Spirits of San Pedro

4/24/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Over 35 years ago on November 17, 1988, a heavily pregnant woman named Jackie Hernandez moved with her 2-year-old son to an old bungalow in San Pedro, California. The reason for the move was a troubled marriage, but soon enough this was the least of her worries, when she realized the house was badly haunted.

Jackie Hernandez experienced extreme hauntings in a house in San Pedro, CA

Jackie claimed that two ghosts haunted her, and like the stereo-typical cop partners, one was the good guy, the other the bad one.

In a 1993, interview she described where the "benign one" led her to his grave. He lived thirteen blocks away from her home in 1913. The other one used her fear to fuel his activity in the bungalow. She became so desperate she moved, only to find that now she was the one haunted, since the ghosts traveled with her.

Jackie moved to a desolate trailer in Bakersfield and there was no escaping them. Her neighbor Susan Castenada who often babysat for her, told her to contact Barry Taff. He had previously investigated the 1974 case of Doris Bither, which would become the real life inspiration for the movie The Entity (1982).

During the 1970s Doris experienced extreme paranormal attacks from three entities when she lived at a home at 11547 Braddock Drive, Culver City. She lived there with her adolescent daughter and three sons. The address did not seem to have a worrisome history, which could have caused the phenomena. In 1951, Gustav Mattern, 74, died inside the home. He was a retired baker who was born in Germany. The Mattern family had lived there since at least 1939.

Barry Taff and another investigator never witnessed the physical and sexual attacks Doris Bither described had taken place, but on their first visit to her home a frying pan flew at them. This led them to believe her experiences were not only a product of psychological issues, and alcoholism.

Ultimately Taff believed Bither acted as an energy source. The torment followed her after she left the home. Doris allegedly passed away in 1995.

San Pedro bungalow where Jackie Hernandez had her experiences

Like Doris Bither, Jackie was a single mother, with an abusive childhood, and a troubled background. She suffered severe mental duress and she experienced domestic abuse, a violent lifestyle and depression. She lived in a volatile environment, which is a common denominator for examples of psychokinetic spikes and poltergeist activity.

In August 1989, parapsychologist Barry Taff led a team to investigate her claims while she lived at the house in San Pedro. On the first visit cameramen Barry Conrad and Jeff Wheatcraft accompanied him. They were immediately greeted by a foul odor, and despite airing out the house they were not able to find the source.

Barry Conrad would eventually describe strange happening in his condo. Chairs rearranged themselves into the middle of the room, a flashlight would turn on and off by itself, and the worse was when he found live bullets placed on top of his stove which had mysteriously been turned on.

Taff described where this case was unique because the ghost followed her, and "went after the researchers".

Death of Herman Hendrickson c.1930

Jackie said she saw strange lights, mists, apparitions and blood-like liquid trickling from the walls. This event happened when her friend Kristina Zivkovic was present. The first sign she realized that something was off was when her cat chased shadows around the house, and she could hear voices muttering from the attic. The next event was hard to dismiss. She saw pencils fly out of a pencil holder. She wondered if her pregnancy was causing her to hallucinate. This theory didn't hold up, since the events continued after the birth of her daughter Samantha in April, 1989.

Soon after she gave birth she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She happened to glance inside her children's room, and looking at her with glaring eyes was an old man dressed in a lumberjack shirt and denim suspenders. Then he vanished. Another time she saw another corpse-like, old man sitting at her dining room table.

Sleep offered no refuge since Jackie started to experience dreams in which she saw a younger man clubbed with a pipe, and then drowned by his attacker in San Pedro Harbor. The time period appeared to be during the 1930s. At one point instead of being an observer she became the victim, and experienced the horror of being held under water.

Barry Conrad at San Pedro house

At one point Jackie and her friends started to use a Ouija board in an effort to identify the ghost. She received information about a murder committed in the 1930s that she believed was linked to her dreams.

Barry Taff and his team visited Jackie on the night of August 8, 1989. They brought different equipment with them in order to capture proof of what she claimed. He described that during the interview, "we kept hearing what sounded like a 200-pound rat running around the attic." She told the team she had seen the ghostly image of a severed head there before, accompanied by muffled voices.

Photographer Jeff Wheatcraft went into the attic hoping to capture a photograph of what was causing the ruckus. The first night his camera was wrenched from his hands, and the lens ripped off of it. During the second visit on September 4, Jeff again went into the attic, and this time a clothesline wound around his neck, which then got caught on a protruding nail. It was tied in a sailor's knot.

