The trail passed by a large wooden cross. On the hike up and from an angle, it looked like the handle of a giant sword stabbing into a wounded landscape. Toward the peak, I perceived the residual energy of a village, maybe twenty small huts were scattered around a central fire.

A female spirit appeared before me. Her transparent image merged with the hillside of chaparral and sagebrush in early summer bloom. She was beginning to grey and not very tall. Her grass skirt revealed a bare, rounded belly. Dark hair roughly cut to her shoulders, she had bands of white and earthen red painted around her biceps. The skin on her face creased by lifetime exposure to sun and wind, her bare feet sturdy and calloused.

I stopped on the trail when I felt her watching me. She knew I could see her as well. Many years had passed since someone noticed her. She welcomed me to follow and showed me how she crushed seeds with a mortar and pestle. Then she held out her favorite possession, the shell of a giant sea turtle she used to gather food and serve at mealtime. It was almost always by her side.

“These people are crazy,” she said, as she waved her arm in a sweeping gesture toward the mission below. A small creek winds between two hillsides. The location looks ideal, but when the rains come during the winter and springtime, the creek floods the valley and the mission is awash in mud. She explained how this place was once a hunting ground for the people. Young men knew to lie down among the reeds and wait for the game to come in seeking water. The people knew to be careful themselves, a mountain lion could make a meal of a person in seconds. Living close to the water was a necessity. Building a house on top of it was insane.

I asked her if she grew crops for food. With a stern look she said, “No.” I was shown in mental images how she harvested wild plants in the areas where they grew. Moving them seemed ridiculous. This lady stayed near the village to care for the children while younger adults worked for the padres in the fields. She held the babies in her arms as they died, one after another, from diseases brought along by the Spanish incursion. She smiled at me, then turned her attention toward a ceremony happening in the valley to the east where people were dancing spread out in a pattern and wearing regalia that reminded me of the Hula. She showed me the boats with many oars that meant so much to the prosperity of her people. The ceremony was intended to honor relations with their indigenous neighbors, providing gifts of abundance and diversity for all.

The spirit turned to face me again. This time, a tiny infant wrapped in a blanket nuzzled in her embrace. She lifted the covering to show me the baby. It was tiny with bulging eyes, the skull elongated into an hourglass shape. “We have never seen one like this before,” she said, “but the baby desires to live, so I will care for him as I do for the others.” She shrugged her shoulders, rewrapped the infant, and returned her attention to the festivities below, moving her feet to the beat of the drum, singing along just lightly.

Bang! Someone heard the percussion and thought ‘the savages were going on the warpath’. She was shot in the back by a man with a rifle from some distance away. She never saw it coming. The image of the baby disappeared as she reexperienced the event of her death, wrapping her arms around her torso, fatally ripped open by the blast. She looked at me horrified, with an open mouth and wide eyes, then just over her shoulder at two young men standing tall beside her. Each held a long fishing spear in the position of a staff, their heads, arms, and ankles embellished by leafy wreaths. They wore identical body paint and called the spirit grandmother. The rest of her family already crossed over; these boys were waiting for her to join them.

In an instant, she stood upright, her body completely healed. She flashed me a joyful and innocent smile, then excused herself from my company. She was in a hurry to go, then. She said she belonged with them. Together again, with arms interlocking, grandmother in between, they walked down the trail. Their images slowly faded into a brightly lit fog. Rays of sunlight beamed down through the clouds, illuminating the hills and valleys around me. It was suddenly a beautiful day.

Today, California State Parks maintains Mission La Purísima. In the center of the property, between the altar and the education center, were fenced enclosures holding pigs and fowl lying in mud and feces as part of the overall historical exhibit. This is done without being clear that science has proven smallpox and other infectious diseases responsible for decimating the indigenous population traveled on germs created by European methods of animal husbandry.

If this one apparition had lingered so long, I knew there must be other lost souls still struggling from this brutal time in California history. The kindness and hospitality of this spirit’s demeanor touched me, qualities that seem increasingly rare in this techno-isolated and socially violent twenty-first century we exist in today. 

So, my quest began… to visit every California Mission and connect with as many lost souls as possible.

These are my stories.