Graveyard Shift Puts History Before Horror

Ghostly apparitions. Grisly deaths. Mysterious accidents.

As a kid growing up in Grand Terrace, Eric Bermumen heard all the creepy stories surrounding the Agua Mansa Memorial Cemetery in Colton.

Bermumen, now a 20-year-old musician living in the same area, remembers when his parents drove past the graveyard at night just to give him a scare.

But Bermumen became convinced that the ghost stories were more than urban legend when he drove past the cemetery one evening a few years ago and witnessed something he will never forget.

“To this day, I could swear I saw a guy walking a dog and it looked like the guy had no head,” he said.

Add another bloodcurdling tale to the legend of Agua Mansa.

The weed-covered cemetery on a hill overlooking the Santa Ana River is the oldest graveyard in San Bernardino County and has become legendary among local ghost hunters and amateur paranormal research groups. They’re convinced the unquiet spirits of the region’s early settlers -- interred on that land for more than a century -- now haunt the site.

County museum officials and historians cringe when they hear those stories. They have been working for years to quash the ghostly legends and replace them with a renewed interest in the history of the settlers buried in the cemetery.

“As an institution, we want people to consider the humanity of the people buried there,” said Michele Nielsen, an archivist for the county, which took charge of the cemetery in 1967.

But the morbid fascination with the cemetery has proved harder to kill than a horror flick zombie.

Around Halloween, the cemetery attracts thrill seekers looking for spooky adventures among the tombstones. For that reason, the county deploys security guards in the cemetery on Halloween night. The lot is already encircled by an 8-foot chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire.

The Agua Mansa ghost stories have even crept into the Internet. The cemetery appears on lists of alleged haunted sites on the websites of the Southern California Amateur Ghost Hunting Society, the Southwest Ghost Hunter’s Assn. and the Alliance for Paranormal Research.

“It’s really haunted,” insisted Paul Groslouis, a self-trained ghost hunter from Lake Elsinore who calls himself “Dr. Ghost-louis.” He claims he once saw a ghostly female figure, carrying a pail and floating toward him at the gates of the graveyard.

Now a recent tragedy adds to the graveyard’s lore.

Last month, the cemetery’s caretaker, who lived in a house on the grounds for nearly a year, took his own life. County officials declined to talk about the death at the behest of his family.

Before he died, the caretaker watched over a 5-acre graveyard on an isolated hill, surrounded by open fields and industrial plants. Most of the remaining gravestones and crude wooden crosses are broken and weathered by years of rain and sun. Weeping pepper trees, scraggly weeds and dry shrubs grow wild among the graves.

Area police and government officials shrug off the ghost tales.

Still, Colton Police Lt. Mark Owens acknowledged that the winding Agua Mansa Road has been the site of several grisly events and fatal automobile accidents. The most unusual crime took place nearly 20 years ago when police found two homicide victims in the back of a pickup parked at the graveyard gates.

The most common Agua Mansa story told by locals is a new rendition of an old Mexican folk tale about “La Llorona,” the weeping woman who wanders along the shores of a river, calling for the children she had drowned.

But you can’t convince Mark Crosby that the cemetery is haunted.

Crosby, a security supervisor for the San Bernardino County Museum, has worked the graveyard shift at Agua Mansa on Halloween night for eight years in a row. The only souls he has encountered have been those of rowdy teenagers.

“Nothing unusual” is how the burly security chief described his Halloween night experiences.

If Nielsen, the county’s archivist, could have her way, the Agua Mansa ghost stories would die a quiet death.

“Ghost stories are an amusing aside, but that is not what we want to focus on,” she said.

Instead, Nielsen wants locals to focus on the county’s latest effort to document the lives and deaths of the Agua Mansa settlers.

The site is the final resting place of about 2,000 pioneers who endured hardships to cross the Spanish Trail to put down stakes on the shores of the Santa Ana River. They were instrumental in helping settle what is today San Bernardino, Colton and Riverside.

The settlers traveled more than 1,200 miles from New Mexico in 1838 to work on two massive ranches, Rancho San Bernardino and Rancho Jurupa. Their duties included protecting the ranches’ livestock from marauders. Some of the settlers put down stakes on the north side of the Santa Ana River, calling their settlement Agua Mansa, Spanish for calm waters.

But the river’s name proved to be ill-suited. In 1862, after 15 straight days of rain, the gentle waters of the Santa Ana River turned into a raging torrent that washed away much of the settlement. Historical records are not clear on how many lives were lost, but the settlement was rebuilt on higher ground.

The flood spared the cemetery, which overlooked the settlement.

“This was a determined group, and that is what this is really about,” said Nielsen.