Ana Barraza
Nothing is as frightening or disturbing as a spine-tingling encounter with the spirit world.
The San Fernando Mission in Mission Hills, neighboring Bishop Alemany High School and Brand Park all seem to be hot spots for paranormal activity.
Maybe it’s because the San Fernando Mission Cemetery is right next door.
Danielle Messiha, who graduated from Alemany in 1999, recalled a myth about the ghost of a woman who appears in Brand Park.
One night, going back to campus with her basketball team after an away game, one of her coaches dared some team members to run through the park looking for the woman.
“The legend says that the ghost of a lady in a white dress appears when you call her name at midnight. Supposedly, she is looking for her son or her baby who died in an accident, and she asks you where he is,” said Messiha.
The team pulled over and two brave souls agreed to the dare, but no one saw anything.
“I stayed inside the van with all the doors locked,” she said.
In a Google search of haunted spots in the area, supposed sightings in the mission’s chapel of a lady in a white dress frequently came up.
Messiha’s sister, Jacqueline Messiha, also an Alemany graduate, knows of a different legend about an American Indian who patrols the campus grounds at night.
“I heard that supposedly the whole area is built on ancient American Indian burial grounds, and that that’s one of the reasons Alemany’s mascot was the Indians,” she said.
That American Indian’s ghost isn’t the only one roaming the school.
Tales of Halloween…
Gabriel Barrera, a former seminarian at Our Lady Queen of Angels Seminary, remembered how everyone knew there was a ghost there, even going as far back as when Cardinal Roger Mahoney attended, he said.
(Alemany High School took over the seminary campus after the 1994 earthquake destroyed most of the high school’s original campus on Rinaldi Street.)
“It was in the C-dorms. The ghost would hang out on the top floor. He would walk in the middle of the night and hum,” said Barrera. “Some say it was the ghost of Richie Valens.”
The 1950s rock ‘n’ roll singer, a Pacoima native, was buried in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery after dying in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959.