Haunted Lake Tahoe

INTRODUCTION

I’m often asked how I can believe that ghosts exist. This is usually followed by a look that says you seem like a rational and reasonably intelligent person. Before anyone can answer a question about ghosts, there first has to be some agreement about what a ghost is. I’ve long believed that—and for the purpose of this book—ghosts are the essence (spirit) of someone who has died. It is not my intention to offer up proof of ghosts and hauntings; this would require someone with infinite patience and a deeper understanding of scientific matters than I myself possess. I have written this book with two purposes in mind: to tell the stories of ghosts that I and others have encountered at Lake Tahoe and to share some of the legends and myths that are an integral part of Lake Tahoe’s history. Fans of the old television series Bonanza have seen Lake Tahoe in the opening scene of the show many times; that scene was filmed near Incline Village at North Lake Tahoe. Of course, the Cartwrights and their famous Ponderosa Ranch were fictional, but the breathtaking scenery is real—and it is haunted.

Ghosts are everywhere. But some places lend themselves to hauntings more than others. Lake Tahoe is such a place. The two-million-year-old lake does not entirely belong to California or Nevada. Instead, it straddles the borders of both states, thus giving California and Nevada equal, if at times contentious, regulatory rights over its shoreline. Since the near-pristine lake is an interstate waterway, Lake Tahoe is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States Coast Guard.

Lake Tahoe is 22 miles long; it is two-thirds in California and one-third in Nevada. It is the tenth-deepest lake in the world and the second-deepest lake in the United States, with a deepest point of 1,645 feet and a surface area of 193 square miles. There is enough water in the lake to cover the entire state of California to a depth of 14 inches. With thirty-nine trillion gallons, the lake contains enough water to provide everyone in the United States with seventy-five gallons of water per day for five years. The lake has its different areas, particularly North Shore and South Shore. If you plan to see the entire lake and its shoreline—and you must—keep in mind that the driving distance around the lake, from one end to the other, is about seventy-two miles. As you cover those miles, you will see the lake’s color change from azure to turquoise and its surroundings change from tall pines, mountains and rustic, log-hewn buildings to high-rise hotels and casinos. Also in those miles, you will pass, albeit in the secluded distance, Tahoe’s nude beaches; there are said to be seven of them, with Secret Cove and Secret Creek being the most popular. But this is a book about ghosts, so I’ll just say that clothing is optional for the living and the ghosts at these locations.

Looking at the lake as an early morning mist shrouds its shoreline, it seems almost enchanted, and you can sense its haunted magic. Ghosts are more popular than ever, but ghostly legends and folklore have surrounded Lake Tahoe since long before Captain John C. Frémont discovered it on February 14, 1844. Of his first look at the lake, Frémont wrote in his journal:

Accompanied by Mr. Preuss, I ascended today the highest peak to the right from which we had a beautiful view of a mountain lake at our feet, about fifteen miles in length, and so nearly surrounded by mountains that we could not discover an outlet.

Naturalist and environmentalist John Muir visited Lake Tahoe for the first time in October and November 1873. He called the lake the queen of lakes. In his 1915 Letters to a Friend, a collection of letters he wrote to his friend Jeanne Carr, the following was written about Lake Tahoe on November 3, 1873:

Somehow I had no hopes of meeting you here. I could not hear you or see you, yet you shared all of my highest pleasures, as I sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual.—the soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one’s being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come.

It is not surprising then that John Muir’s ghost is said to haunt the Lake Tahoe region. According to author Charles A. Stenfield in his book Haunted Southern California: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Gold State, the ghostly Muir, who appears in a greenish glow, has been known to point lost hikers in the right direction. If only all ghosts were this friendly. Alas, they are not, just as all lakes are not as captivating as Lake Tahoe.

Unlike other lakes, there are no outlets to the sea at Lake Tahoe. The lake’s only outlet is the Truckee River, which flows east to Reno and then onward to Pyramid Lake. Some believe that beyond this connection there is also an underground connection that links Pyramid Lake with Lake Tahoe. Where there are legends and myths, there are ghosts. The Lake Tahoe area abounds in myths, legends and ghosts. Standing on land that is as ancient as the lake itself, the hotels and casinos on the South Shore dazzle with a twenty-first-century allure, but there is more here, much more. Lake Tahoe is truly one of Nevada’s and California’s treasures. Regardless of where you happen to be—Incline Village, South Lake Tahoe or anywhere in between—you can feel it. You can feel that this is a mystical place of mystery, magic and ghosts. After one visit, you will return again and again. That is the lure of Lake Tahoe. And it brings three million visitors to this area annually.

1

THE LAKE’S LEGENDS AND LORE

MARK TWAIN

Captain Frémont discovered the lake during his second expedition of the Great Basin. Frémont called the lake Lake Bonpland in honor of Jacques Alexander Bonpland, the noted French botanist who accompanied Baron Alexander von Humboldt on his exploration of the west. Charles Preuss, however, identified it as Mountain Lake on maps he later drew of the expedition. Thus began the confusion over what the lake should be called. Native Americans had been living on the shores around Lake Tahoe for hundreds of years before Fremont made his discovery. They called the lake Tahoe, which is what many felt it should be called.

Others strongly disagreed; the debate raged for many years. In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain, who did not like the name Lake Tahoe, jumped into the fray with the following:

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen! Tahoe! It suggests no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea in the clouds; a sea that has character, and asserts it in solemn calms, at times, at times in savage storms; a sea, whose royal seclusion is guarded by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!

Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and gaum it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning. These are the gentry that named the Lake.

People say that Tahoe means Silver Lake—Limpid Water—Falling Leaf. Bosh! It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger tribe—and of the Pi-utes as well. It isn’t worthwhile, in these practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry—there never was any in them—except in the Fennimore Cooper Indians. But they are an extinct tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. I have camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part in the chase with them—for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast. I would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.

Certainly Mark Twain’s words were of a different time, nonetheless they were thoughtless, cruel and derogatory. But everything evens out, eventually. There is an old saying, What goes around comes around. In Mark Twain’s case, this has proven true, although it would be over one hundred years in coming. There is a scenic cove on the lake that supporters recently wanted to name Samuel Clemens (Twain’s real name) in his honor. Native Americans nixed the idea because of Twain’s racist, derogatory comments about the Washoe and the Paiute tribes. The cove was not named after him.

During the winter of 1852, California’s third governor, John Bigler, received word that a group of emigrants were stranded in the area. With the tragedy of the Donner Party still fresh in everyone’s memory, he led a rescue party in to assist them. His actions were considered heroic, and soon afterward, the lake was unofficially renamed Lake Bigler in his honor. Despite the unpopularity of that name, largely due to Bigler’s pro-Southern views during the Civil War, the California legislature passed an act in 1870 that officially legalized the name. In 1945, the legislature rescinded that act: The lake known as Bigler shall hereinafter be known as Lake Tahoe.

Mark Twain often walked from Carson City to the lake, not a short stroll. Of his walk, he wrote:

We plodded on, two or three hours, and at last the Lake Burst upon us—a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still. It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole world affords!

And then there was that fire that