Whatever Happened to the Fresno/Visalia Ghost Stories Thread

Before the website change I was able to find it, but now it appears to have passed along?

Anyway, someone back then wanted to read more about the ghosts and weird stories of Tulare County (like the Mooney Auto Theatre red haired boy, the strange bumps in the night of the Mooney Mansion).

Here's the story of the Rocky Hill Ghost Rider -

While attending high school in Visalia back in the 1970’s, auto or motorcycle cruising was all the rage. Mooney Blvd was “the” strip. This was where you wanted to be seen. HS kids would cruise their motorcycles and cars from dusk to dawn during those hot summer evenings in the San Joaquin Valley. Usually the nights would be uneventful and downright boring. Other times, it would be frightful yet exciting. Most of the frightful and exciting experiences happened off Mooney Blvd. For a town of only 50,000 or so, Visalia was small enough for everyone to know what everyone else was doing, yet large enough to get lost when you needed to.

Sure there were the occasional scuffles amongst the then three rival high schools when cruising was in full swing. And yeah, even kids from the surrounding communities would come to Visalia to check-out the weekend cruisers and cause trouble themselves. Most of those kids felt they were nothing more than faceless youths, and therefore immune to local retaliations. But this story of the strange really has nothing to do with what happened on Mooney Blvd, but what happened between it’s Southern tip and the city of Exeter, all along a strip of road called E. Caldwell Ave, or Tulare County Avenue 280.

There was a great allure being able to show off your ride and your girlfriend and friends to others. Packing 5 or 6 teenage co-ed bodies into the cab a 1967 El Camino was fun. Sometimes we would split a case of beer in the truck, and sometimes one of the guys or girls along for the ride would share whatever “weedage” they had among all. Back then, the local police or county deputies did little to discourage it in the beginning. We were out to have fun so long as no one got hurt – and for the most part that is the way it was for many years. Getting laid was also on everyone’s mind, guys and girls alike. The adults in town had bars and clubs to hook up at; we had our cars and cruising.

A guy at my high school named Richard F. had an older sister named Sarah F. Sarah was 3 years older than Richard. Because I was a bit old for my school grade, that made me about 2 years younger than her. At this time, I wasn’t sure if Sarah was still attending one of the other schools, if she had graduated or otherwise just dropped out. Sarah was a very good looking chick. She was tall and slender dressed in the typical “post-disco pre-punk style” of the time. She hung out with all the rich cool kids with hot-rod cars and tricked-out motorcycles all weekend.

Sarah would drop names of the guys and girlfriends from all over Tulare County she would go cruising with. She also bragged about the “exclusive” parties out in the orange and walnut groves, alfalfa fields, hay bins and ranch houses outside of town. “Keggers”, “punchbowls”, “bowling parties” and “fast-shrooming” were names she called these parties. All of these parties involved either beer, hard alcohol, weed, mushrooms or a combination of any of the 4. Most of those who knew Sarah considered her a professional partier. It wasn’t like she was a constant blind drinker, shroomer or pot smoker. It was more like she just always seemed to go to the best parties and see the coolest things while out.

One hot summer Saturday afternoon, I happened to be at the local hot dog stand near “downtown” Visalia listening to friends and others describe their own experiences from the previous night of cruising and parties. The joint was nothing more than 16x10 plywood framed box with an order counter surrounded by red wooden picnic tables. Each red table had about 50 years of paint on them. There was an old swamp cooler squeaking on the side of the box keeping the inside kitchen as cool a possible while the cook slung dogs, chips and sodas. Meanwhile outside, we were left to our own devices to keep cool.

Sarah and her latest boyfriend Kevin N. walked in and ordered up some chili-cheese dogs and strawberry sodas from the order window. They had just pulled up in his late model yellow Grand Torino. Kevin’s car was known to be one of the fastest in the county. It rumbled into the parking lot of the hot dog joint and chirped its tires as he shut down the engine and prematurely popped out the clutch. After they placed their order, they joined us at the picnic tables we had all gathered at. They sat down and also began to listen to the stories from the night before. Some of the tales were known to be true (like one or more witnessing an accident involving mutual friends on Mooney Blvd), some were suspect of being fantastic (“So-and-so” was seen doing a guy in her back seat with her brother watching from the front seat), and others were downright impossible hearsay (“what’s-his-name” stole yet another Coors truck… for the umpteenth time).

“We saw The Ghost Rider of Rocky Hill last night and it scared the crap out of us!” blurted out Sarah. We all stopped eating and looked up at each other. The Ghost Rider of Rocky Hill, what the Hell is that?

