Mission San Juan Capistrano

On December 8, 1812, an earthquake collapsed the Great Stone Church at Mission San Juan Capistrano during mass, killing 40 parishioners including two young lovers named Magdalena and Teofilo. On moonlit nights, visitors report seeing Magdalena's candlelit face high in the ruined stone walls. A headless Spanish soldier still walks the front entrance.

Teofilo ran back into the church when the walls started to come down. The earthquake hit on the morning of December 8, 1812, a feast day, and the congregation was already inside celebrating mass at the Great Stone Church, the new stone cathedral the Mission had spent nine years building. Magdalena, a young woman of the Acjachemen people, was walking at the front of the procession carrying a penitent's candle. She and Teofilo, a young artist, had been in love and in trouble. Their families had told them they were too young to marry, so Magdalena had come to the mass to do penance. That is where the roof caught her.

Forty parishioners died when the stone barrel vaults collapsed. When workers cleared the rubble, they found Magdalena and Teofilo together, locked in a final embrace. He had made it back inside to try to get her out. The great earthquake of 1812 is one of the most documented disasters in early California history, and the two lovers are its most remembered casualties. The Mission never rebuilt the church to its original grandeur. You can still walk through the ruined stone walls today. They are one of the most photographed structures in the state.

On moonlit nights, visitors say, a young girl's face sometimes appears high up in the stone ruins, illuminated as if by candlelight. Magdalena's face. The account has been in circulation at the Mission for more than a century. Tour guides will point to the spot where she is most often seen. A lot of people insist they've seen it. Some have photographed what they think is her.

Magdalena isn't the only one who kept walking after death. A headless Spanish soldier is often described pacing the area near the front entrance of the Mission, heavy boots audible on the stone, standing guard over an outpost that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody at the Mission is sure who he is. The candidates include a soldier killed during the 1812 quake and one killed during the attack by the pirate Hippolyte Bouchard in 1818, when the mission was briefly raided. Either way, the boots keep coming.

Inside the original quadrangle, the oldest still-standing building in California, a faceless monk has been reported in the corridors. The Mission was founded in 1776 by Father Junipero Serra and staffed for decades by Franciscan priests who lived and died on its grounds. Staff and visitors describe a figure in a brown robe, hood up, face not quite there, walking the arcades at dusk. He never speaks. He never seems threatening. He just walks.

Ghost Hunters came to the Mission in 2013 and filmed an episode called 'Ghost Mission,' investigating the ruins and the quadrangle. They came away with audio and temperature anomalies that the show's investigators couldn't explain. It wasn't proof. Nothing at Mission San Juan Capistrano is ever proof. What it has instead is 250 years of accumulated grief pressed into a few acres of adobe and stone, with the names of the dead still attached. Magdalena and Teofilo are the ones people come to find.