Lore - Legends 52: Sunshine

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

We might long for vacations in beautiful, sunlit settings as a break from the mundane, but just because a place is a paradise doesn’t mean it has no shadows. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: Warby Parker: Visit one of over 270 stores to find your next pair of glasses, or go to WarbyParker.com/LORE to try on any pair virtually! Acorns Early: Acorns Early is a smart money app and debit card for kids that helps them learn the value of money. Head to AcornsEarly.com/LORE, or download the Acorns Early app to get started today! 1-800-Flowers: Right now, when you order one dozen roses, they’ll double it to TWO dozen for FREE, at 1800Flowers.com/LORE. Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. ————————— To advertise on this podcast please email: [e-mail]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Music Most of us aren't thinking about ghosts while we're vacationing in paradise. The sun, the sand, the palm trees, they seem to drive away the darkness. And when we're stretched out on a beach, the only spirit that comes to mind are the ones that are poured into a coconut, complete with a little umbrella sticking out. Because after all, how can heaven be haunted? As I'm sure you know, though, there are just as many lost souls in paradise as there are anywhere else. Take for example, the Bahamas.

On the remote island of Great Isaac Cay, you'd expect all the normal tropical trappings, blue water, a stunning coast, amazing wildlife. And it has all of that and more, of course. But it also has a lighthouse. For years, this pillar of light was the one thing stopping the ships of the Bermuda Triangle from crashing into the barren coastline of Great Isaac Cay. But as bright as it might have been, its history was remarkably dark. For example, during its construction, it's said that a ship hit the rocks and sank nearby. The only survivor, a little boy, was allegedly eaten by sharks.

His ghost can still be seen limping across the island's beach. Another legendary mid-19th century shipwreck also left no survivors. It said that you can still see a ghostly gray lady wandering through the lighthouse, looking for her infant son, who was lost at sea. But the lighthouse is best remembered for its keepers. In August of 1969, it was discovered that the two lighthouse keepers working there had gone missing, and they were never found again. Today the great Isaac K. Lighthouse shines on, its light still sparkling across the blue Bahama waters.

Just looking at it, you would never guess that so many ghosts are hiding inside. But that's the thing about beauty, right? Sometimes a glittering shell can hide a rotten core. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends. Just north of the Mexican border, San Diego is the jewel of the west coast. With year-round temperate weather and world-class beaches, it's considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in America. But San Diego hasn't always been San Diego.

It went through a lot to become the city it is today. That said, people have lived there much longer than you might assume. Even though we might think of California as a newer state than those on the East Coast, that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, throughout human history, it's almost always served as someone's home. The area was first settled by the native Kumyai over 13,000 years ago. They've gone down as some of the best ecological land managers in American history, too, doing incredible work to keep the land around modern-day San Diego healthy. Europeans

didn't arrive until the mid-16th century, when a Portuguese explorer landed in San Diego's harbor. According to his own personal diary, most of the natives there fled from them, but he and his crew gave presents to the three that stayed to meet them. Relations would, of course, not always be so cordial. Two hundred years after Europe made contact, Spain established its very first military fort on the shores of what would one day become San Diego. But the initial group of Spaniards didn't last very long, their numbers decimated by disease and starvation.

This experience would characterize Spain's first few years on the shores of Southern California. Difficult with high turnover rates, they were forced to learn the same lesson that so many settlers had learned before them. Beautiful land, even paradise, can still be hard to tame. Even though San Diego saw significant population growth in the early 1800s, its settlers never rose above 600. Luckily for Mexico, they had many more troops than that, and so in 1822, Mexico took control

of San Diego, ruling it for the next 24 years. It doesn't seem to matter who was holding the power, though. San Diego never became an easy place to live. During Mexican rule, the settlement experienced a huge smallpox outbreak. Then they were looted by the local native tribes. The population fell drastically throughout the years as the people were picked off by tragedy, which meant that they didn't have much of a defense when the Mexican-American War came to their front doorstep.

