Balboa Park Ghost Stories and Real History: What the Record Actually Shows

1. Cabrillo Bridge

Where: Laurel Street at Balboa Drive, San Diego, CA 92101, the west approach.

Seven arches of load-bearing stone and concrete, a hundred and twenty feet over the freeway that arrived decades after the bridge did. San Diegans have argued for more than a century over what foreign bridge it copies, and the man who documented this park more thoroughly than anyone, historian Richard Amero, names three candidates and refuses to pick one. This page won’t either.

The Exposition’s planning committee capped the bridge budget at $150,000. Supervising architect Bertram Goodhue wanted a dramatic three-arch span modeled on a bridge in Spain; his bid came in at $157,000, seven thousand over. Frank Allen, the Exposition’s Director of Works, had the authority to price his own alternative without outside bids, and did: a plainer seven-arch design he could put at exactly $150,000. His design won on the number, not the vision. A San Francisco engineer, Thomas Hunter, worked out the actual structural math, and Amero writes that at this late date it’s idle to guess which man contributed more. Allen then underestimated the real construction cost by $75,254.98, and Goodhue, who kept the receipts on his rival’s miscalculation, made sure it was on the record. Had Goodhue’s design been built, it would have come in only slightly over budget. San Diego built the cheaper bridge, and it turned out not to be cheaper at all.

Now the myth, and it’s a good one, and it isn’t true: that Franklin Delano Roosevelt drove the first car across this bridge at its 1914 dedication. He didn’t drive anything. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, rode across as a guest in a welcoming party that included the mayor and three other officials. The San Diego Union‘s own dedication-day account, printed the next morning, says he was a passenger. That newspaper, not the legend, is the document worth believing, and Amero cites a 2004 San Diego Union-Tribune retrospective as an example of the myth still running in print ninety years later.

There’s a darker piece of this bridge’s history on the record. In the middle of the twentieth century the structure saw a number of deaths by suicide, and in January 1950 the City installed barriers on the span in direct response, a documented civic decision reported in the paper at the time. We’re not describing method, and we’re not pointing to a location. What’s true and worth knowing is that this bridge has carried both kinds of weight San Diego has ever asked of it: traffic, and grief.

One more piece of the structure. For decades, neighborhood kids used the bridge’s hollow interior as their own clubhouse, crawling in through gaps and leaving trash behind, along with the original 1913 wooden construction forms that were never cleared out. On July 17, 1951, that mix caught fire. The blaze had almost no oxygen and nowhere to vent, producing blinding smoke instead of visible flame, and firefighters slipped on the sloped, soot-blackened interior trying to reach it. The bridge reopened to traffic after three hours. The City’s fix was to padlock a door seventy-five feet down the eastern slope. It is still locked today.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any hour.

2. California Tower and the Museum of Us

Where: 1350 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101, in the California Quadrangle.

Listen for the bells. Every fifteen minutes, on schedule, and there hasn’t been an ounce of bronze up in that tower since 1946. What you’re hearing is an electronic carillon, a genuine, checkable oddity, and it isn’t the real story here.

The real story is that this building spent eighty years talking about human beings to the public while its own tower stayed locked to everyone. Bertram Goodhue designed the quadrangle for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, layering Spanish and Mexican church styles onto one façade: Plateresque, Baroque, Churrigueresque, Rococo and Gothic elements together over the entrance. The 1915 exhibit inside was called “The Story of Man through the Ages,” and the anthropology museum that grew out of it has occupied this building for over a century since. The tower closed to the public after the 1935 Exposition and did not reopen until January 1, 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the original Exposition, to the day, after a full seismic retrofit. A hundred and twenty-five steps to the observation deck, after eighty years of nobody climbing them.

In August 2020, the San Diego Museum of Man formally became the Museum of Us. By the museum’s own account, staff had questioned the old name internally since 1991, and the change was made during that summer’s national reckoning. The museum states, in its own published words, that a significant part of its collection was acquired through inequitable and colonial means, and it runs an active repatriation program under federal and state law, in partnership with the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, formed by twelve federally recognized Kumeyaay bands in San Diego County. The museum’s own materials say it sits on unceded Kumeyaay ancestral homeland.

