La Jolla History and Ghost Stories: What the National Register Nomination Actually Says

1. The Sea Caves and Sunny Jim’s Cave: The Fight, the Punch, and the Petition That Flipped

What you’re looking at. 1325 Coast Blvd. Seven sea caves below Goldfish Point, one of them reachable by a tunnel and staircase cut through the cliff in 1902, still open today as the Cave Store.

The story. Three different people will tell you three different things about the name of the town you’re standing in. The postcard version is that La Jolla means “the jewel” in Spanish. A 1998 scholarly article on this coastline says flatly that the boosters who sold this place “cheerfully mistranslated” an old Spanish term for a hollow as “jewel.” A 2024 National Register nomination records a third, older name still: the Kumeyaay Mut kula xuy, place of many caves. We’re not picking a winner.

In 1902, a property owner named Thomas Diamond petitioned the city for permission to tunnel into these caves and charge admission. His neighbors petitioned right back that it would endanger the street and shorten the caves’ life. Ellen Browning Scripps, a name you’ll hear again on this walk, signed the protest. The city sided with the neighbors and denied Diamond.

Then it got physical. That December, the newspaper reported “a little difficulty between Thomas Diamond and Prof. Gustav Schulz,” which resulted in Diamond’s arrest for battery on the professor. And Schulz, the man Diamond hit, dug the tunnel anyway, from his own property, with two laborers, opening it to paying visitors within a year. In 1903, the same residents who’d opposed Diamond petitioned the city again, this time in favor of Schulz’s tunnel, saying it had become “one of the principal attractions” in La Jolla.

The town signed a petition against one man tunneling into the caves, watched him get punched, watched the second man tunnel into the caves, and then signed a petition supporting the second man. Same hole. Eleven months apart.

Now the naming. The internet says, everywhere, with no citation, that L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, named this cave “Sunny Jim” after a cereal mascot because the cave mouth resembles his profile. The 2024 National Register nomination, working from the historical society’s own archive, says the name comes from “the silhouette of a human profile formed by the perimeter edge of the cave.” No Baum. A 1998 scholarly article on Baum’s actual San Diego visits found he genuinely wrote these caves into a novel, but could not pin down when he ever visited, and never claimed he named anything.

What people say happens here. The drop from the cliff above is still called Dead Man’s Leap by people who work this coast, a name on record in a 1984 newspaper piece describing bodies recovered from these caves over the years. The store also tells a Prohibition story: liquor and people smuggled up through the tunnel from the water below.

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2. Point La Jolla and the Sea Lion Rookery: A Beach Closed for the Animals

What you’re looking at. A railing over rocks you’re not allowed to walk on, at the north end of Ellen Browning Scripps Park. The rocks are a California sea lion rookery, meaning they give birth here, not simply rest.

The story. The closure came in stages, and each stage is a public document. In 2021 the city imposed an emergency seasonal closure after visitors climbed down among the animals. In 2022 the California Coastal Commission approved an annual pupping-season closure. On September 7th, 2023, the Commission went further and approved a year-round closure with a seven-year permit term. Eleven days later, the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to close the point year-round. A lane stays open for swimmers to reach the water; the land is shut. The city revisits it around 2030.

Sit with that for a second: a public beach, closed to the public for seven years, by a unanimous council vote, because people would not stop walking up to wild animals for a photograph.

A public beach closed to the public for seven years, because people would not stop walking up to wild animals for a photograph.

This town has had this exact argument before, and it wasn’t about animals then. In 1920, La Jolla killed a plan to rebuild the Cove bathhouse into an open-air pool with two hundred dressing rooms. In the early 1930s, it killed a proposal for a yacht harbor right at the Cove. Arguing against it, Robert P. Scripps wrote that people who wanted to “buzz around in noisy little motorboats” were already well accommodated elsewhere. A rich man in 1931, saying this water is for looking at, not using, and getting his way. A century later, the argument is still running, and the side that wants the water left alone is still winning.

What people say happens here. Nothing paranormal; this stop is a live civic argument, not a ghost story, and it’s a genuinely good one to hear standing at the railing.

This is a walkable neighbor to the Sea Caves, a few minutes north along the same shoreline.

3. The Children’s Pool and Casa de Mañana: A Wall That Outlasted the Man Who Built It

What you’re looking at. The curved concrete breakwater at 850 Coast Blvd, and, across the street, Casa de Mañana at 849, a 1924 hotel now in use as senior housing, so it’s named here and not pointed at.

The story. Ellen Browning Scripps hired hydraulic engineer Hiram Newton Savage in 1921 to “work out the issue with Old Ocean.” Savage had just been fired off the Barrett Dam project after refusing to bend his engineering opinion to city officials who wanted to run things their way. He spent several years abroad inspecting irrigation works in more than thirty countries, reporting back to President Coolidge, then came home and built this.

He didn’t fight the natural sandstone reef already curving out from the bluff here. He traced it: a roughly three-hundred-foot breakwater, following the shape the ocean had already cut, with eighteen-inch steps running its full length, which he specified “to facilitate the children in climbing around… and to also serve as seats.” It was finished in 1931, cleared by a state Senate bill signed that April. Scripps said why she wanted it: “I have always had an innate interest in children… I want the children to have a primary claim” to this beach.

Now the seals, and this is where the 1931 paperwork comes back to life. Harbor seals began hauling out here in numbers in the mid-1990s; the first pups were observed in 1999. In 2005, a Superior Court judge ruled the city had violated the terms of the 1931 trust, which required the beach be used as a public bathing pool, and ordered it restored. An appellate panel upheld him in 2007. Then, in 2009, the state legislature added “marine mammal sanctuary” to the site’s permitted uses, and a tangle of court orders over that single summer, one judge ordering the seals removed, then setting aside his own order hours before his own deadline, ended with a different judge ruling the city didn’t have to disperse them after all.

