‘Cemetery Park’ Not as Spooky as It Sounds

For those who can’t get enough of Halloween, here’s an eerie warm-up for the big day: Take a stroll through Ventura’s “cemetery park.”

As you amble under the stately pine and pepper trees, you might think this is just another neighborhood park where people walk dogs and jog. But it’s a park with a past.

Under the manicured grass lie the bones of about 3,000 early-day Ventura County residents. The park, stretched out on a hillside overlooking the ocean, was previously a cemetery where the dead were buried from 1862 to 1943.

The huge, ornate headstones are gone, but scattered around the park are small, almost unnoticeable markers identifying but a fraction of those buried there.

Nearly hidden by the grass, the markers tell of life and death in numbers: Crisogono Ayala, 1793-1866; the baby Charles Gandolfo, born 1904, died 1905; the Richardson family, Elizabeth, George, Arthur, Joseph and Charity; young Lena Raffetto, dead at 23 in 1914.

The markers draw little notice from park users, but sometimes flowers appear inexplicably. Last week 10 rose blossoms encircled the grave site of Jennie Morales Ayala, who lived from 1900 to 1924. On the other side of the park, a simple pink carnation lay on the marker of Mary Byrum Hollingsworth, 1828-1902.

Although it’s a park (its official name is Memorial Park), you won’t see weddings or concerts there. Because of its history, only casual use is allowed, which means no organized activities, according to Bill Byerts, Ventura’s parks manager. And if people are squeamish about tossing a Frisbee over the graves of Ventura’s past citizens, they aren’t saying so.

“I have not had one comment,” Byerts said. “It’s a real nice place to sit and relax. The people who use it live around there. It’s a fairly quiet place.”

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So if a quiet, transformed graveyard appeals to your sense of Halloween, take a walk through this seven-acre park, bordered by Main and Poli streets and Aliso Lane and Crimea Street. It’s in midtown Ventura now, but when it opened in 1862 it was on the outskirts of what became the city of Ventura four years later.

At the time, the San Buenaventura Mission was looking for a larger burial ground, and the spot was deeded to the Diocese of Monterey-Los Angeles that year, according to a history of the cemetery by Msgr. Francis J. Weber in an issue of the Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly.

Although it started as a Catholic cemetery, St. Mary’s Cemetery, eventually the site was divided into sections for followers of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths. A number of Chinese residents were buried there, close to Main Street.

The cemetery was nearly out of space by the time Ventura’s Ivy Lawn Memorial Park opened in 1917. The old cemetery fell into disrepair. Weeds grew unabated. Vandals shattered tombstones. For years it was an eyesore. Every Halloween it was a playground for tricksters who hauled off tombstones as a joke. A Works Project Administration crew built a cobblestone retaining wall on the front of the property in 1934, but the end was in sight. After two burials in 1943, the city passed an ordinance prohibiting any more.

By this time the city had taken over responsibility for the cemetery. Years of talk about turning it into a park finally took shape in 1963, in what some thought was a bizarre fashion.

City officials sent 200 letters to relatives of the deceased, telling them that the 600 headstones had to go--but that their relatives’ remains could stay. If they wanted the hefty markers, they could pick them up in Hall Canyon, where the markers would be laid out in alphabetical order.

Although some were delighted at the prospect of a park, others weren’t. One woman was quoted in a newspaper as saying she was “quite horrified” at the idea of disturbing the headstones, especially the way crews were allegedly manhandling them with sledgehammers.

Unclaimed headstones stayed in Hall Canyon for seven years and then were hauled to Olivas Park Golf Course, where they were broken up and used as rubble for a levee.

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Meanwhile, relatives who wanted the old grave sites marked could request a small, ground-level plaque. Over the years the number has grown to 50 markers.

“We average one or two requests a year to put markers out there,” Byerts said. Usually it’s someone whose great-grandmother or -grandfather is buried there.

The markers say little about the dead, except for two, both of them war heroes. The more famous, Brig. Maj. Gen. William Vandever, commanded troops in the Civil War. Later he was a two-term congressman from Ventura, where he died in 1893.

The other, Pvt. John Sumner, was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1870 for his bravery during an Indian battle in Arizona. In his later years, he drifted to Oxnard, where he spent his last years working in a saloon before dying destitute in 1912.

The famous, and not so famous, were buried there: the Camarillos, Olivas, Hobsons, Richardsons and Ventura’s first mayor, Walter Scott Chaffee. An unknown number of Native Americans rest there in a common grave, according to newspaper accounts.

One of the biggest mysteries about the cemetery surfaced three years ago when a tombstone emerged amid the rocky rubble off Surfers Point in Ventura.

How it got there no one knows. The smooth granite stone bore the inscription: “Mother Ida May Shively, May 3, 1867-June 2, 1901.” Also noted on the stone was the death of an infant son, Lonnie Winston, 10 years earlier.

The woman had died after childbirth, at the age of 34, leaving a week-old daughter. The huge stone was retrieved from the surf and returned to the woman’s daughter, who was 91 at the time of the discovery.

DETAILS

* WHAT: Memorial Park, known as “Cemetery Park.”

* WHERE: Between Main and Poli streets, and Aliso Lane and Crimea Street, Ventura.

* CALL: 658-4787; the city clerk’s office has records of who is buried there.