On a warm afternoon, just shy of All Hallows’ Eve, we load 2 tweens, a 4-year-old, sleeping bags and a box of cupcakes into our mini-van and head southeast to San Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista is a sleepy little town in Central California, south of Santa Cruz and east of Carmel. We’d passed through many times before, lunching at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants Jardines del San Juan. Tonight we are doing more than just passing through. We are taking up residence in an AirBNB apartment above the historic Blacksmith shop, right behind the Masonic temple, a few blocks from Mission San Juan Bautista.
The town is hundreds to thousands of years old, depending on where you start. The Mission was built in 1797 on a site chosen by Father Junipero Serra because it promised an “abundant harvest of souls.” Like other Mission towns, the history of San Juan Bautista is the story of Native Americans living for thousands of years in an idyllic place before conquest. An Ohlone tribe known as the Mutsen lived in and around the valley for about 3,000 years, until the Spanish brought disease and religion, leaving a legacy of wooden crosses marking mass graves.
In her antique shop called Fool’s Gold, punctuated by trays of costume jewelry, crates of vinyl LPs, and eclectic oil paintings by her talented husband Bruce Kleinsmith (“Futzie Nutzle”), Halina Kleinsmith tells me that San Juan Bautista is built on a crystal bowl between sacred ranges. She explains that the water percolates up through the quartz, making the San Juan Valley a power spot. That’s what drew the Native Americans here. That’s what drew the Spanish here. Everything is amplified here—good, evil, nightmares, dreams. “Have you ever seen a ghost?” I ask. “Every day,” she says nonchalantly, as if talking about something as ho-hum as the rising sun. She explains that residents of San Juan Bautista must learn to coexist with spirits. They see them in their houses and businesses, hear them in their attics, and walk through “cold patches” as the spirits roam the streets. “The veil is thin here.”
