Do you believe in ghosts?
Some of your Inland Empire neighbors do.
We asked for your spooky stories this Halloween. You delivered.
So whether you see these tales as cause for concern or just simple entertainment, here are some of the best we received.
Miner ghost roams Perris freeway
A late-night drive home to Perris made believers out of Stephanie and Victor Bustamante.
It was about a year and a half ago. The northbound 215 Freeway was dark and nearly empty as the couple approached the Ramona Expressway exit in her Mercedes Benz.
“As I was driving with my husband next to me on the passenger side sleeping, I noticed an old man figure with a white beard had appeared in the middle of the freeway,” Stephanie Bustamante wrote. “He was dressed in an old hat and old-looking clothes and was holding a pick tool.”
She drove right through the ghost and recalled thinking: “Did I just see what I saw?” The man had disappeared, she said.
Victor Bustamante awoke. His wife told him what happened.
She explained the man looked like a prospector. Her husband, a longtime Perris resident, told her mining was once prevalent in that area.
“I was then in complete shock that I had just seen a ghost from that period,” she wrote. “I do officially believe in ghosts now.”
Kids get message from beyond the grave
When Kim Bradford was young, her aunt and uncle visited from England.
But a week into the visit, Uncle Charles died in her house.
Fast forward about two years. Bradford, who lives in Temecula, and her sister were playing with a Ouija board they got for Christmas.
“We decided to see if we could talk to our Uncle Charles,” she wrote. “We asked him where he was. We could not have anticipated nor made up the answer we received.”
The Ouija board “spelled out LIMBO.”
“We freaked out and never touched a Ouija board again.”
School still in session for student ghosts
Steve Weller’s electrician job in the late 1980s took him to an old abandoned school.
Lights had been spotted inside this kindergarten classroom in the Whittier-based Lowell Joint School District. But electrical service had been discontinued long before, recalled Weller, who lives in Rialto.
He removed the fuses and light bulbs. Later, a neighbor called to report kids running in the building with flashlights. Weller, flashlight in hand, returned to investigate the dark building.
“I noticed small footprints mingled with mine in the dust on the floor,” he wrote. “Then I heard the sounds of children playing and saw five kids running in the corridor outside the building. I bent down to pick up my light and when I looked back, the kids I had seen were gone.”
Building by building, he searched for the children but found no one.
“I heard laughter as if they were taunting me,” Weller wrote.
Later, a longtime employee told him students died there in an early 20th-century earthquake.
“I went back that night and saw small orbs of light running around the kindergarten building,” he said.
“The school was leveled and homes were built on the land,” Weller wrote. “I still wonder if the kids of Lowell School are still playing in the area.”
Haunted apartment spooks summer intern
Riverside resident Brandon Brown got a healthy dose of the spooks while doing a summer internship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
He lived alone in an apartment above a barn in a forest area, but it wasn’t the animals outside that bothered him.
“I tried my best to sleep in the bedroom, but I knew it was haunted,” Brown wrote.
Though it was on the second floor, he heard someone knocking on the window. He began sleeping on a living room chair — “only to have a child whisper to me all night,” he wrote. Brown never could figure out what the child was saying each night.
One night, the power went out. He went outside and into the basement to look at the breaker box. It was pitch black outside when he opened the basement door.
“I saw nothing but spiders with my flashlight,” Brown wrote. “The breaker box was open, and I flipped the switch and then ran back up the basement stairs, then upstairs to the haunted apartment. Spirits seemed safer than people and wild animals.”
These ghost kids were not all right
Steve Jacobs has haunting childhood memories from growing up in a Whittier apartment in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“My brother and sister and I used to see these small kid figures at night,” wrote Jacobs, who lives in Moreno Valley.
“They were flat like a paper cutout and had no discernible features. Sometimes they were all white and sometimes all black. They usually ran as soon as you saw them.”
One night, Jacobs recalled waking up to see one facing him. He chased it down the hall and into the living room, where his mother slept on the couch.
“When the kid made it to the living room, it jumped into the air and went behind the couch. I was running so fast I hit the couch and woke my mom out of a dead sleep. I told her what had happened but she just sent me back to bed.”
Eventually, the sightings ended.