That 1915 “Story of Man” exhibit did not display an idea in the abstract. Fairs of that era, this one included, put living people on display as attractions, and a contested piece of this park’s history sits a short walk from here: a live village exhibit the Exposition itself promoted as “the most extraordinary exhibit of Indian life ever attempted,” revived again in 1935. We’re naming that plainly rather than skating past it, and naming two different tellers. The Exposition’s own promotional voice in 1915 framed it as education and spectacle. A century later, the institution that grew out of that fair is the one telling you, in its own words, that its founding collecting practices did harm, and is working with Kumeyaay governments directly on repatriation. A Kumeyaay-authored account of that 1915 or 1935 exhibit, separate from the museum’s account of itself, was not located in this research pass, and we’re saying that plainly rather than presenting the museum’s telling as though it speaks for both sides.

3. The Botanical Building and the Lily Pond

Where: 1549 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101.

Stand at the south end of the pond and look north at the building reflected in the water. No ghost story attaches to this spot. What attaches instead is a dream printed in 1912 that never came true, and it’s better material than a haunting.

Alfred Robinson, who ran the San Diego Floral Society, talked the Exposition into building a lath house here by describing one that didn’t exist. In Sunset magazine in 1912 he wrote a first-person daydream of a five-hundred-foot dome, fifty feet in the air, six great aisles, orchids hanging free, air “as intoxicating as champagne.” What got built was two hundred fifty feet by seventy-five by sixty, a fraction of what he’d promised. Robinson lived to see it and wasn’t impressed; three years later he was still describing, in print, the building he’d actually wanted, warning San Diego to build it “before some other place seizes the idea.” Eugen Neuhaus, a professor of design at Berkeley, was blunter: “A Botanical Building in San Diego is a joke. I cannot help it.” A climate that grows poinsettias outdoors, he argued, doesn’t need a building to shelter flowers that end up looking like patients “confined in a hospital for observation.” And here’s the quietest fact in the entry: Kate Sessions, the woman who planted much of this park (stop 10), wrote constantly about San Diego planting for decades and never once mentioned this building in anything she published.

The building is steel trusses under seventy thousand feet of curved redwood lath, billed in the promotional language of the day as the largest lath house in the world. The pond in front is really two ponds joined by a low walkway. During the First World War, with sailors training in the park, the City converted the larger pond into a swimming pool for them over citizen protest. During the Second World War, with a Naval Hospital occupying much of the park (stop 9), the pond was deepened two feet and resurfaced again, this time for hospital patients, and that round’s protesters were publicly accused of being unpatriotic. That’s why the surface has been lined with impermeable material ever since, and why every plant in there today sits in a box rather than rooted in the pond bed.

4. Spreckels Organ Pavilion

Where: 1549 El Prado (Pan American Road East), San Diego, CA 92101.

There’s no ghost story here, and telling you one would mean inventing folklore, which this page won’t do. What’s here instead, and it’s a better hook than a haunting, is a gift that came with a promise attached, and San Diego has kept that promise every Sunday for over a hundred years.

Brothers John D. and Adolph B. Spreckels gave this pavilion and organ to the people of San Diego, built for the 1915 Exposition and dedicated on New Year’s Eve 1914, the night before the fair opened, before a crowd reported at roughly thirty thousand. Dr. Humphrey Stewart, the city’s first civic organist, played the inaugural concert. The reported cost split was $33,500 for the organ and $66,500 for the pavilion around it, designed by Harrison Albright in an ornate Italian Renaissance style, deliberately different from the Spanish Colonial look of the rest of El Prado. It’s billed, then and now, by the organization that maintains it, as the largest outdoor pipe organ in the world.

The part that still matters today: the deed of gift itself requires free public concerts, and they have never stopped. Every Sunday concert since has been San Diego honoring a gift’s legal condition, attached to the land over a century ago.

5. Zoro Garden

Where: Off El Prado, between the Fleet Science Center and Casa de Balboa, San Diego, CA 92101.

This sunken stone garden was built for the 1915 Exposition, and twenty years later it became the single most profitable attraction of the 1935-36 fair, because somebody figured out you could sell tickets to a nudist colony inside a public park.

