The Haunting of DeForest Park in Long Beach, CA.

For over thirty years, I have been an urban park ranger. During those years, I have witnessed strange occurrence’s in the parks have worked in. In the earlier part of my career, I worked for the City of Long Beach as a park ranger. One of the sites I patrolled was DeForest Park. During the day it was your average style park, but at night, it took on an ominous feel.

Below is an account by a park patron who encountered something odd in the park one evening. Did he encounter something paranormal, or was it just a torchered homeless person? After reading this blog, you decide.

Fifteen acres of land purchased by the city of Long Beach, California in 1976 is what comprises a place known as DeForest Park.

Here you can hike a nature trail, let the kiddos play on playground equipment, or engage in any one of a number of interesting sports for which they have the requisite courts: basketball, volleyball, tennis, the list goes on and on.

There’s nothing uncommon about feeling that someone is following you, especially when you’re in a dark and seemingly dangerous place, and the protective sun has gone down for the night.

But here – at least, according to many of the Long Beach locals – that feeling is all too justified.

Sudden gusts of cold air, voices on the wind, and that awful prickly feeling at the back of your neck.

Something that signals to your brain that someone or something is taking far too much of an interest in you (and probably wants to see you dead or worse).

These are all precursors to the appearance of a paranormal creature which some say inhabits the grim darkness of DeForest Park at night.

A park which some locals feel, is one of the most haunted places in Long Beach.

And if you go towards the end of the day – and especially if you happen to go alone – you might just get the fright of your life.

“I saw it a couple of times, back when I was a lot younger, faster and braver – or possibly more stupid,” says Robert B. At fifty-five, while no spring chicken, he is still hale and healthy, but will not go near the park.

“I say ‘it’, but what I really think is that it was a she. And she is a ghoul of some sort, perhaps a crossover between a ghost and some sort of damn zombie.” He looks at me as if to say he knows that this sounds ridiculous, so I assure him it doesn’t – I’ve heard this kind of thing before.

“The first time I saw her, she didn’t seem to see me. But the second time, she chased me halfway through the park.

“I’m telling you, I was twenty-three or twenty-four when that happened, and in the prime of my life.

“I was just looking for something to do on the weekend but I thought by the time that I got out of that godforsaken park I was going to have a heart attack and keel over right there.

“I got a good look at her, you see,” he says, and his face screws up in horror and revulsion at the memory. “It looked like all of her skin had sloughed off, from her face – which sagged down so that it partially covered her eyeballs, to the way that the skin of her fingers seemed stretchy over the bones…like she was wearing a pair of surgical gloves, only it was her skin.

“Her clothes are filthy, just rags really, and she walks through the trees with this weird sideways gate, like her entire lower half has been ratcheted sideways by something.

“I suppose it has. Whatever she is, whatever she used to be before she became this thing, I can tell you this: she died a horrible death.”