A few months ago, a childhood friend who knew about the ghost stories emailed Jacobs a 2017 news article. The headline? “‘Death House’ slayings gain attention.“
“When I read the article and saw the address, I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote.
In 1916, “a man had murdered his common-law wife and her three young kids, burying them under the garage in the back,” Jacobs said. “Truly creepy!”
Friends stage ghost prank …. or did they?
When Winchester resident Norbert Onaitis served in the U.S. Air Force, some buddies thought it would be fun to scare him. Or so he thought.
The scene was Portugal, in 1968. Local legend had it that in The Azores a Spanish treasure ship had been captured by the Portuguese in the 1500s, he wrote. The treasure was removed and hidden in a cave near the city. Years later, the Spanish invaded, conquered the islands and wanted their loot back.
In their quest, the Spanish tortured and killed a Portuguese commander — giving rise to tales that his “ghost still walks the slopes of Monte Brasil, overlooking the city of Angra do Heroísmo,” as Onaitis put it.
His Air Force friends invited Onaitis on a trip aimed at dispelling the myth of the ghost.
“I agreed, knowing that I was being set up,” he wrote.
The servicemen drank rum and watched the moon rise. Onaitis’ friends departed, leaving him eager to see what they’d come up with.
“As if on cue, I spotted a figure coming up the slope below me,” he wrote. “As it came closer, I could see that it was wearing a helmet and cuirass. I thought to myself: ‘You guys went all out on this … aluminum foil and all!’”
The figure passed between Onaitis and the moon — but he could “see the full moon through the figure.”
“Ran like a terrified rabbit I did!”
Strange and stranger things seen in farmhouse
Jana Cheney is convinced her Victorian farmhouse in Riverside is haunted.
“What started out as the occasional sound of someone walking up the stairs soon graduated to shadows darting, toilet lids mysteriously lifting, and weird food-related ‘gifts’ found under the covers of a (unruffled) made bed,” she wrote.
One night, while laying in bed and using her laptop, Cheney heard something moving under the bed.
“Within 60 seconds or less, my mattress was pushed up,” she wrote, adding that the home was built for and lived in by a Riverside pioneer.
“Everything seemed to move in slow motion as I looked over to the side of the bed, and as my head and shoulders hung over the side, out from under the bed came a white ball of light. In an otherwise dark room with 9-foot ceilings and no source the light could be emanating from it was, shall we say, a tad alarming?”
The plum-sized “ball” slowly moved along the baseboard and disappeared behind her dresser.
“Crazy as it sounds, I remained in the room that night and every night since!”
Unexplained fog scares car’s passengers
There’s an old horror flick called “The Fog.”
But what happened one December night in 2022 was very real for Riverside’s Mary Snowball.
Snowball and her daughter were driving after visiting Snowball’s sister in the city.
“We had driven halfway down the block when we noticed a patch of rolling fog a few feet in front of our car,” Snowball wrote. “The fog was moving towards us. It seemed so odd to have this random cloud of fog. There was no fog anywhere else.”
They drove through the fog, which was centered on the passenger side. As they did, her daughter felt a cold sensation.
“That same night on a social media post, someone had posted about driving through a strange rolling fog along Victoria Avenue, they also said ‘it felt cold’ when they drove through it,” Snowball wrote. “This was maybe a couple of miles away from our fog encounter.”
“It gave me chills when I read it, and I am convinced to this day, that it wasn’t just fog!”
Singing ghost performs at bed-and-breakfast
Upland’s Carol Scott awoke to a scare during a stay at the Tombstone Bordello Bed & Breakfast in Tombstone, Arizona.
The building was once a brothel, where women were mistreated and many died of overdoses, she said. It’s rumored to be haunted.
“In the middle of our last night there, I awoke to what I thought was the howling of coyotes,” Scott wrote. “It turned out not to be coyotes but music with someone singing.”
She thought the clock radio accidentally went off and drifted back to sleep when the music stopped.
“Suddenly, I felt someone touching me on my left side — like a finger swiping up. And I came wide awake!”
Heart pounding, Scott knew it wasn’t her husband — he was sleeping to her right.
“In the morning, I related this experience to our hosts and was told that the ghost related with our room liked to sing at the door!”