The story comes almost entirely from newspapers of the day, and even the San Diego History Center’s own exhibit on this saga prefaces it with a warning worth repeating here: “a grain of salt should pepper your faith in the following. It all came from local newspapers.” On May 2, 1935, a man calling himself Adolph, wearing nothing but a long beard, is seen helping build the stage; he becomes King Adolph of the Nudists. The garden is named for a made-up sun god, Zoro. On May 20, Zorine, Queen of the Nudists, arrives and complains about the sun. On May 28, San Diego County District Attorney Thomas Whalen personally inspects and approves the show; Zorine declares she won’t wear “burlesque bits” of clothing, “I am a nudist.” Admission was a quarter, and Time reported that summer that plenty of “thrifty peeping-toms” paid nothing at all, watching through knotholes in the fence.

Here’s the one real dispute in the record, told with both sides rather than a winner: contemporary 1935 newspapers describe actual practicing nudists. Local historian Matthew Alice, writing decades later in the San Diego Reader, says the performers actually wore flesh-colored bras, G-strings, or body stockings, zipped up tight. Two named authorities, flatly disagreeing, and neither gets the last word here.

The rest ran for over a year on scandal and Depression-era showmanship. Amateur nudists elsewhere in California demanded the DA investigate the Zoro performers as frauds; he declined. Actress Mae West visited next door at Gold Gulch. A performer calling herself Gold Gulch Gertie rode through the fairgrounds “clad only in a smile” imitating Lady Godiva, was arrested, acquitted, and rode again under police escort. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was invited to tea with Queen Zorine and refused. Three named civic groups, including the San Diego Council of Catholic Women, formally protested in January 1936. The City Council, asked to shut it down, declined, saying that was a matter for police, not politicians. A Methodist pastor told his congregation there would have been no nudist colony at all if George Marston, who spent his life fighting to keep this park a park (see stop 10), had been running the Exposition instead. In March 1936 a new queen was crowned after a contest that included tree-sitting. City directory records from that year show the family running the show, the Cubitt sisters, living on Jackdaw Street in Mission Hills, working day jobs as a hairdresser, a stenographer, a clerk, and a waiter. The whole thing closed in August 1936, not from scandal, but from an argument over money.

Today it’s a butterfly garden, planted for native and migratory species, sitting in the exact bowl where San Diego’s district attorney once personally certified a nudist colony as legitimate.

A rumor worth naming and setting aside: a claim circulates online that the garden today carries “mischievous energy.” This research traced it to a single national tour operator’s page. No document, witness, or earlier telling behind it has been found. It exists as a claim, told by a tour company, with nothing behind it beyond the telling itself.

6. Casa de Balboa: the night the Electric Building burned

Where: 1649 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101.

The building in front of you is not the building. What stood on this footprint for sixty-three years burned to the ground in three alarms on a Wednesday night in 1978, and what you’re looking at is a 1982 reconstruction of it.

At 8:13 p.m. on February 22, 1978, the San Diego Fire Department got the call. Inside was the San Diego Aerospace Museum: fifty-five vintage aircraft, several one of a kind, including a 1967 replica of the Spirit of St. Louis built by some of the same people who built Lindbergh’s original. All of it burned, along with the museum’s archives and its International Aerospace Hall of Fame. The building was sixty-two years old, wood and stucco, no sprinklers, built in 1915 as a temporary exhibit hall that never got torn down. Insurers had already refused to cover it because of how it was built. Loss was estimated at $16 million by the museum, with some other accounts putting it over $10 million; we’re stating that spread rather than resolving it. Witnesses saw two people running from the building around 7:55 that evening, after stuffing burning papers into a vent in one of the front arcade’s pillars. The museum had already been six days from bidding out its own move to a safer building across the park. Executive director Owen Clarke, standing in the wreckage, said it plainly: “This is unbelievably tragic. When you’ve spent that length of time acquiring history, building something up to where it had international prestige, then see it all disappear in a couple of hours, what else can it be?”

Fourteen days later, on March 8, 1978, an arsonist destroyed the Old Globe Theatre a short walk from here (stop 7), another three-alarm fire, four million dollars lost. Investigators at the time believed they were hunting one serial arsonist working both fires. They weren’t, and it took twenty-three years to find out why.

