mute.

“Just like a Democrat,” says Larson, “waiting for his master to give him something.”