Mission Santa Clara de Asis

Santa Clara University was built on top of several Ohlone burial grounds and a 19th-century cemetery, and over the last two decades, more than 20 bodies have been unearthed between Kenna Hall and the Walsh Administration building. Students in Walsh and McLaughlin Residence Halls report hearing marbles rolling across empty floors, and ghosts of Jesuit monks are said to walk the mission bell tower after dark.

Roughly 1,000 people are buried in a 19th-century cemetery between the Mission Church and O'Connor Hall. Another 2,000 are interred just off The Alameda near the end of Franklin Street. And over the last twenty years, at least 20 bodies have been pulled out of the ground in the area between Kenna Hall, the Walsh Administration building, and the Arts and Sciences buildings. These are the numbers Santa Clara University will confirm in its own archaeological records. The unconfirmed number, how many Ohlone ancestors are still down there, is much larger.

Mission Santa Clara de Asis was founded on January 12, 1777, the eighth of California's 21 Spanish missions. It sat on Ohlone land that had been in continuous habitation for thousands of years. The Mission was rebuilt several times after floods, fires, and earthquakes, and by the time the Jesuits of Santa Clara University took over the site in 1851, there were layers of burials beneath it. Native burials from before contact. Mission-era burials of Ohlone converts. 19th-century cemetery burials when the community was still burying its dead on the grounds. The current university campus sits on all of them.

Every time Santa Clara digs a foundation, bodies turn up. The construction for the Arts and Sciences complex between Kenna and Walsh was the most prolific. Ohlone ancestors have been disinterred and, where possible, returned to their descendants for reburial. A Santa Clara University publication, The Santa Clara, has reported on the ongoing discoveries, and the university works with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe on repatriation. The campus sits on something much older than itself, and it is not subtle about letting students know.

Students in Walsh and McLaughlin Residence Halls have reported the marbles for years. That is the detail that keeps showing up, across generations of dorm residents who don't know each other: the sound of marbles rolling across an empty floor above, or down a hallway that is empty when anyone checks. Other residents have reported the sound of furniture being moved upstairs in rooms no one is in. Campus ministry staff have been spooked by the same reports from enough different students over enough years that the stories have stopped feeling like undergraduate hysteria. Students sometimes describe the presence as an Indian child. The rooms at Walsh are on top of ground that held burials.

Around the Mission Church itself, Jesuit priests are the ghosts people talk about. The Mission burned in 1926, and after the fire, the remains of Father Magin Catala, a beloved early padre known as the Holy Man of Santa Clara, were supposed to be sealed behind a marble plaque in the rebuilt church. Archaeologists who tried to locate his body later could not find it. Ghostly figures in Franciscan or Jesuit robes have been reported near the bell tower after dark, seen from the far side of the quad by late-walking students. No one sees a face. They see a robe and a shape and hear footsteps.

Santa Clara doesn't play the haunting up. It is a working Jesuit university, not a ghost tour destination, and the administration mostly declines to comment. But the bones keep coming out of the ground, the marbles keep rolling in Walsh, and the monks keep walking the tower. You do not have to believe in ghosts to believe that 250 years of displaced burials would leave a mark on the acreage above them.