After two long years of war, the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, freeing San Diego from Mexican rule. Within a couple of years, the city was reincorporated into the nation once again. Thankfully, after the war, San Diego was granted a reprieve from disaster. By 1870, over 2,300 people called San Diego home, and the Gold Rush of 1889 brought in thousands more. By 1940, the population had reached 200,000. Today San Diego is one of the most beautiful cities in California.

Its Spanish soldiers and gold miners have since been replaced by herds of sea lions and hordes of influencers. But still, a little bit of darkness remains. The slice of paradise that we see today wasn't always a utopia. In fact, for most of its history, it wasn't even close. Looking at it now, it's hard to imagine that it was once plagued by constant death. But for many years, that was the reality

of living in San Diego. And as we all know, when a city has gone through so much, that mark tends to stay, staining the very fabric of its reality. And it's a stain that not even the brightest sunshine could ever bleach away. The legends defy Expectation This hotel was not the kind of establishment where people were shot in cold blood, but if you believe the stories, that's exactly what happened.

Today it's known as the Horton Grand Hotel, but when it was established in the 1880s, it was simply called the Grand Hotel. The name was fitting, too. This place was nothing short of grand. There's just no other way to describe it. Modeled after the most ornate European hotels on the continent, the Grand Hotel was built to impress. In the 1880s, San Diego was going through a lot of changes.

Most importantly, in 1885, the city was integrated into the route of the brand new transcontinental railroad. The number of people that would now be coming into San Diego could be an economic game changer for the city. But first, they needed a few high-end hotels to both house and dazzle the oncoming influx of visitors. And the Grand Hotel was the answer to that need. Since its establishment, the hotel has hosted a number of celebrities, from President Benjamin

Harrison to Babe Ruth, but its most infamous guest is probably someone you've never heard of, and he gained that fame because he never left the grounds. Roger Whittaker was a gambling man, and I don't mean that figuratively, this guy literally loved to gamble. For Roger, there was nothing better than having a cup of scotch in one hand and a set of cards in the other. He had a reputation for being both a heavy drinker and a swindler, but that didn't seem to deter people from getting mixed up with him. He could always find someone to play a few hands of poker

with, or at least someone he could cheat out of a few bucks. Often, they were the same person. But Roger wasn't always very good at his chosen pastime, and that goes for both the gambling and the swindling. Unfortunately, over the years, he racked up a pretty substantial debt, and payday was coming. One evening, while he was staying at the Grand Hotel, Roger's creditors found him there. They demanded that he repay them, but he couldn't. Soon enough, the meeting turned violent, and Roger was grazed by a bullet. Deciding that that was enough excitement for the night, he fled back to the hotel, leaving

a trail of splotchy blood in his wake. Now, unbeknownst to Roger, his creditors followed him all the way to his hotel room, room 309 to be specific, and when they kicked down the door, they found him cowering in the wardrobe. Right then and there, they shot him, and then the creditors walked out of the hotel, leaving Roger's bloody body behind. Today, room 309 is considered to be the most haunted one in the Grand Hotel. A common complaint from guests is that the bed sometimes shakes while they're sleeping. The shaking is apparently so violent that it wakes them up and, occasionally, even sends

them screaming from the bedroom. Others report that their personal effects move on their own power and that the wardrobe doors swing open of their own accord. And Roger's ghost has made a name for himself as a troublemaker. On top of the bed shaking, guests in room 309 have said that they found bedside lamps on the bed or their window curtains tied in knots. We can't say if Roger was a practical jokester while he was alive, but we can say that he

was kind of a sleazeball, and that doesn't appear to have changed, even in the afterlife. Women have reported feeling ghostly arms try to hug them, and guests in Room 309 can often hear loud, invisible poker games throughout the night, complete with the sounds of shuffling cards. It's a fantastic legend, but the trouble is we don't have any concrete proof that Roger Whittaker actually existed. There are no dates attached to his story or any evidence of his visit to the hotel, but every person who has stayed in Room 309 could tell you that someone clearly died in there, and that someone really

