Mission San Juan Capistrano

At Mission San Juan Capistrano in California, the story goes that on moonlit nights a girl's face appears in the one window still standing in the ruined stone church. They call her Magdalena. As the legend tells it, she was sixteen, the daughter of a mission soldier, and she died inside that church.

To understand the window, you have to start with the building it belonged to.

The Great Stone Church was the grandest thing the Spanish built in the whole California mission chain — 180 feet long, 50-foot walls, seven masonry domes, a bell tower 120 feet tall. They quarried the sandstone six miles off and spent nearly a decade raising it. It was finished in 1806. It stood for about six years.

At roughly 7 a.m. on December 8, 1812 — the Feast of the Immaculate Conception — the church was packed for the first Mass when an earthquake hit, estimated at somewhere around magnitude 7. The tower and the seven domes came down on the people inside. Forty worshippers were killed, along with two boys who'd been up in the tower ringing the bells. They were buried in the mission cemetery.

The legend grows out of that morning. Magdalena, the story goes, had fallen for Teofilo, a young artist who'd come to paint frescoes on the church. Her father forbade it, and ordered her up the center aisle before the whole congregation carrying a lit penitent candle. She was carrying it when the quake struck. As one retelling has it: "Among the dead was Magdalena. She was found still grasping the candle in her hand."

No baptismal record, no burial entry, no contemporary account confirms Magdalena — or Teofilo — ever lived. The candle and the window are legend, not biography.

But the church is real, and the forty dead are real, and the one window is still standing. On moonlit nights, the story goes, her face is in it.