Another photographer Gary Boehm, also in the attic at the time, saw what happened and rushed over to help and brought him back downstairs. Jeff Wheatcraft left the house, never to set foot inside it again. He believed the entity had attacked him.

Jeff Wheatcraft strangled by rope in attic of San Pedro house

The haunting events dovetailed with the end of Jackie's marriage, where she held down two jobs and dealt with the stress of raising a newborn and toddler. Towards the end of 1989, Jackie and her husband tried to make a go of the marriage and moved to a trailer in Weldon, 300 miles north of San Pedro.

For a time things were normal. She said, "Within a couple of weeks or so I felt really comfortable being there. I thought I had left the ghost back in the house. I thought everything was going to be OK."

However there was no saving the marriage, and within months her husband left, and now she was left alone in a remote area with no friends or family. The ghosts returned. She moved a television into a shed outside, then she saw an image of an old man on the screen. It was the same one who appeared to her in the San Pedro bungalow. That night she heard "someone pounding on the inside (of the shed) wanting to get out."

She called Dr. Taff, and he arrived that night when things were going crazy. The team's cameras would not work, and equipment kept turning off. They brought the Ouija board out, and first the table began to shake, and once again Jeff Wheatcraft became the victim of violence, when an invisible force threw him against the trailer wall. Jeff had been targeted because he looked like the spirit’s murderer. Those answers are contained in part of the scrawled transcript she said she made of the session:

Question: How long have you been trapped (in the spirit world)?
Answer: Sixty years.
Q: Did you die in the (San Pedro) house?
A: No.
Q: Where did you die?
A: San Pedro Bay.
Q: Did you drown?
A: No, I was held under water.
Q: Did you live in the San Pedro house?
A: My murderer (lived there).

Hernandez said the ghost also revealed that he had been born in 1912 and died in 1930. With that information, she and friends later discovered old newspaper reports of the death of seaman Herman Hendrickson, whose body was found floating under a pier on March 25, 1930. Hendrickson was 10 years older than the age indicated on Hernandez’s transcript. He had a jagged wound on the top of his head, and the coroner ruled that he had drowned. Authorities determined that the seaman had not been murdered, but had sustained the wound when he fell off a dock.

Second investigation at Jackie Hernandez' home

Jackie did not feel threatened by Hendrickson's ghost, but the other one did scare her, and she made efforts to identify him.

She spoke to long-time residents of San Pedro, and she learned the bungalow where she had lived was built by a man named John Damon. She believed this is the old man she saw there.

However John Damon's life did not coincide with this story. He was a private who fought in the Civil War, and who served in the Vermont volunteer heavy artillery division. After the war he lived in Mammoth, Illinois where he met and married his wife Anna. The couple moved to Tilden, Nebraska in 1881, and lived there till about 1912. John Damon had only lived in San Pedro about a year, before he died from a paralytic stroke in 1913 at the age of 67. It seemed he would have little or no attachment to where he lived such a short time. Also he could not have been the man who supposedly killed Herman Hendrickson who died in 1930.

Anna Damon died from a cerebral hemorrhage, three years after her husband and her address was listed as 577 7th St. San Pedro, this is not the address where Jackie experienced the haunting, which was 593 W. 11th Street. This house was built decades after John Damon came to San Pedro.

Was John Damon really the one tormenting Jackie Hernandez?

San Pedro is a port town connected to Los Angeles by a 28-mile narrow strip of land. It was a Navy town for the Pacific fleet, and was one of the busiest harbors in the United States. So many strangers came, went and died there, that anyone of them could have been the spirits causing the disturbances.

In the spring of 1990, Jackie visited San Pedro and saw a ball of light outside the house where she was staying. She followed it to a nearby graveyard where it settled over a tombstone marking the grave of John Damon. She believed this signaled the end of Damon's attachment to her. The other ghost had left too, and her experiences tapered off.

In the summer of 1990, Jackie moved back to Los Angeles to stay with a friend. The ghosts trailed along with her, but their activity slowed down.

Jackie claimed her children did not suffer any ill effects from the haunting, only her son Jamie had a problem sleeping alone. The ghosts did sour the relationship with her friend and baby-sitter Kristina Zivkovic. Kristina didn't even like to talk about the strange events and as a result became more religious. She believed that Jackie "overreacted to everything" and has sunk into "total neurosis".

Jackie went onto find an office job, and said, "I’m more scared of dying than I was before. In hindsight I think I was fortunate to see and experience first-hand something that most people never see."

Jackie went on with her life, and appeared in different paranormal shows detailing the story of her haunted life.