What happened after is worth telling in full. San Diego’s mayor, Pete Wilson, stood in the ash the next morning and launched a recovery fund. A Safeway in North Park loaned its basement for storage. A paper company donated a thousand boxes. Volunteers, working with two of the men who’d built the 1967 Spirit of St. Louis replica, and with an aviator’s honorary supervision, rebuilt a new one from scratch in a hangar across town and flew it on April 28, 1979, the anniversary of Lindbergh’s first flight out of San Diego. They called themselves Phoenix Flight, and some volunteers still wear that name on their museum badges. On February 22, 1980, exactly two years to the day after the fire, the museum reopened. The building itself, rebuilt in the same Spanish Renaissance style at a cost of over $7 million, reopened May 17, 1982, under a new name: Casa de Balboa.

Here’s the ending nobody expected. In 2001, twenty-three years after the fire, San Diego Fire Battalion Chief Art Robertson finally closed the case. The Electric Building was burned by three Chula Vista teenagers who confessed they’d started the fire trying to stay warm. They were minors at the time, never charged; the statute of limitations had already run. No name from that confession has ever surfaced publicly, and per this page’s own standing policy, none will be printed here even if one does: they were minors, uncharged, and the case is closed by operation of law. The fire, the loss, and the twenty-three-year mystery are the story, and they’re devastating enough on their own.

7. The Old Globe Theatre

Where: 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego, CA 92101.

The building in front of you reads as old, and it isn’t: this Globe was built in 1982, on the footprint of an earlier one that burned in 1978, which itself replaced a 1935 original.

It started as a fairground attraction, built in 1935 for the California Pacific International Exposition, a deliberate copy of a Globe theatre built for a Chicago World’s Fair, itself a copy of Shakespeare’s original in London. During the Exposition it ran fifty-minute Shakespeare, five short plays a day, an actor named Major Keatinge playing Falstaff by day and working the crowd at the adjoining Falstaff Tavern. It was built to be torn down when the fair ended. San Diegans wouldn’t let that happen: a group of citizens formed a nonprofit, raised ten thousand dollars in 1936, and the state chartered them in February 1937 to keep it standing permanently. Among the cast of the reopening production that December was a young actor named Craig Noel, who went on to run this theatre, on and off, until his death in 2010. The Navy took the building during World War II along with the rest of the park; the company kept performing one-acts around the city until it got the Globe back in 1947.

Then, on March 8, 1978, fourteen days after the Aerospace Museum burned across the park (stop 6), an arsonist destroyed this building too: three-alarm fire, four million dollars lost on a forty-three-year-old structure. The company built an outdoor stage in weeks so that year’s Shakespeare Festival could go on anyway, and it did. The Globe reopened in 1981; the indoor theatre standing here now opened in 1982. In 1984, arsonists struck the outdoor festival stage a second time; that building was rebuilt too. And that same year, 1984, having been burned down twice in six years, the Old Globe won the Tony Award for best regional theatre in the country.

Now the ghost story, and here’s exactly what it is and isn’t. Tour pages report actors and crew hearing footsteps on the empty stage, the rustle of costumes with nobody wearing them, shadows that vanish. Traced back as far as it goes, every version comes from one national tour company’s website. No named witness, no date, no cast member on the record, nothing from the theatre’s own extensive published history. We’re telling you the story anyway, because it’s widely told and you’ll hear it from somebody in this town if you haven’t already, and telling you plainly that we found one source, a tour company, repeating it. What’s real, and belongs alongside it, is the ghost light: a single bare bulb every theatre in the English-speaking world leaves burning on an empty stage overnight. The practical reason is that a dark stage with an open orchestra pit is a place a person can fall and get hurt. The tradition layered on top, that the light is there for ghosts to perform by, is real, old, and universal to the craft. It isn’t a claim about this specific building. The Globe keeps a ghost light because every working theatre does.

8. The Japanese Friendship Garden, and the teahouse that isn’t there

Where: 2215 Pan American Road East, San Diego, CA 92101.

The garden here opened in 1990. It isn’t the story. The story is a building that used to stand nearby, and the family that lived in it, and what their own government did to them.

