The haunting of Newport-Mesa

Young Chang

All the other doors on the street open and close. Busybodies rush

through, some wearing sun on their cheeks and others, thongs on their

feet. Everybody jingles with keys.

But the hinges on one Balboa Peninsula door haven’t creaked in some

time.

Its dusty shell resembles a chilled tin can. The windows look fogged,

or is it just dirt? The patio is abandoned, leaving a garden to the

imagination.

And the little gate out front, which may once have been white, is

dulled a gloomy gray -- the kind that coats the house.

Keys don’t ever jingle here. Thongs don’t flip and flop. The last

couple that brought the place to life -- they’re said to have moved out.

Because of the ghost.

The sighting happened during a loud, heated fight four years ago that

would qualify more as a rumble than a lover’s quarrel. The couple sat in

the dining room screaming and arguing when a Coca-Cola bottle at one end

of the table moved, by itself, to the opposite end.

The fighting died immediately. The couple moved out a month later,

said their friend, Newport resident Jennifer Wesoloski. Neighbors say

they haven’t seen anyone enter or exit the home since.

The Coca-Cola ghost is just one of the phantom dwellers of

Newport-Mesa. A specter searches endlessly for gold, another sinks ships,

the theater ghost wears an usher’s uniform and yet another entity has a

brown suit waiting on the bed, in case he wants to wear it.

Local historian Jim Jennings, who has lived on Balboa Island for 42

years, has seen this suit. For decades, during his early-morning strolls,

he has passed by an Onyx Street home known by neighbors nearby as the

Ghost Home because no one has ever been seen inside.

But one morning about 15 years ago, Jennings saw a lady in the front

lawn watering plants and went in.

They talked. She and her husband had lived there before the husband

passed away, and now she remained the sole owner of the home while living

elsewhere. She had white hair and wore a dress that might have been blue,

Jennings remembers. They walked through the rooms of the house.

In the bedroom, Jennings found a plain brown suit laid neatly out on

the bed. The closet was full of men’s clothes. A lady’s dress was laid

out on another bed.

In the kitchen, the table held plates.

This was all in case the late husband would ever want to wear his old

brown suit and sit down for a meal with his wife, who would also then

wear her designated dress.

Jennings didn’t ask the woman any questions.

“I go by that house almost daily,” he said. “I have never ever seen

her again.”

But he has seen painters freshen up the exterior. At least every five

years, the lady Jennings met that morning arranges for the beige planks

to be colored more beige, the green trims a fresher green.

Workers were last spotted just two months ago. Jennings remembers

asking one of them if they planned to go inside.

“No way, nobody’s ever been inside,” Jennings recalls hearing.

Costa Mesa’s spirit appears more social. It is said that from the

right angle and at the right, rare time, you can still see his flame in

the window of the Estancia Adobe.

In the mid 1800s, a robber who is said to have stolen gold was being

chased by authorities, said Hank Panian, a former Orange Coast College

history professor. To hide his stash in the event that he was captured,

legend has it that the robber stormed into the Adobe, left his candle on

the window sill and walked away until he could no longer see the flame.

He buried his gold in this spot, but only he knows which direction he

walked, where he stashed his secret.

He was chased out, Panian heard, and never returned. The treasure is

supposedly still there.

“If you’re at the Adobe at the right time, you can see the candle

light in the Adobe. Story goes that it’s the robber trying to locate the

gold,” the Costa Mesa resident said.

Michele Roberge of the Balboa Performing Arts Theater tells of another

friendly ghost. This one’s in uniform.

Two years ago, as the Newport Beach theater underwent demolition for a

renovation that still goes on today, Roberge, her co-workers and the

demolition crew leader came across an old Polaroid of a female usher

wearing a maroon uniform with navy blue piping. She was smiling, her hair

was light brown, curly and short. The photo was found underneath a seat

in the theater, which was built in 1927.

Roberge and her cohorts assumed the color picture was from the

forties, judging from the clothes and hair of the usher. Then they

realized Polaroids didn’t exist then. And the theater hadn’t had

uniformed ushers in decades.

But what really spooked Roberge was the message on the back of the

photo: “To Bob, with love.”

The demolition crew leader who was looking at the photo was named Bob.

“It was just kinda spooky that this picture . . . we don’t know how it

came to be still there,” Roberge said. “We’re hoping that the usher is

still hanging around there somehow in the theater. Theaters have to have

ghosts for good luck.”

Then there’s the ghost light. Every theater has one -- the Balboa

Theater will get theirs at the end of the renovation.It’s a bare light

bulb that sits atop a pole on wheels and solely lights a dark theater

throughout the night, when no one’s there.

“The more romantic story is that the stage manager puts the light out

there just to let the spirits and personalities and characters that have

been created on the stage -- that a lot of us believe live on -- know

we’ll be back the next day,” Roberge said.

When the executive director first arrived at the theater for a job

interview, the building was being gutted and piles of junk cluttered the

grounds. In the corner, Roberge spotted an old office desk chair on

wheels.

“And I just saw that and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a very good sign,’

because a ghost light -- you can’t just buy it. You have to make it. When

I saw that old desk chair I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the hardest part to

find,”’ Roberge said.

Today, the wheelbase sits in Roberge’s office, just waiting to be

turned into a ghost light.

“It’s to let the spirits of art and music and dance and theater know

that we’ll be back in the morning, that the show will go on,” Roberge

said. “We’re about as superstitious a kind of people as they come.”

Marine ghost-lore has its own superstitions: sea gods are said to

wreak havoc on boats that change names. So when Gay Wassall-Kelly’s boat,

which was renamed the S.S. Michigan from its previous name of W.J., kept

sinking for no justifiable reason at the docks, the Newport resident

thought twice about what she had heard: that the ghost of a Norwegian

fisherman lived on the boat.

Joe Warren, a minister with Universal Life Church who is authorized to

conduct exorcisms, rode over to the S.S. Michigan on a gondola.

“They came aboard with fire and brimstone and incense and went all

around and they had a Bible,” Wassall-Kelly said. “What he was doing was

he was cleansing the boat of its ghosts and evil spirits.”

Warren also brought aboard a small object that was supposed to spark

up and ward off ghosts. The spark caught fire on Warren’s eyebrows, hat

and hair instead. He wasn’t harmed and the onlookers aboard had a good

laugh.

“Something backfired, so to speak,” Wassall-Kelly said. “But we have

not had a problem ever since.”

-- Young Chang writes features. She may be reached at (949) 574-4268

or by e-mail at o7 [email protected] .