Graveyard Shift Puts History Before Horror

Ghostly apparitions. Grisly deaths. Mysterious accidents.

As a kid growing up in Grand Terrace, Eric Bermumen heard all the creepy stories surrounding the Agua Mansa Memorial Cemetery in Colton.

Bermumen, now a 20-year-old musician living in the same area, remembers when his parents drove past the graveyard at night just to give him a scare.

But Bermumen became convinced that the ghost stories were more than urban legend when he drove past the cemetery one evening a few years ago and witnessed something he will never forget.

"To this day, I could swear I saw a guy walking a dog and it looked like the guy had no head," he said.

Add another bloodcurdling tale to the legend of Agua Mansa.

The weed-covered cemetery on a hill overlooking the Santa Ana River is the oldest graveyard in San Bernardino County and has become legendary among local ghost hunters and amateur paranormal research groups. They're convinced the unquiet spirits of the region's early settlers -- interred on that land for more than a century -- now haunt the site.

County museum officials and historians cringe when they hear those stories. They have been working for years to quash the ghostly legends and replace them with a renewed interest in the history of the settlers buried in the cemetery.

"As an institution, we want people to consider the humanity of the people buried there," said Michele Nielsen, an archivist for the county, which took charge of the cemetery in 1967.

But the morbid fascination with the cemetery has proved harder to kill than a horror flick zombie.

Around Halloween, the cemetery attracts thrill seekers looking for spooky adventures among the tombstones. For that reason, the county deploys security guards in the cemetery on Halloween night. The lot is already encircled by an 8-foot chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire.

The Agua Mansa ghost stories have even crept into the Internet. The cemetery appears on lists of alleged haunted sites on the websites of the Southern California Amateur Ghost Hunting Society, the Southwest Ghost Hunter's Assn. and the Alliance for Paranormal Research.

"It's really haunted," insisted Paul Groslouis, a self-trained ghost hunter from Lake Elsinore who calls himself "Dr. Ghost-louis." He claims he once saw a ghostly female figure, carrying a pail and floating toward him at the gates of the graveyard.

Now a recent tragedy adds to the graveyard's lore.