The original Japanese Tea Pavilion was built for the 1915 Exposition and, when the fair closed, was gifted outright to the City of San Diego. The City leased it to a couple, Asakawa Hachisaku and his wife Osamu, with help from a cousin, and starting in 1917 the family ran it, and lived in it, for twenty-four straight years. Their sons Moto and George slept as boys in the unfinished attic above the teahouse and, as they grew, worked the garden themselves: weeding, thinning bamboo, re-papering the shoji screens every year because visitors kept poking their fingers through the rice paper to see what was on the other side. Osamu Asakawa invented her own green tea ice cream by mixing tea powder straight into the cream. In the garden’s own recorded oral history, George Asakawa remembered it this way: “My mother created green tea ice cream by mixing the tea powder into the ice cream. Inside there were traditional tatami mats made of bamboo on the floors, and my mother had a small gift shop where she sold small things imported from Japan.”

In 1942, under Executive Order 9066, the federal government forced the Asakawas from their home, along with roughly a hundred twenty thousand other Japanese Americans, into incarceration camps. This was not a relocation. It was their own government removing them from the home they had built their lives inside. The American Red Cross took over the teahouse during the war, running it first as a servicemen’s center and later as a lounge for the Naval Hospital that had taken over much of the park (stop 9). By 1946 the building sat vacant; it fell into disrepair, was boarded up, and in 1955 was torn down entirely to make room for the Children’s Zoo.

The Asakawas came home after the war. They never saw their house again; it was already gone. Moto Asakawa went on to found the Presidio Garden Center in San Diego, served twice as president of the local Japanese American Citizens League, and helped build a three-million-dollar endowment for nursery education in California before his death in 2011. His brother George stayed active for decades as a volunteer at a Balboa Park museum, which is largely how the family’s history came to be documented at all. Efforts toward a new Japanese garden began the same decade the old one was demolished; this one finally opened in 1990, with a new tea pavilion added in 1999, on ground near, but not on, where the original stood.

9. Inspiration Point: the hospital that took the park

Where: 2115 Park Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92101, at the Veterans Museum.

Everything visible from here, the parking lot, the chapel, the open ground around it, was at its peak a hospital compound holding more than twelve thousand patients at once. San Diegans have argued since 1887 over whether this land should ever have left the park, and voted, over and over, to let it go anyway.

Every acre of this land change required a public vote, because the City Charter said park land couldn’t be converted without one, and San Diego voted yes almost every time, usually by lopsided margins. The pattern started small: Marines and a field hospital moved in during the 1915 Exposition. By World War I, with the Navy running a training center on the grounds, trainers used the park’s own lily pond for swimming lessons over citizen objection (stop 3). In 1919 the Navy’s own Secretary renamed the wartime dispensary a “Navy Hospital,” an internal move made explicitly to better position the department for a land grant. The City deeded over seventeen acres that year; voters ratified it afterward by more than sixty to one. More acreage followed in 1925, again by lopsided vote, and neither of those two deeds carried a reversionary clause: once given, that land was gone for good.

By 1938, with Los Angeles and San Pedro lobbying the Navy for hospitals of their own, a rear admiral told the local paper exactly what was at stake: “Every million or two dollars spent by the Navy here is good insurance the Navy will stay in San Diego.” Voters approved more acreage in 1939 and 1941, this time with reversion clauses included. By May 1941 the Navy held the entire ninety-two and a half acres of this promontory.

Then came Pearl Harbor. Between 1941 and 1945 the hospital grew from fifty-six buildings and fourteen hundred beds to two hundred forty-one buildings covering two hundred forty-seven acres with over ten thousand beds. The Navy took the museums across the park too: the California Building, the Fine Arts Gallery, and the Natural History Museum all became hospital wards. The House of Hospitality became a nurses’ dormitory. The Japanese tea garden (stop 8) became a Red Cross servicemen’s center. The lily pond (stop 3) became a swimming pool a second time. The hospital treated roughly a hundred seventy-two thousand patients over the war; on a single day in December 1944, the patient count passed twelve thousand. The chapel in front of you was dedicated in January 1945, on land the Navy had leased from the City in 1937 for recreational use only, land on which the base commander had personally promised no buildings would ever be placed.

The Navy paid the City $790,000 cash for its long use of the park, plus another hundred thousand from selling surplus buildings when it left, money the City used to repair Exposition buildings the war had damaged. Amero, who spent his career documenting this fight, didn’t pretend neutrality about the architecture the Navy left behind, calling one nine-story surgical building “the carcass of a stranded whale.” He also added up the century’s cost: three hundred twenty-two acres deeded or leased away to freeways, a naval hospital, and other incompatible uses, by a city he says was more careless with its park in the supposedly enlightened twentieth century than it had been in the shadier land deals of the nineteenth. By 1989, with the chapel abandoned and the City considering tearing it down, local veterans founded what is now the Veterans Museum at Balboa Park, the building standing here today.

