Hillcrest and Bankers Hill do not have a ghost story that survives contact with a source. What they have instead is a documented 1982 murder and missing-persons case in a Bankers Hill hotel basement that a cold-case researcher is still pursuing, and a rumor about a vanished Hillcrest restaurant that a real newsroom chased down and printed honestly, naming every voice on every side. Alongside those two, this page tells a bridge legend that turned out not to exist when we went and looked, and a city park that is still, in fact, a cemetery.
A plain note before the walk: Hillcrest and Bankers Hill are not currently stops on any Haunted San Diego Ghost Tours route. No host stands here after dark as part of what we run nightly through the Gaslamp Quarter and Old Town. This page is a sourced guide to the neighborhoods, researched from newspapers, archives and named sources, and told just as honestly.
We went looking for a ghost tradition first, because that is the bar a neighborhood has to clear before it gets a page like this. Two Bankers Hill footbridges, a cluster of architecturally important private houses, a museum, a hospital campus and a strip of 1920s Egyptian Revival apartment buildings all turned up genuinely interesting documented history and, checked directly, no ghost story, no death and no folklore of any kind. They are not here, because padding a page with pleasant local history is not what this page is for. What is here is shorter and stranger: one true crime case, one properly investigated rumor, one debunked legend, and one park that keeps its own secret in plain sight.
1. The Hawthorn Inn, and the Basement Nobody Has Finished Searching
This story concerns the murder of a minor and the sexual exploitation of teenage girls. If you or someone you know needs help, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-373-7888, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is free, by call or text, any time.
What you’re looking at. A 1900 building on the 2100 block of First Avenue in Bankers Hill, on a hillside, with a separate rented house next door. It operates today as a small inn. There are living tenants here and an operating business, and everything below is public record, reported by a licensed broadcaster.
What happened, documented. In 1982, San Diego police found the remains of Josefina Hernandez, 16, in the basement of this building. She had been missing nearly two years. The building was then called the Plainsman Hotel; it is now the Hawthorn Inn. The manager, Eugene “Ricco” Cruz, also known as Victor John Marez, was convicted of her murder, and separately convicted of drugging teenage girls and forcing them into prostitution. Nancy Vaughan, the deputy district attorney who tried the case, her first murder trial, described the mechanism this way: “The people that lived in the hotel were often mental patients, or former mental patients, who all had prescriptions for various drugs, mostly Thorazine. Ricco would buy the Thorazine from them and then sell these girls to the mental patients as prostitutes.”
After the 1982 discovery, detectives spent two days searching a 5,000-square-foot basement and found nothing further. Vaughan: “It was like a swap meet that had died and no one had been in there for a generation. Five-thousand square feet with men digging with shovels. It’s not going to work.” Four girls associated with Cruz were never accounted for: Sandra, 13, pregnant at the time she disappeared; Susan Eve; and two known only as Joy and Candy. Vaughan again: “These were girls from the ages of 13 to 17 who were mostly pregnant and held by Ricco in the hotel. They’re gone. We don’t know where they are. We have no trace of them.” They are missing, not confirmed dead, and this page tells it that way.
“Susan Eve, call your father.”
The case did not stay closed. April Valenzuela, the daughter of one of Cruz’s victims, has spent years interviewing Cruz at Corcoran State Prison, coached by a retired FBI agent. Cruz has been drawing her maps of the basement, and of the basement of the house next door, which is rented today as part of the inn and was never searched by police in the 1980s. Valenzuela’s own research turned up a Los Angeles Times personal ad from 1982 that ran for several weeks and read, in full: “Susan Eve, call your father.” That line is a documented fact, not a dramatization. The house next door had its own witness at the time: its owner, a woman named Ruby, complained that Cruz had been under her house and that she could not sleep. Vaughan, decades later: “I don’t think anybody really believed her… I have never stopped being worried. All I can say is, I think there are some undiscovered young girls residing on that hillside.” Valenzuela offered to pay for a ground-penetrating radar scan of the basement. The current owner declined. San Diego police have interviewed both Valenzuela and Vaughan, and a cold-case homicide detective began reviewing the file, with the department stating only that it was “reviewing the case files and talking to prior investigators to determine the proper course of action.” This page cannot tell you the case is open, closed, or resolved as of today. What is documented is that it was reopened for review, and that the outstanding questions, the four missing girls and the unsearched basement next door, remain unanswered in every source we located.