Sarah began her tale.

“We were driving down Caldwell between Farmersville and Exeter, somewhere ‘round the intersection of Road 188. Kev was driving a little faster than 60 miles an hour just outside of Exeter” She recounted. Kevin pertly corrected her saying it was closer to 75. Since Exeter is near the far East end of the area where this event occurs, I assumed they were traveling west on Caldwell/Ave 280 back towards Visalia.

Sarah continued, “Last night was a full moon”, everyone nodded their heads in agreement. “Kev said he looked into his rear view mirror and could see Rocky Hill illuminated by the moonlight miles behind us”.

In the area where they said they were, I guessed that Rocky Hill was about 2 miles off in the distance to the east and fading fast. Sarah’s voice then started to take on a quieter, more monotone quality.

“Kev then noticed a brighter than white light even brighter than a car or cycle’s high beams in his rear view mirror. It seemed to have dropped down from the sky directly behind us a couple hundred yards. It started to catch up with us real fast, like almost within seconds. I though it was going to run into us! I though it was just some crazy guy on a motorcycle hauling ass to scare us. Scary things then happened. The car started rumbling and drifting back and forth across our side of the road”.

There was no such thing as HID auto lighting back then, so a brighter than white light was something really white. Caldwell Ave/Avenue 280 even to this day is a bi-directional two-lane road not more than 20 feet wide total. It sees a lot of tractor and implement transport use since it is, after all, in the middle of agricultural farmland. Having a road like this become a rough drive is not out of the ordinary. Add to their speed, and the possibility of Kevin purposely trying to scare Sarah by bumping the steering wheel left to right, and you have the beginning of one of those ‘fantastic tales’.

Sarah’s voice then became rather mouse-ish, almost as if she was talking like a little girl in a volume so that no one could hear her outside of the 8 or 10 of us listening intently to her story. I could have sworn she was trembling at this point. The look on her face was one of ashen tone, almost no expression at all. She held her head low as she continued.

“The rumbling got really loud. I mean, REALLY loud. It was so loud I had to cover my ears”. Sarah then took a very slow deep breath and let it out. “And then it rode over the top of us and disappeared. All the noises stopped and it was just me and Kev in the Torino, on the road, all by our selves.”

“It scared the CRAP out of her I tell you” said Kevin with a bit of cynicism in his voice. Initially most in the group believed the whole thing was conjured up by Kevin to scare Sarah, probably to some point of vulnerability – a way for him to get to second or even third base with Sarah perhaps?

Sarah kept quiet the rest of the time while we all continued to eat our dogs and sodas to beat the mid-day heat. We collectively further discussed rational reasons as to what really happened to Kevin and Sarah the night before, well as rationally as a bunch of HS kids could anyways.

Some of the other kids in the group said they wanted to go out that next evening and try to prove or disprove the event was real. I sort of felt it was a good idea as well, so I called up my friend Mark P. and told him what I was thinking of doing… try to find and chase down what caused the phenomena.

The next evening found Mark, his girlfriend Terri W., my girlfriend Christina N. and me driving towards Rocky Hill about 12:20am. All of us were in the front of his semi-restored 1963 Ford F100 truck. I remembered that Sarah and Kevin said the whole thing happened to them about 12:30 am, so we were right on target time-wise.

Mark was a bit bigger in stature than I. He was a football defense lineman. He was also much more rational and practical in his everyday thinking… a product of his Catholic school up bringing and Midwest farmer’s attitude instilled to him by he Midwest born and bred parents, so he wasn’t they type to be taken in by some fabricated BS told by a ‘professional partier’ the day before.

“We will see what we see” is what Dan kept saying over and over again. The girls were all jittery and nervous, I was somewhat nervous only because I didn’t know what to expect.

We drove all the way to Exeter along Caldwell Ave/Avenue 280. We drove at 70 miles and hour as much as possible (there were stop signs at most every major intersection back then) and had experienced nothing like what Sarah described to us. Dan said it was all BS and we should just go ahead and swing up to the North side of Visalia to Black Bridge, a place where the citrus express railroad train trestle crosses the St. John’s River. It’s a place well known amongst HS kids as a place for teenagers to drink, smoke or practice their sexual prowess without prying eyes. Think of it like cruising without burning gas.