10. Sefton Plaza: Kate Sessions’s nursery ground

Where: Sixth Avenue at Laurel Street, Sefton Plaza, San Diego, CA 92101.

No crime here, no fire, no ghost, and it’s still one of the best stories in the park. Look north and east: the Torrey pines, Monterey cypresses, eucalyptus, and oaks across the northwest corner of Balboa Park are, in real part, the work of one woman, and they’re the oldest living things in the park.

Katherine Sessions came to San Diego to teach in 1884, and by 1892, with land prices soaring on Coronado where she’d started a commercial nursery, she asked the city council for a lease inside what was then empty scrubland called City Park. Her pitch, in her own words to the council, was that a public nursery would be “a continual incentive to our citizens to encourage and foster work in our park.” The City agreed: ten years, thirty-two acres in the park’s undeveloped northwest corner, free city water, in exchange for planting a hundred trees in the park every year and supplying three hundred more for city streets and plazas. She over-delivered every year of the lease and never actually used more than ten of her thirty-two acres. At its peak her nursery held roughly twenty thousand plants, twenty varieties of eucalyptus alone, acacia, bamboo, Spanish cork oak, Hawaiian kukui, a banyan tree. On Sundays in the 1890s, up to a hundred San Diegans would walk through it, a private commercial nursery functioning as the city’s first botanical garden.

What the plaque version usually leaves out: in 1890 and 1891, before her own lease even existed, she was the one who recommended the City hire Frederick Law Olmsted, the most famous landscape architect in America, to design the whole of what would become this park. In 1902 she formed the Park Improvement Committee alongside George Marston, and their work produced the first real comprehensive plan this park ever had.

And here’s the part nobody tells: her lease broke the dam. Within months of it being approved, other people started asking the city for their own slices of the park on the same terms, and the requests didn’t stop for a decade. In late 1893 the City came within a vote of handing two to three hundred acres of park land to a single private operator for twenty-five years. The San Diego Union itself had to step in publicly and warn the city to guard its own park “against the greedy assault of land-hunters.” Sessions earned the title “Mother of Balboa Park” during her own lifetime; a clipping in her own scrapbook is headed exactly that. She died in 1940, and a bronze statue of her went up in this plaza in 1998.

A short detour worth the walk: George Marston’s name comes up throughout this page, the man a Methodist pastor said would never have allowed the Zoro Garden nudist colony (stop 5), and Sessions’s partner in writing this park’s first real plan. His own home, the Marston House at 3525 Seventh Avenue on the park’s northwest rim, is a preserved 1905 Arts and Crafts house, built by Hebbard and Gill, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and run today as a house museum by the Save Our Heritage Organisation.

11. Professor LeBatt’s dugout

Where: No fixed address. Two sites in the eastern canyons of the park, neither precisely located; the nearest public vantage is Pershing Drive overlooking Florida Canyon.

This is the story that shows how far a told story can drift from the account underneath it, because both versions survive and can be read side by side.

Here’s what circulates today: a national tour company tells the story of “The Phantom Piano Man,” described as one of the park’s oldest legends, a brilliant, penniless nineteenth-century musician who carved himself a home into the hillside, kept bees, sold the honey, played a haunting concert downtown, and whose phantom piano music still drifts through the canyons at night.

Here’s where that story actually comes from: a first-person memoir called “Byways of Old City Park,” published in the Journal of San Diego History in July 1955, written by a man whose family had lived in San Diego since 1882, describing things he’d personally seen as a young man. And here is where the two tellings part company. First, on the number of people: the 1955 memoir tells the pianist’s story and a beekeeper’s story as two separate incidents in two different parts of the park, and the author is explicit that he never learned the beekeeper’s identity. Second, on the bees: in the 1955 telling, the beekeeper lived in the park’s abandoned smallpox isolation hospital, not any dugout, cleaning out every stick of furniture in the process and selling the honey in town, never identified or caught. Third, on how it ends: the 1955 memoir states plainly that the pianist, a man remembered only as “Professor LeBatt,” died by suicide, alone, in the canyon where he’d made his home; the tour version ends on “resilience and artistry” instead. Fourth, on the piano music itself: no phantom piano appears anywhere in the 1955 account, or in anything else located in this research. That detail enters with the modern telling.