loved card games. If it isn't Roger, then it could just be about anyone. Vices like poker weren't unusual in San Diego. Just like the other mining community in California, its residents worked hard, and they played hard. For some, their vice of choice was gambling, for others, it was drinking. But for many, it was women. Sex workers made a killing out in California, and San Diego was no different. Of course, well-to-do hotels like the Grand Hotel didn't allow amorous couples to rent

rooms by the hour. But that doesn't seem to bother the hotel's second most famous ghost. Ida Bailey was one of San Diego's most successful madams. Like many other women on the frontier, she owned a brothel in the Red Light District, making a name for herself in one of the only ways a woman could in those days. And it seemed to have gone well for her. Her establishment was popular with the city's wealthiest clientele, and it made her more than enough money to live comfortably.

But nothing gold can stay, not even a brothel that rakes in gold hand over fist. And eventually the Grand Hotel was built right on top of Ida's business. Ida Bailey's spirit has stayed loyal to her brothel in death, even though it stopped existing years ago. Today her ghost can be seen wandering the halls of the hotel, offering a friendly smile, and on occasion floating through unsuspecting patrons. If you were to visit the Grand Hotel today, you would never guess that its elegant façade was hiding a dark history of murderers, gamblers, and more.

But that's the thing about beautiful places. Sometimes the unpolished parts are what make them iconic. Yankee Jim didn't really like these new crime policies in California. They were much too hard on criminals. Criminals like him. The rule of law was on the rise in the not-so-wild west. Mining camps were turning into towns, and those towns were employing sheriffs. Unfortunately for those sheriffs, there were far too many outlaws running around for the authorities to bring them all to justice.

You see, in the mid-19th century, California was experiencing a crime boom. Everything from cattle theft to murder was becoming more prevalent. The government did what they could to crack down on the worst of it, but it was like trying to push a boulder up a hill. You might make a bit of progress, only to lose it all and more a moment later. So the state's higher ups looked the other way when communities started to form their own vigilante committees. The concept was simple. If the government didn't have the manpower to stop all the crime, then the people would take the matter into their own hands. But the problem with these vigilante committees is that they tended to dole out punishments that didn't quite fit the severity of the crime.

One of the more famous instances occurred when a man named Jim Ugly got into a fight with a bartender. He stabbed the man, but then before he could flee the scene, a mob grabbed him, took him outside, and lynched him. The bartender survived, and Jim Ugly most certainly did not. It was enough to make any hardened crook's blood run cold, including Yankee Jim Robinson's. All things considered, he wasn't so bad. He didn't kill, and he didn't maim. He was just a horse thief, albeit a legendary one who could drive hundreds of horses at a time across the Mexican border. In Yankee Jim's eyes, he was just making a quick buck in the best way he knew how. It's not like he was hurting anyone. He even later told people that he considered himself to be a good man who had, according to his own recollection,

donated heaps of gold to the poor. But once Jim Ugly was killed for stabbing the bartender, Yankee Jim realized that he may see his crimes as no big deal, but the locals would see them as an extremely big deal, maybe even a big enough one to string him up from a tree. So in the summer of 1852, he made his way south to the one city that he thought was still a bright haven for ne'er-do-wells, San Diego. Once he reached the city, Yankee Jim and two of his buddies hatched a maniacal plan, a

truly diabolical feat. They were going to steal a rowboat. Yeah, you heard that right. Just a rowboat. Not much to write home about. But to be fair to them, it was the first part of a multi-step plan to steal a much bigger and more valuable schooner. They just needed something to carry all the supplies for the heist in. So a rowboat it would be. On the night of August 13th of 1852, evening beachgoers reported

seeing a tall man in a red shirt push a rowboat into the surf and row towards a large boat out at sea. Then he came back, loaded the rowboat down, and returned to the ocean. After he came back again, people started to get suspicious. Out of an abundance of caution, word was sent to the captain of the large boat, Captain Keating. The captain grabbed his gun, and he intercepted Yankee Jim during his fifth trip on the rowboat. When Yankee Jim refused to identify himself, Keating shot at him, but by then Jim was already rowing himself back out to sea, and the bullets didn't even touch him.

