Old Orange County Courthouse

At the Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana, the story goes that a judge in a long black robe sits in the old courtroom, watching from the bench. About 25 years ago, the night janitors stopped cleaning that room. When museum staff asked why, the crew told them it was haunted — a judge had hanged himself in there, and they weren't going back in.

Staff asked how they knew. The janitors pointed to a small plaque on the wall, mounted under an old clock. It read: "Judge Morrison Clock / Hung in courtroom / 1985."

The clock was hung in 1985, to honor a judge named Morrison. The janitors read "hung" the other way.

No judge ever died in that room. The courthouse's history is among the best-documented of any building in Orange County, and Chris Jepsen, who wrote about the place for Orange Coast after 15 years working inside it, put it plainly: "no judge has ever died in that room." The plaque is still on the wall. Anyone can walk up and read it.

The legend kept going anyway. The black-robed judge became the building's signature ghost, and the Santa Ana Ghost Walk still works the old courtroom into its route. A paranormal investigator named Ernie Alonso recorded current employees who said certain rooms left them feeling dread, fear, a tightness in the throat. The basement, they say, is the worst of it.

The building opened in 1901, red sandstone over a granite base, the most impressive thing in the county for years. It's a museum now, the courtroom restored to its original woods and chandeliers. Real trials happened in those upstairs rooms — a televised murder case, a yacht-bombing acquittal — none of which left a ghost anyone talks about.

The one ghost that stuck came from a death that never happened. A sign on the wall, read in the dark, by men who knew the word "hung" but not the clock it described.