As we made the u-turn on the outskirts of West Exeter and headed back towards Visalia, I remembered deducing that Sarah and Kevin were in fact traveling east to West when they had their experience. We had just come west to East. I told Dan that our investigation wasn’t complete unless we made the same run from the opposite direction. With a heavy sigh, he agreed. Although we guys seemed intent of finding the truth, our half drunken girlfriends wanted to park and do some serious suck-face. After driving about 2 minutes from making the u-turn, I looked over my shoulder back towards Rocky Hill as it rose from behind Exeter. There was more than enough moonlight to give a ghostly shadow across the entire length of the foothill range, but Rocky Hill stood out like a soft, subtly blue thumb. I pointed out to all that this was the same experience Sarah and Kevin described yester….”.

Suddenly I felt a great series of rumbles from under the truck. It felt like the tuck was traveling across dozens and dozens of closely set speed bumps. At out speed, it caused the suspension of the truck to become dangerously uncontrollable. Mark quipped out above the noise that he thought he lost a leaf spring. The girls were staring to get scared. My GF squealed out for a split second. Terri was hiding her eyes in Mark’s shoulder. I quickly looked over my shoulder and out the truck back window. I looked for the bright light, but could see nothing. I then turned forward to tell Mark that there was no light behind us. As I looked up ahead to my disbelief, I saw an extremely bright white light coming towards us in our lane – from the exact opposite direction as Sarah and Kevin saw it coming from.

Christina, Mark and I all yelled out as fast as we could. “OH SHIT! FUCK! OH GOD!” Terri was sobbing uncontrollably in Mark’s shoulder. The deafening freight train like noise and uncontrolled vibrating truck chassis was very intense for the next 5 to 10 seconds. Passing time was really hard to judge at this point

All of a sudden, the light ahead of us just went out, as if someone flicked off a switch. Mark was scared shitless. In one quick evasive response, he locked up the trucks brakes and slid down the road. The tires made a heavy groaning noise as they lost traction. I later found out Mark had thought that whoever it was coming toward us decided to play a no-win game of lights-out chicken with us. The sudden breaking caused the rear of the truck to drift off the road in a cloud of dust. The truck came to a stop. We ended up with the front left tire on the road, and the other tires in the dirt. We were next to an orange orchard about a mile East of Farmersville… about 2 feet from ending up in irrigation ditch..

By the time we stopped and the dust cleared, and the truck headlights could see far enough ahead, I realized that we had indeed NOT been playing any kind of chicken game with anybody. We are all alone on the road. No headlights behind us, no taillights ahead of us - just the moonlight and a thin layer of dust in the air.

The first word out of our mouths was to make sure the girls were OK. Other than Terri’s crying they were OK, but well shaken.

Mark immediately noted “Some bastard someone put “a bunch of crap on the road. We hit all the crap and that’s what caused the truck to get out of control.”

I waited.

Terri was crying that she wanted to go home. Christina was staying at my house for the weekend since each of our parents was out of town on different excursions, so she stayed close to me.

I continued to wait.

“Let’s go back and see what all that crap really was” suggested Mark.

“I wanna go hooooome” Terri continued to sob.

We all climbed back into the truck and slowly back-tracked our path from the direction we came.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing was on the road that would have caused the truck to get out of control. Mark said he was only going about 60 miles an hour when all Hell broke loose. There was no debris, not ruts in the asphalt surface, no speed bumps or anything – the road was clear.

I still waited.

We all piled back into the truck and turned around. Mark decided to take an alternate road home since Caldwell Ave/Avenue 280 now “gave (him) the creeps”.

Finally I couldn’t wait any longer.

“Does anyone want to talk about that fucking light that nearly ran us down” I asked sarcastically.

Nothing, no one answered. Mark did flash a ‘not now’ look at me as Terri kept her head buried in his shoulder. Christina told me she didn’t want to talk about it either.

Mark dropped Christina and me off at my parent’s home. He and Terri drove off down the cul-de-sac exit, turned left and disappeared from view. We both went inside and we both fell solidly asleep on the family room sofa bed. We slept hard until about 11:00am that Sunday morning. We got up, showered and decided to have brunch at the local breakfast joint downtown. Christina suggested the Omelet Factory.

The Omelet Factory is known for just that - great omelets. We walked in and signed up for a table for two. As we waited, Christine noticed her older brother and his family sitting at a large table. He waved us over. They had just ordered and invited us to join them. That’s cool because I like Christina’s bro - because he pays for everything.

Dave N. is what every HS girl deserves as an older brother. Although he was 8 years older than she, he was very hip to the local scenes having lived through much of it himself. After we ordered our breakfasts, Christina began to tell Dave the story of what happened to us earlier that morning. She told him about the drive, the moonlight, the noise. I told him about the losing control of the truck, the light. Dave nodded as all was revealed.