Suspicious of the strange man in the rowboat, Captain Keating contacted San Diego's sheriff. The sheriff got the word out that he was looking to apprehend a suspected thief with a red shirt, and by the next morning, a Mexican rancher was bringing Yankee Jim into town, his face all bloodied and bruised. Despite the fact that Yankee Jim had only stolen a rowboat and that the rowboat was returned safe and sound to its owners, he was charged with grand larceny. His buddies cooperated and it's suspected that they may have even cut a deal to get off easy. But not Jim. No, he wouldn't be let off the hook that quickly. Yankee Jim's trial wasn't a normal one.

Unhappy with his legal representation, he opted to shrug off his lawyer and just represent himself. The judge who presided over the court was known for showing up at trials still drunk from the night before, and perhaps most egregious of all, the two owners of the stolen rowboat actually served on the jury. The odds were clearly stacked against our intrepid outlaw. It would have taken a miracle to get him off. That miracle, however, never came.

In the end, Yankee Jim Robinson was convicted of all charges and sentenced to death by hanging. And tragically, Jim never believed that they would go through with it, at least not until the very end. Yankee Jim believed that they would go through with it, at least not until the very end. Yankee Jim believed that it was all some big joke. After all, who gets killed over a rowboat? He even told a Catholic priest who visited his jail cell that he wouldn't be needing any divine intervention, although he did convert anyway, seemingly to appease the worried clergyman. Yankee Jim didn't believe that he was going to be executed until he was finally brought to the gallows.

He fought for his life until the very end, and that end was a long time coming. The hanging wasn't a clean one, they say. Standing at nearly six foot four, his legs were too long to allow for a quickly snapped neck. Instead, he dangled, slowly asphyxiating. And once he was finally gone, his legs had to be broken so that he could fit into the standard issue coffin. It would seem that the unfairness of his death still keeps Yankee Jim up at night. He's been

seen all across San Diego, wandering the streets. And for a few years, he was also known to appear in front of anyone who got too close to the sight of his hanging. But that changed when, in 1857, a man named Thomas Whaley built a house on the exact spot where our crook met his end. For the rest of his life, Thomas' house was haunted by Yankee Jim. He was known to startle Thomas' family on the regular and to keep them up at night with loud stomping that left muddy footprints behind. Yankee Jim Robinson didn't aim too high as an outlaw, but it was enough to bring

justice crashing down on his head. He might not have believed his sentence was real back then, but it's fair to say that he's learned one very particular lesson. Crime never pays. If you were to interview Yankee Jim today, he would say that he was unfairly executed. And here's the thing. He might actually be right. And look, I'm not going to get into cruel and unusual punishment here. I'm not a lawyer and I don't have the tools to tell you why his punishment didn't fit his crime. But I will address another problem in 19th century California's criminal system, the recycling of outlaw nicknames. California settlers were not the most creative people when it came to naming their

state's crooks. They called James Robinson Yankee Jim, but they also used that title for another guy named James Nolten. That's right, there were two Yankee Jims, and the latter was a known murderer. And so when Yankee Jim Robinson arrived in San Diego, rumors started circulating about him, except they assumed that it was the killer, James Nolten, who had come to town. Unfortunately for our Yankee Jim, James Nolten wasn't well-liked in San Diego. Only a year or two before he had joined a group of escaped convicts who terrorized the streets of the city.