The woman who wanted children to have a primary claim to this beach wrote the sentence that the people trying to remove the seals used as their weapon, seventy-four years later.

What people say happens here. No haunting; the site’s real drama is legal and it’s stranger than folklore. Casa de Mañana across the street was, in its 1920s and 1930s heyday, a stop for Hollywood stars flying in for the Del Mar racing season.

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4. The Red Rest and the Red Roost: Forty-Nine Years Empty on the Most Valuable Coastline in the County

What you’re looking at. Two small wooden cottages at 1187 and 1179 Coast Blvd, wrapped in tarps, wedged between condominium towers. Empty since 1977.

The story. Both went up in 1894, the year the railroad reached La Jolla, built twenty-five days apart, dirt to done, for two of the town’s early residents. One later tenant, in the 1950s, was a young Walter Munk of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who paid rent here before becoming one of the most consequential oceanographers of the century.

Here’s why architects get emotional about two beach shacks. A 1980 federal survey measured the Red Rest and found something close to a magic trick: almost the entire weight of the building rests on its exterior siding; there’s essentially no wall framing inside, and what looks like a foundation was applied to the outside and holds up nothing at all. The surveyors wrote, “Despite its surprisingly small structural members, the building is remarkably solid after many changes and over 80 years of use.”

In 1967, the new owner applied to demolish both for a seventeen-unit apartment building. A local preservation group appealed, and the fight has run, in the open, on the public record, ever since: city landmark listing in 1975, National Register listing in 1976, eviction of the last tenants in 1977, a “demolition by neglect” ordinance enacted specifically over this property in 2000, a fire that seriously damaged both cottages in October 2020, and a fresh listing in May 2024 as contributing resources in the brand-new La Jolla Park Coastal Historic District. As of mid-2026, an appeal over restoration and demolition plans is still open.

Whatever happens to these two buildings, they can be rebuilt accurately from the record. Somebody in 1980 took the trouble, and that trouble is now the only thing standing between them and being completely gone.

What people say happens here. No haunting is attached to this stop; its story is a fifty-year property fight, told from public filings, not folklore.

5. The Green Dragon Colony Site: A Governess, Twelve Cottages, and the Law That Came After

What you’re looking at. 1258 to 1274 Prospect St. Nothing survives. That’s the point of this stop.

The story. In 1894, a German immigrant named Anna Held, then working as a governess for Ulysses S. Grant Jr.’s family, bought an undeveloped hillside here for $165 and built a tiny Arts and Crafts cottage, designed by a young architect named Irving Gill. She named it The Green Dragon. She never really stopped building after that: within a few years there were twelve cottages, with names like The Ark and The Gables, eucalyptus trees strung with lanterns, and free concerts she opened to the whole village, “from Portuguese fishermen and their wives to the wealthy Scripps sisters.”

Guests signed the woodwork instead of a guest book. One beam, carved in 1900 with the line “Music breathes what the Poet cannot write,” survived everything that came after and hangs today at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library on Wall Street.

In 1912, Held sold the colony for $30,000. She’d paid $165. The 2024 National Register nomination folds her into a stranger fact almost nobody knows about this town: La Jolla was known in its own era as “a woman’s town.” By 1911, women owned nearly forty percent of the land here; by 1918, forty-six percent, straight out of the City of San Diego’s own Lot Books.

The colony changed hands, became small shops and galleries, and in July of 1991 the last four cottages came down over three days, ahead of a restraining order that arrived too late because the courts hadn’t accounted for the Coastal Commission’s own ten-day waiting period. Later that same year, the Governor of California signed a bill tightening state preservation law and cited the Green Dragon Colony by name as the reason tougher rules were needed.

A hillside full of cottages in La Jolla became a line in a state statute.

What people say happens here. No haunting; the site’s power is what’s missing, not a ghost standing in for it.

A short walk from Ellen Browning Scripps’s own house, the next stop on this route.

6. Ellen Browning Scripps’s House: The Woman Whose Estate Plan Is a Whole Neighborhood

What you’re looking at. 700 Prospect St, now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Ellen Browning Scripps’s own home, South Molton Villa, named for the London street where she was born.

The story. Scripps came to San Diego in 1891 and out to La Jolla in 1897. She met architect Irving Gill in 1899, and over the next thirty years the two of them built most of what this town still points at: St. James’s Chapel in 1908, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s first laboratory building from 1908 to 1910, the Bishop’s School, the La Jolla Woman’s Club, the La Jolla Recreation Center.

On August 7th, 1915, her own house burned. Gill rebuilt it over the next two years as a three-story reinforced-concrete structure designed to be fireproof, with the arched front porch that’s his signature. There’s a record of Gill himself on his hands and knees rubbing color into the wet unfinished concrete floors; Scripps wrote it down in her own diary. Local outlets describe the fire as arson, by a fired employee who confessed. That claim traces only to a commercial blog, not to any newspaper or court record this project could locate, so it isn’t repeated here as fact.

She also personally funded the cobblestone retaining wall still holding up Coast Boulevard below this house, graded a thousand feet of the road, added sidewalks, and paid for the pergola above the bluff stairs, all documented in her own accounting diaries at the Denison Library.

She signed the petition to stop a man tunneling into the sea caves. She paid for the road you walked in on, the wall holding it up, the library, the school, the recreation center, and the ground under the pines. The art museum is her living room.

What people say happens here. No haunting attaches to the house itself; its story is philanthropy at a scale that quietly built the whole neighborhood you’ve just walked through.