The skeptic’s corner
Two claims attached to this property do not hold up. The property has marketed itself as “one of three officially haunted places in San Diego” in the 1980s. No such designation exists, from any body, at any time; nobody has ever issued an official haunted-places list for this city. The property’s own materials also describe the building as an “iconic National Historic Landmark.” That is a specific federal designation held by roughly 2,600 properties nationwide, and this building does not appear on that list. It is a genuinely old and locally interesting building; it is not a National Historic Landmark. A third claim, that the building hosted Black travelers during the Jim Crow era when most San Diego lodging would not, comes from the property’s own history page. We could not corroborate it against an independent record in this research pass, so it ships here as the property’s own claim, attributed to the property, not as verified fact.
2. Pernicano’s and Casa di Baffi, the Restaurant That Sat With the Plates on the Tables
What you’re looking at. Nothing. The building is gone, demolished in January 2022 for an eight-story apartment building, and the site on Sixth Avenue between University and Robinson is now under redevelopment. For 37 years, from 1985 until the demolition, the thing to see here was a full-block dead restaurant with its sign still lit.
What closed, and what people saw through the windows. Two Pernicano-owned Italian restaurants stood on this block: Pernicano’s, reputed to be San Diego’s first-ever pizza place, and Casa di Baffi, “House of the Mustache,” a steakhouse known for its pork chops, where famous customers in the 1950s supposedly included Jackie Gleason, Joe Namath and Jimmy Dorsey. They closed in 1985 and no member of the public ate there again. Walt Meyer, manager of Lambda Archives, on what remained visible through the windows for decades: “You could still see half-eaten meals and coffee cups on the tables.” A community planning leader, in a 2014 Union-Tribune interview: “Ten years ago, there was a tour of the place on TV, and it was like something out of ‘Great Expectations.’ There were cobwebs, and I remember he blew some dust off the cheese rounds.”
The owner, George Pernicano, was a restaurateur and part owner of the San Diego Chargers, known for a 14-inch handlebar mustache he claimed to the Los Angeles Times was insured by Lloyd’s of London. He lived in a small office in the restaurant’s own parking lot during the week, “Who the hell wants to fight that traffic?”, and spent weekends at a ranch in Santee. He died in 2016 at 98. Thieves eventually stripped the empty building of copper pipe and liquor; then-Councilman Todd Gloria called it “a black eye in Hillcrest.” In 2010 the family opened the parking lot to the public, and a parking-starved neighborhood treated it as a civic event, ribbon-cutting and all; Gloria called it “the Miracle on Sixth Avenue.” A 2015 sale fell through when developer William Hamilton’s plan, a hotel, apartments, affordable housing, museum space for Lambda Archives, a rooftop park and a promenade, needed nearly double the height limit. Hamilton’s own verdict: “Damn, it was cool.”
The rumor, investigated properly. The persistent Hillcrest story is that George Pernicano shut both restaurants after seeing two men kiss during dinner service, and that he then refused for three decades to sell the land to anyone gay or gay-friendly. Voice of San Diego went at the rumor directly in a 2018 investigation and printed everything it found, on the record, naming every voice. The reporter’s own line: “I haven’t found any evidence to suggest that Pernicano closed his restaurant because he hated gays. The man himself is dead and unable to respond to questions. It’s important to address this rumor, however… It’s pervasive.” Walt Meyer, who runs Lambda Archives’ own Hillcrest LGBT history walking tour, described how the story is told: Pernicano “allegedly saw a public display of affection between two guys during dinner service one night, and he lost it. I wasn’t there, I can’t say for certain. But that has been the story that’s been passed around. I have never seen definitive proof one way or another, and I don’t know what that proof would be.” Nicole Murray-Ramirez, an LGBT community leader, told a local TV station in 2010 that Pernicano had said to him directly: “As long as I’m alive, I’m never selling property to any homosexuals or those who would cater to homosexuals.” Tootie Thomas, of a drag venue that discussed relocating there around 2006, gave a different read entirely: “He didn’t come off that way with us. I never got that from him. It was just like he was an old codger who didn’t want to make decisions and wanted to pass the property onto the next generation. He wanted to hold onto it for his kids.”
