Shaken, not stirred.

Three months after we moved into a stucco house just off of a place called Arana Gulch, a ghost showed up in my backyard.   Being a mom of a toddler at the time, I wrote off this visitation as the result of stress,  ( he had no legs that I could see and the dog ran right "through" him.) Then,  a librarian, who was also a neighbor, pestered me into admitting that I had seen someone. I described my encounter. She smiled and announced with relief:  "You've seen Jack Sloan, the Ghost of Arana Gulch." With a tilt of her head she added mischievously: “You’d be his type.”

Three months later, the Loma Prieta quake hit.  It was 1989.  A bone breaking 6.9 on the Richter Scale left our house still standing. We were lucky.  Our tiny neighborhood huddled around gathered barbecues, all sharing the contents of our defrosting freezers. We were three days into a power outage that was county wide.   Over the warm glow of coals, the librarian neighbor handed me some information about a man named Andrew Jackson Sloan.   
I kept the odd notes for many years, especially the one that said he was murdered near my property and that he had fought off seven bandidos with a bull whip!  Jack Sloan, I later found out, did die on February 11th, 1865, but from three gunshot wounds, one in the groin which ended his life.

I was skeptical at first about where or why Jack died, until I began to research the history of my deed. Despite a cynical window clerk at the County Records Office, I did find my deed, made at the request of F.A. Hihn, one of the founders of Santa Cruz. My land was sold to a neighbor, two days after the murder.  One year later, in 1866, the land was in default and sold off at auction by the US Government. During the review of my own title, I did notice my husband and I had signed our papers on February 11^th, something that, at the time, twenty five years ago now, I had not given much thought to. That was my first connection with the history of A.J. Sloan. 
Alot,( as local Santa Cruz Historian Sandy Lydon is fond of saying,) of 'Hooey History' is found around Mr. Sloan but much, including his fate, is still a mystery.

Until now. 

My novel, Buried Star, explores a few serious and fanciful theories of what may have happened to Mr. Sloan. Some ideas have even been reported as actual 'history', but have no basis in fact. Andrew Jackson Sloan is, as he did then, still creating controversy.

I guess this all boils down to whether or not you believe in ghosts.

Do you?

An open book or a damned man?