In Brief
At Arana Gulch on the eastern edge of Santa Cruz, people keep describing the same figure: a thin man in a long black coat and a broad-brimmed hat, crossing the trees on foggy nights. They say he's Jack Sloan, who was shot off his horse there in 1865.
The Full Story
At Arana Gulch, on the eastern edge of Santa Cruz, people keep seeing the same man. He's thin, in a long black coat and a broad-brimmed hat, and he turns up among the trees or crossing the decks of the homes built along the creek, usually on foggy nights. Neighbors have described him the same way for more than a century.
The man they describe has a name. In 1865, Andrew Jackson Sloan was shot off his horse in the gulch and killed. He was 39, lived on 7th Avenue, and was riding home on the old Soquel Road after dinner downtown. The bullets weren't meant for him. Two men, Jose Rodriguez and Faustino Lorenzana, were lying in wait to ambush Juan Arana over a family feud — and when Sloan's horse spooked, it gave the hidden men away. He rode into the middle of it and never rode out.
The first time anyone tied the figure to Sloan was 1895. A woman and her daughter, driving a buggy through the gulch, saw a tall man in dark clothing step into the road and vanish in front of them. The local paper ran the story under the headline "Saw An Apparition." One of the men who had carried Sloan's body out of the gulch thirty years earlier, Thomas A. Sweeney, heard their description — and said it matched the dead man exactly, down to the clothes he was wearing the night he was shot.
Every account since has described the same man. The long coat. The wide hat. The thin build. And it isn't only something people see — residents along the creek report heavy boot-steps stomping across their decks, with no one out there.
There's no marker for him, no plaque, no tour. Sloan is buried across town at Evergreen Cemetery. The story stays alive the only way it can: neighbors keep reporting the same man in the same coat, and someone keeps writing it down.