“It’s a valuable piece of property. But it’s my life in there.”
Three competing explanations for the closure are on the record, none of them the anti-gay rumor: his son Gary, through the family’s listing agent, says it was his mother’s health, with the family leaving everything in place hoping to reopen, before vandalism made restoration unaffordable by the late 1990s. George Pernicano himself, in a 1990 Los Angeles Times interview, said the liquor board told him he had to stay open at least five days a week: “That’s bull. But I didn’t want to hassle with them.” A 2002 Union-Tribune account has him holding it for tax reasons and, in his own words, “more so, for sentimental ones… It’s a valuable piece of property. But it’s my life in there.” This page attributes all four voices and picks none, exactly as Voice of San Diego did.
A second, smaller rumor belongs in the same file: that the half-eaten meals in the windows were staged, kept that way for years to preserve a liquor or business license that required the restaurant to serve dinner once a year. Meyer relays this version too and calls it bizarre himself. Nobody has confirmed it, and it is told here exactly that hedged.
3. The Spruce Street Suspension Bridge, and the Ghost Story That Isn’t There
What you’re looking at. A 375-foot pedestrian suspension bridge, 70 feet above the canyon floor, the only one of its kind in San Diego. Stand in the middle of the span and the deck moves under you. That is the whole point of the place, and it has been since it opened.
Documented. The bridge was designed in 1911 by Edwin M. Capps, the city engineer, who was also twice mayor of San Diego, designing it between his two terms. It was built to solve a specific problem: the blocks west of the canyon were cut off from the streetcar lines on Fourth and Fifth Avenues, and the bridge “opened up the area to further development.” Fourteen houses stood in the district before the bridge went up; thirty more followed within eight years. The canyon it crosses has carried three names in the historical record: Paloma Canyon, then Arroyo Canyon, and now Kate Sessions Canyon. The city designated the bridge Historic Landmark No. 116 on January 7, 1977. Its opening date is itself an open question the sources have never reconciled: a contemporary newspaper report has it opening in late November 1911, a year earlier than the 1912 date every other source uses, and nobody has settled which is right. Locally it is known as the “Wiggly Bridge” or “Swinging Bridge.” The original wooden deck was replaced with a steel grid in the 1970s, with further rehabilitation in 1985. A hundredth-birthday party was held in 2012, attended by Capps’s own great-great-granddaughter.
The legend we went and checked. A version of a ghost story circulates online for this bridge: a bouquet that appears every year on the trellis, security cameras that never catch anyone placing it, a heartbroken boyfriend, a young woman’s death in the bridge’s early years. We traced that story to the specific page most often cited as its source and read it directly. There is no ghost story on that page at all; it is a hiking write-up about a stick hut in the canyon below. We found no documented death of any kind at this bridge in this research pass, and no folklore, no haunting and no ghost tradition attaches to it in any human-authored source we could locate. If a story exists here, we did not find it in print, and we are not going to manufacture one because a version of it already circulates online.
4. Pioneer Park, the Park That Is Still a Cemetery
A note before this one. Real families are still connected to the people buried here, including people quoted by name in 1988 reporting. This page tells the documented history plainly and does not turn it into entertainment.
What you’re looking at. A public park where people picnic and throw frisbees on a lawn that is still, technically, a cemetery. Along one edge stands a row of roughly 147 headstones, set together as a memorial. They do not mark the graves under your feet. Those are somewhere else on the same lawn.
Documented. This was Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground established in 1876, which declined after Holy Cross Cemetery opened in 1919; the last burial here was in 1960. In the 1940s the state passed legislation allowing cities to acquire inactive or inadequately maintained cemeteries for open space. In 1970, the City of San Diego removed roughly 300 gravestones from Calvary Cemetery and dumped them in a ravine at Mount Hope Cemetery. The graves themselves stayed exactly where they were; as the Los Angeles Times put it in its own 1988 investigation, “the tombstones were removed but the graves remained.” The 147 markers judged of historical significance were left in place, and the site reopened as Calvary Pioneer Memorial Park.
