What Spectral Ectoplasm Haunts Camp Pendleton?

They may be the U.S. Marines, but ghostbusters they’re not. Things still go bump in the night at Las Flores Adobe even though it became part of Camp Pendleton in 1942. “One night [in 1999] my son was in his bedroom, which faced the adobe,” says Jerome Herrington, property manager at the site since 1998. “He heard the sound of a horse neighing, but when he went out, there was no horse or tracks.”

Paranormal whinnies are a more recent example of the weird goings-on rumored at the 142-year-old adobe on the former Rancho Santa Margarita, which was once part of missions San Juan Capistrano and San Luis Rey. Nearly a quarter million acres, the ranch was a land grant in 1841 to Pio Pico, California’s last Mexican governor. It was later owned by Pico’s brother-in-law, Don Juan Forster; the now-decayed two-story Monterey-style adobe was built for Forster’s son and daughter-in-law.

According to local legend, a priest was murdered at the site when an outpost of Mission San Luis Rey stood near the adobe (one variation holds that the killing was done by local Indians being used as forced labor for the mission). In “Rancho Santa Margarita Remembered,” author Jerome Baumgartner, great-grandson of Richard O’Neill, who co-owned the ranch with James Flood in the late 1800s, recounts a family story about two women who saw a pair of Franciscan monks standing in their room in the adobe. As the frightened women grabbed each other, the monks said, “Be calm, my children” and drifted from the room. Elena Patricia Alderete, niece of Ruth Magee (whose family leased the property from 1888 to 1967 and raised beans on the surrounding land so successfully that one Jane Magee was known as “The Bean Queen”), visited Las Flores during the 1950s and ‘60s, and remembers tales of a female ghost who roamed the building’s upper story. One rumor has it that the woman was a resident who died of a wasting disease, possibly tuberculosis, on the premises.

Decades ago, property manager (and Boy Scout ranger) Herrington says, “a marine corporal checking on a sentry who guarded the adobe saw a man wearing a burlap-colored priest’s habit, speaking in a language he couldn’t understand. When he [looked] back, no one was there.”

The adobe became a historical landmark in 1968 and is now leased to the Boy Scouts of America, who camp on the grounds and hope to restore the building. For years, a favorite weekend retreat was billed as . . . “Ghost Hunter.”