The chaos of that outlaw invasion is actually what made San Diego crack down hard on crime. Unbeknownst, of course, to Yankee Jim Robinson, who had thought that San Diego was still a bastion of crookedness. During James Robinson's trial, the local bartender told the city's residents that the man on trial was the Yankee Jim, the one who had murdered their fellow miners and looted their pocketbooks only a short while before. Soon, the news had spread so far that it was picked up by the newspapers.

And do you know who happens to read newspapers? Jurists, of course. Suddenly, Yankee Jim wasn't on trial for the minor crime of stealing a rowboat. The entire town had decided that he was there to answer for his alleged previous crimes, those that had been committed by a man who shared his nickname.

An answer for them, he did. He paid the ultimate price for sins that he truly did not commit. I hope you enjoyed today's tour through some of the legends from San Diego. It's clear from the stories that even the most bright and beautiful setting can still play host to some frightening shadows. But Yankee Jim isn't the only unhappy spirit still kicking around on the streets of San Diego. There are a lot more, and they all call the same place home. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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That's q u i n c e dot com slash lor to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash lor. When you picture paradise, you probably don't think about its graveyards. But as I hope you figured out by now, people die in beautiful coastal cities just as often as they die anywhere else. And they all have to be buried somewhere. In San Diego, one of those somewheres is the El Campo Santo Cemetery. Established in 1849, it served the city for almost two centuries.

Once the cemetery was a great, sprawling thing, taking up a huge swath of old town. Today, it's been reduced to a fraction of its original size, making it one of California's smallest graveyards, with only 477 headstones left standing. But even small spaces can host a lot of ghosts. Especially if so many of their graves were disturbed. And they were. As the city grew, bodies were dug up and moved to other parts of town. But eventually they didn't even bother to do that. Many of the graves were just paved over, leaving the human remains to rot beneath concrete instead of fresh earth. Which, as we all know, is a

foolproof way to create poltergeists. Businesses and homes around the cemetery have reported numerous poltergeist hauntings. And apparently these things have caused a lot of trouble over the years. There have been multiple instances of unexplained disruptions in the electric grid. Lights flicker, appliances turn on and off, and car alarms are triggered for no reason. It's almost as if the spirits of El Campo Santo are calling out, we're still here. Cemetery visitors frequently report intense cold spots.

These temperature drops can get significant, too, with some likening the feeling to suddenly walking through a freezer. And it seems that people aren't the only ones who are frozen, because those who park their cars near the cemetery Often have a hard time starting their engines again. And of course there have been the sightings Most who have reported seeing ghosts inside the cemetery say that they're dressed in 19th century garb They float around or sometimes even above the headstones moving in a macabre dance One of the more famous ghosts

is actually our old friend, Yankee Jim, but there have been many others as well. There's a Native American who floats just inches above the ground. There's a woman dressed in a white Victorian-era dress who frequents the south wall of the cemetery. And most disturbingly, there are multiple ghosts wandering around with no heads or legs,

just torsos bobbing around the grave markers. As you might imagine, living next to all of this can range from mildly inconvenient to downright horrifying. And so, in the mid-90s, the local residents decided that they had had enough. They banded together and they hired a priest to perform an exorcism. But of course, they knew that a simple divine banishment alone wouldn't do the trick. After all, so many people's resting places had been upturned, their spirits wouldn't

move on so easily. But luck was on their side. Around the same time as the exorcism was happening, investigators discovered 38 graves hidden under the cemetery's paved parking lot. Residents deduced that no one could be happy spending an eternity forgotten under rows of minivans, and so they hatched a plan. They created memorial plates for each and every lost grave. Today they are still placed there, along the cemetery walls, telling visitors about the recently discovered bodies.

And it seems to have worked. Well, sort of. The neighborhood's number of haunted hijinks have gone down significantly. It seems that most of the dead have taken the appeasement positively and moved on to a better place. But there are, of course, a few still kicking around, and occasionally they even make some trouble. Even ghosts, after all. Like to keep things interesting. This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. Don't like hearing the ads?

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