The dumped stones sat forgotten in the ravine until city officials rediscovered them by accident around 1985, while surveying a trolley line route. In January 1986, a city council committee voted unanimously to return the markers to Pioneer Park, under pressure from a community campaign whose slogan was “stones belong with the bones.” An environmental impact study then put the cost of returning them at $70,000, and Mission Hills residents living nearby opposed the return, saying they wanted to keep their open space. The committee reversed its own vote and ordered the stones buried at Mount Hope instead, with twenty of them used to build a pedestal. In late January 1988, city crews began burying the tombstones in a pit at Mount Hope, without public notice.
“The city made history by burying those tombstones.”
Lawrence Riveroll, who had worked on the return effort for five years, learned what was happening only because he had gone to visit his great-grandmother’s grave: “I overheard the tractors on the other side of the grave, and when I saw them I almost passed out.” He added: “The city made history by burying those tombstones.” The city’s own position, from deputy park development director Wilbur Smith: “This is not the best solution, but, given the circumstances, it should finalize the issue. But there will be some that are not satisfied with the outcome,” and, on whether the public had been warned, “They knew of our plans well ahead of time. We were not hiding anything.” Senior planner Ron Buckley’s account of why more families had not simply reclaimed their stones years earlier: “Unfortunately and rather unceremoniously, the tombstones were dumped into a ravine. The families had a chance to come and retrieve them, but in some cases that was not going to happen. Some of them are in six-by-six-foot granite chunks.” Both sides of the 1988 notice dispute are attributed here and this page picks neither.
How many people remain buried under the park is genuinely disputed. Figures in circulation run from about 800 to over 1,800 to as high as 4,000, and no source we found commits to a number with a method behind it. This page will not pick one; the disagreement itself is the honest finding. Mount Hope Cemetery, where the removed stones ended up, is the city’s oldest cemetery, established 1869, and holds Alonzo Horton, Kate O. Sessions and George Marston among its own burials.
The legend, dated honestly. A “poltergeist neighborhood” reputation circulates for this area; an iHeartRadio piece from October 2021 carries that framing. We could not trace the claim any further back than that 2021 post, and this page does not imply an older tradition it cannot locate. The strongest thing at Pioneer Park needs no ghost at all: people picnic on a lawn that is still a working cemetery, and the markers along its edge do not correspond to the bodies underneath. That is true, documented, and stranger than a haunting.
Frequently asked questions
Are Hillcrest or Bankers Hill haunted? We did not find a documented ghost tradition in either neighborhood. What we found instead is a documented 1982 murder and missing-persons case at a Bankers Hill hotel that a researcher and a former prosecutor are still pursuing, and a rumor about a vanished Hillcrest restaurant that a newsroom investigated and printed honestly. This page tells both as what they are, true crime and rumor, not as ghost stories.
What happened at the Hawthorn Inn, formerly the Plainsman Hotel? In 1982, San Diego police found the remains of 16-year-old Josefina Hernandez in the building’s basement. The manager, Eugene “Ricco” Cruz, also known as Victor John Marez, was convicted of her murder and separately convicted of drugging and trafficking teenage girls. Four other girls associated with him, Sandra, Susan Eve, Joy and Candy, were never accounted for and remain missing, not confirmed dead. A researcher and the case’s original prosecutor have continued pursuing it in recent years; the case’s current status is not publicly confirmed.
Why did Pernicano’s restaurant sit empty for 37 years? Three competing, on-the-record explanations exist: the family cites his mother’s health followed by vandalism that made restoration unaffordable, George Pernicano himself blamed a liquor-board dispute in a 1990 interview, and a 2002 account cites sentimental attachment. A persistent rumor claims he refused to sell to gay buyers after witnessing a same-sex kiss, but Voice of San Diego’s 2018 investigation found no evidence for it and printed every competing account. Nobody has resolved which explanation is true.
Is the Spruce Street Suspension Bridge haunted? No documented ghost story attaches to it. A version of a legend, an annually appearing bouquet and a young woman’s death, circulates online, but we traced it to the specific page most often cited as its source and the story does not appear there. We found no record of a death or a haunting at this bridge in any source we could locate.