Now the actual man, as the 1955 witness described him. He lived in a hole dug into a hillside, almost hidden by sumac bushes, in a part of the park “not so well known then and scarcely to be located now,” even in 1955. People said he was highly talented and had, in the author’s words, “a strange inability to profit financially from his gifts or to make a fair living in other ways.” He gave at least one concert at Horton Hall, San Diego’s first theatre, and tried for a while to teach. He made one short trip north, came back to his hillside home, and died there by suicide. We won’t describe how, and the source itself gives no method to describe. What’s true is that a real man lived and played and died in this park more than a century ago, and a tour company turned him into a ghost story with the death quietly edited out. The honest version, with the death left in, is the better story.

The beekeeper’s part is its own strange footnote. In late 1892, the pest house’s last official keeper checked the vacant building and found someone had moved in and set up a full beekeeping operation inside it, stripping every piece of furniture from a smallpox isolation ward. When word got around town, people who’d bought that honey got uneasy, wondering whether some of it dated from right after the last smallpox patients had left the building, “alive or dead,” in the memoir’s own phrase. As far as the record shows, nobody was ever harmed by it, and nobody ever learned who the beekeeper was.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any hour.

12. How the San Diego Zoo actually started

Where: 2920 Zoo Drive, San Diego, CA 92101, main entrance. The founding site, thirty-two temporary Exposition animal cages, stood nearby along today’s Park Boulevard and is now largely under the zoo’s own parking lot.

You’re standing where thirty-two cages of leftover World’s Fair animals sat abandoned in 1917, with no fence, no gate, and no way for anybody to charge admission to see them.

The zoo’s own founding legend, told for a century, is that in September 1916 a young San Diego doctor named Harry Wegeforth was driving past the park with his brother, heard a lion roar from among the stranded Exposition animals, and said, on the spot, “Wouldn’t it be splendid if San Diego had a zoo! You know, I think I’ll start one.” Here’s the rare, honest twist: the zoo’s own peer-reviewed historian, writing in the Journal of San Diego History in 2016, names that story as a myth without taking it away from you. In her own words, “the spark that set into motion the San Diego Zoo as a separate entity has become an almost mythical origin story… this mythos of the roar simplified the past and made what started with a tenuous beginning appear an inevitability.” That isn’t a debunking. It’s a historian pointing out that the roar makes a decade of grinding, uncertain fundraising look like fate, when it was really neither quick nor guaranteed.

Here’s the record behind the legend. The animals really were stranded: some belonged to the Exposition directly, others were on loan from a defunct local amusement park that had already closed by the time the fair ended on December 31, 1916, leaving the animals nowhere to go. Wegeforth had the articles of incorporation for a San Diego Zoological Society executed on November 17, 1916, before the Exposition had even finished, and named himself president. By May 1917 the new Society had formally taken over the abandoned collection. There was no fence and no gate, so for those first months anybody could walk up and look, free, with a keeper who’d trained some of the animals to perform for passersby at a daily 3:30 feeding.

Money was the entire story for the next two decades. Philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps gave nine thousand dollars in 1921 for a fence, the single object that let the zoo start charging admission and function as a business; she kept giving for the rest of her life, roughly two hundred thousand dollars total, funding an aviary and a research hospital along the way. A dedicated city property tax to fund the zoo was voted down in 1925, passed in 1927 but thrown out on a technicality, passed again in 1929 and never enacted, and finally passed for good only in 1934. Through all of it a bookkeeper named Belle Benchley, hired in 1925, worked her way up until she was running the entire zoo by 1927. During World War Two, with staff leaving for service, Benchley kept it operating with three thousand animals to feed under wartime rationing, and the zoo grew its own victory garden in Mission Valley to help do it. The first man drafted in San Diego for that war, as it happens, was a zoo keeper named Howard Lee.

Grand opening for the fenced, ticketed zoo was 1923, with free admission for any San Diego child, because local kids were always who Wegeforth had this zoo in mind for. In 1962, this zoo became the first in the world to put a moat, instead of bars, around a giraffe enclosure, a small architectural choice that changed how zoos everywhere have been built ever since.