Another Ghost Story

This happened back in August 2000. I bought a book that listed haunted locations through out the nation, seperated by state. I found a story of a small cemetery outise of Paso Robles, Ca. It was called Adeliada Cemetery. Story goes that in the late 18oo's a woman killed herself as she was distraut as her two young children died in a dyptheria epedimic. The story continues to say that on every Friday night between the hours of 10:00 pm and midnight the woman would appear and places flowers on her children's graves.

My friend Fred did a bit of research and called up the Paso Robles Cemetery District to find out more as well as get permission. He talked to someone there and they gave him a first name of Charlotte. They couldn't tell him where the part of the story of her showing up on Friday's but we thought this would be the time to go and made preparations and went one Friday night.

The four of us (Tom, Scott, Fred, and myself) arrived around 9:30 to the cemetery. The place didn't look abadoned but you can tell it wasn't used much. There were some beautiful iron gates with the cemetery name on them that were locked. Luckily the pedestrian entrance was open (presumedly by the owners since they knew we were coming) and were able to enter. Walking around I got a better feel for the place. There was an abadoned building of some sort, but I couldn't tell what it was until closer inspection. There was also an old sign hanging from a tree with the cemeteray's name on it. The graves themselves were rather neatly kept, you could tell the families still came to the cemetery to clean up the family plots. We noticed that all the graves weren't older then the 1950's. This struck us as odd since the story of the woman mentioned the late 1800's.

We wandered around a bit more noticing that 10:00 was nearing. Tom wandered off to see what was on top of this hill. I'm glad he did as he found another group of graves, around three dozen or so and all from the 1800's. We felt better but had another question in our minds. We were searching for Charlotte's grave but no where did we hear that she was buried there. We decided to start looking for two children's graves that had died in the time period we were told as well as sharing the last name. It was now 10:00 and since the bottom cemetery hadn't been explored throuroughly Scott and myself volunterred to investigate that and Fred and Tom would do the top portion.


Scott and I headed back down and decided to first investigate the graves to see if we could find any children's. There weren't that many and all were relatively new (1950'sish). While we were doing this we heard footsteps.

Before I continue I should describe the place. The street portion of the cemetery had quite a few trees and despite it still being August, there were a lot of dried leaves and twigs on the ground. So much that whenever you stepped you would hear a crunching sound. On top of the hill was worse as the entire area was covered in trees and was like a canopy.

As I was saying we started hearing footsteps. Thinking it was Tom and Fred looking for us I called out to them but heard no response. I then asked if someone was there and stated what we were doing and that we had permission. Still nothing. Scott, being the skeptic he is, thought it was an animal of sorts but then it continued again and it definitely sounded like two footsteps and not four. We walked around a bit more and kept hearing footsteps. I know it wasn't ours echoing or something as we would be still and could hear the footsteps off in the distance. They stopped after about thirty seconds. Scott and I decided to investigate the abadoned building since we couldn't find any children's graves and then wait for Tom and Fred to come back down.

As we were walking over to the building I noticed that the flashlights were moving rather erraticly and I could hear loud voices but couldn't tell whose they were or what they were saying. I figured they were just talking and didn't really think any more of it.

We got over to the building and couldn't quite figure out what it was. The building was constructed of cement blocks and the door was hanging on it's hinges but still opened. I could tell at one point it held nearly a full length pane of glass as the jamb was still intact. Inside I noticed there were benches on either side of the building and assumed it was either a seating area or some chapel of sorts. On the outside on the far end I noticed two square rooms about 4'x4' or so with a small seat. I had no idea what these were for and just assumed they were storage. We went back inside once more to take some photos. When we walked back outside we started hearing footsteps again, this time a bit louder and a bit faster. Then they stopped and I could hear Tom's voice yelling for us.

They had found Charlotte's grave.

As it's nearly 11:30 here and I really need to go to bed I feel this is a good stopping point. I should be able to finish this either tomorrow night or the next day. Figured the finding of Charlotte's grave makes a great cliffhanger of sorts.