Is Pioneer Park actually a cemetery? Yes. It was Calvary Cemetery until 1960. In 1970 the city removed roughly 300 headstones to a ravine while leaving the graves themselves in place, and a 1988 Los Angeles Times investigation documented the stones later being reburied elsewhere without public notice. Estimates of how many people remain buried under the park range from about 800 to 4,000, and no source commits to an exact number.
Does Haunted San Diego Ghost Tours run a tour in Hillcrest or Bankers Hill? No. This page is a sourced guide to the neighborhoods’ documented history, not a stop on any of our routes. Our nightly tours run in Old Town and the Gaslamp Quarter.
Want the history told out loud, on the street where it happened? Our hosts run that every night in Old Town and the Gaslamp Quarter. Book Now. For San Diego’s stories from the seat of a bus, see the Haunted San Diego Ghost Bus.
Exploring other neighborhoods? The Gaslamp Quarter has its own nine-stop walk: Gaslamp Quarter Ghost Stories. Old Town runs from the Whaley House to Heritage Park: Old Town Ghost Stories. La Jolla’s coastline carries its own sourced history: La Jolla History and Ghost Stories. Downtown, Balboa Park, Coronado, Point Loma, Little Italy, the Embarcadero, and North Park and Golden Hill each have their own guides too: Downtown San Diego Ghost Stories, Balboa Park Ghost Stories and Real History, Coronado Ghost Stories, Point Loma History and Ghost Stories, Little Italy Ghost Stories, Embarcadero Ghost Stories, and North Park and Golden Hill Ghost Stories.
Sources
- CBS 8 / KFMB San Diego, “Sex slavery victims may be buried in basement of San Diego inn,” retrieved via Wayback Machine capture dated 2022-08-19 (cbs8.com returns 403 to direct automated fetching; the archived copy is complete). Source for the entire Hawthorn Inn / Plainsman Hotel entry: Josefina Hernandez, Eugene “Ricco” Cruz / Victor John Marez, Nancy Vaughan’s quotations, April Valenzuela’s research, the 1982 Los Angeles Times personal ad, the neighbor Ruby’s account, and the San Diego Police Department’s statement.
- Voice of San Diego, “What We Know About a Hillcrest Restaurant’s Hazy Past and Future,” August 29, 2018, for the Pernicano’s / Casa di Baffi entry in full: the restaurant’s history, the 37 empty years, Walt Meyer’s and Nicole Murray-Ramirez’s and Tootie Thomas’s quotations, the family’s account, and the 2015 redevelopment plan.
- Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1990, profile of George Pernicano, quoted in Voice of San Diego 2018, for Pernicano’s own account of the liquor-board dispute and his living arrangement in the parking lot office.
- San Diego Union-Tribune, 2002 interview with George Pernicano, quoted in Voice of San Diego 2018, for the sentimental-reasons account and the “it’s my life in there” quotation.
- Draft National Register of Historic Places nomination, Heart of Bankers Hill Historic District, California Office of Historic Preservation (ohp.parks.ca.gov), for the Spruce Street Suspension Bridge’s construction record, Edwin M. Capps’s role, and the 1911/1912 opening-date dispute.
- Christine Robbins, “The Bridges of San Diego County: The Art of Civil Engineering,” Journal of San Diego History, Vol. 62:1, Winter 2016, for the bridge’s engineering details, local nicknames, and canyon naming history.
- sprucestreetbridge.org, the neighborhood association’s own site, for the 1911 dating claim, the 1977 landmark designation, and the 2012 centennial event.
- hiddensandiego.com, “Spruce Street Suspension Bridge,” checked directly against the bouquet-and-death legend commonly attributed to it online; the legend does not appear on that page.
- Los Angeles Times, “City Workers Put Tombstone Issue to Rest,” February 23, 1988, for the entire Pioneer Park / Calvary Cemetery entry: the 1970 stone removal, the 1985 rediscovery, the 1986 vote and reversal, the 1988 reburial, and all quoted officials, including Ron Buckley, Wilbur Smith and Lawrence Riveroll.
- iHeartRadio, October 2021 article describing a “poltergeist neighborhood” reputation near Pioneer Park, the only source located for this claim; presented here dated and hedged, with no older tradition implied.