After we finished telling out tale, Dave didn’t seem a bit surprised about our encounter, and neither was his wife Suzie. As their 3 month old baby lay asleep in her baby carrier, both Dave and Suzie told us the background story to what we saw.

In the summer 1968, a recently drafted handsome young man and his beautiful girlfriend decided to have one last road trip before he had to report to the Navy indoctrination center in San Pedro, CA. They decided to hop on his 1966 Harley Davidson shovelhead bike with a fist full of cash and see just how far it would get them. They decided to head north to see the parts of California each had never seen. They travelled as far north as the Yosemite Valley. The reasoned they had just enough money to get back to Sylmar where they both lived, so they turned around and headed back.

On a whim, the young man wanted to detour off highway 99 and take highway 198 to see the citrus orchards and buy some fresh fruit to enjoy the last 160 miles of their trip. By the time they reached the small fruit packing hamlet of Exeter, nightfall was upon them. Opting not to spend the $14 for a hotel room for the night, they asked the attendant at the only gas station in town where they could crash for the night. The greasy young man attending the gas pumps pointed them towards the east side of Exeter.

They motored East out of town about a mile on Avenue 280, parked the bike on a dirt turnout and walked to the foothill rise the locals call Rocky Hill. On the face of the hill, there are some very small caves that vagabonds and hitchhikers alike have used as shelter. There is where they laid out their bedroll to rest their tired, road weary bones.

Many hours later, the young man awoke. He had been startled by something in his sleep. Suddenly he heard his girlfriend scream out his name. He jumped to his feet and scrambled out of the cave. It was still dark outside. He heard her scream again. His eyes focused looking down the hill towards the road. He saw two shadowy men forcing his screaming girlfriend into the back bed of their pick-up truck. He ran back to his bed roll and grabbed the keys for the Harley. With bare feet and n shirt, he kicked over the bike and revved it up. He spun the tires on the dirt match until the rubber finally caught the asphalt.

He rode like a man possessed trying to catch the truck. The love of his life had been kidnapped, probably by that kid at the gas station and his friend. No shirt, not helmet, not boots, no gloves. It was just him in his underwear and tee-shirt. He was going to catch them. The reality is however, they were getting away and he was starting to know it.

It may have been only a few hours to sunrise, but the light from the full moon was more than enough to illuminate the road at a great distance. The shovelhead was spitting fire as its RPM gauge redlined to absolute maximum power in giving chase to catch the truck and its kidnappers.

“Why her? Why?” was what he was frantically asking himself and the snapped through the Hog’s gear train.

Through the town of Exeter they blasted, not stopping for any of the three stop signs in town. Across the rural orchards and fields they flew West down that Avenue 280 towards Visalia.

They young man then had a brief vision. In all the excitement, he calmly, almost as if in slow motion, experienced an instant flash of clarity. He realized he was not going to catch her or her kidnappers. He knew in his heart he would never see her again. He then looked up and saw a concrete ditch bridge embankment in front of him. In a moment of sadness and personal resolution, he closed his eyes.

The young man and his motorcycle crashed into the ditch abutment with a force so great, the Harley was torn in two, sheared in half by the bridge support. His body was tossed as if it were made of straw a hundred feet or so past the point of impact. His now lifeless body ended up near an irrigation ditch, adjacent to an orange orchard.

Hours passed until the orchard manager discovered the young man’s body lying next to the ditch. But that wasn’t all he discovered. There, lying about 10 feet from the young man, was the body of his girlfriend – also dead.

The Tulare County Sherriff’s Department investigated the homicide. The pieces of the motorcycle were recovered and what little forensic skills existed back then, determined they two were riding too fast and hit the ditch embankment causing each their demise. What the report negated to tell, was how she had been fighting with her kidnappers in an effort to free herself, only to find herself clubbed over the head with a Louisville Slugger and tossed out of the truck as it raced down the road. Was it only per chance they ended up next to each other?

Dave quickly brought us back to reality as he told the waitress he would like some more iced tea. After his glass was filled, he continued.

So to this day, on the warm nights of a full moon, it is said that the Ghost Rider of Rocky Hill travels up and down Avenue 280 in search of the boys who stole his love from him and robbed him of their life and future together. He is said to ride up to, and sometimes over the top of , any vehicle on the road. The thunder, rumble and noise of his now ghostly fire-breathing shovelhead are warnings to all that he is still searching for the individuals responsible, and intends on avenging their death.