THE HAUNTING AT BOULDER CREEK CEMETERY
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SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS
BOULDER CREEK - I.O.O.F. CEMETERY
HISTORY
The mountains surrounding Boulder Creek were once a wilderness abundant with life. Grizzly bears roamed the forests, eagles soared above the redwoods, and salmon filled the streams. Long before the logging camps arrived, Indigenous peoples—including the Achista and Acsaggis—lived throughout these mountains, hunting, gathering, raising families, and living among the forests that had sustained them for generations.
That way of life changed with the arrival of outside cultures, and, by 1862, Boulder Creek had become a logging community. Towering redwoods were cut down and hauled away, dramatically altering the landscape. The destruction of the forests, along with the suffering and displacement of the area's Indigenous people, would later become part of a darker local belief—that the land had been violated and something had been left behind.
Fire, drought, floods, mudslides, and landslides repeatedly struck the mountain communities in the generations that followed. Whether natural consequences of the rugged terrain or something more, these events became woven into Boulder Creek's folklore.
Tucked away on a wooded hillside near the original town church is the I.O.O.F. Cemetery, established in 1882. For generations, it became the final resting place of Boulder Creek's pioneers, local families, children, and men who worked in the dangerous logging industry. Many of the earliest graves are now unmarked, their stories largely forgotten.
For a cemetery so deeply connected to the community's earliest history, it is perhaps no surprise that stories of the dead eventually became stories of the unexplained.
The Cemetery Takes a Darker Turn
By the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, stories began circulating about young people experimenting with the occult in and around the cemetery. Candles, strange symbols, and other objects were reportedly found among the headstones, believed to have been used in rituals.
Some residents chalked it up to the times. The occult had become a popular theme in movies and youth culture, and to some, this seemed like nothing more than harmless teenage shenanigans. Others, however, weren't so convinced. According to further research and conversations with longtime residents, that may not have been the whole story.
Several elderly residents recalled seeing something different during the 1980s and 1990s. Their accounts described gatherings involving individuals who appeared older, more experienced, and far more serious about whatever they were practicing.
Residents also spoke of a restricted area beyond the cemetery's metal barriers, where an older Native American burial ground was believed to exist. Whether the location was accurately identified or not, the area had long carried a reputation as somewhere people simply did not go.
Yet some reportedly crossed the barriers anyway. Residents recalled seeing people disappear beyond the fenced-off portion of the cemetery. Strange fire pits were also reportedly discovered among the graves, sometimes surrounded by candles, melted wax over the stones, ritual objects, and black charcoal dust scattered across the concrete. No one could say with certainty who had made the fires or what had taken place there. But the remains of activity suggested that whatever was happening was more deliberate than simple teenage curiosity.
And then there was the man...
The Man in the Woods
More than one account described an unidentified man believed to be between thirty and thirty-five years old. He was said to have long red hair and wore unusual, loosely wrapped clothing that some compared to a monk's robes. Several people independently recalled another disturbing feature—dark black markings around his eyes, almost as though he had drawn additional eyes onto his eyelids.
Some thought he was homeless. Others considered him a wanderer. Whatever his circumstances, those who remembered him agreed that something about the man seemed unusual.
He was reportedly seen spending considerable time in the wooded area behind the cemetery's metal barriers. What he was doing there was never established. Some believed he was involved in occult practices, while others refused to speculate.
According to one account, the man associated with five other individuals, believed to be considerably younger than he was—older teenagers or young adults. All five were eventually said to have died, or have suffered from some sort of debilitating injury, reportedly in accidents or other unusual circumstances.
One particularly disturbing recollection involved objects the man was said to wear around his neck and waistband. One witness believed some of them may have been human remains. Even decades later, the witness remained uncertain about what had actually been seen.
“No one would do something like that, would they? What were they doing up there in that cemetery? I don't rightly know what I saw. I know what I think I saw... but I still have a hard time believing it. What he was wearing didn't look fake to me. Looked real enough. He used to hang around with five others. They were young—kids, really. And every one of them ended up dying. Some kind of accident, or something. I don't know. I never did know what they were doing up there. Back then, nobody I knew would go anywhere near that cemetery.”
Those who remembered these accounts were reluctant to discuss them. None wanted to be identified, and several expressed genuine discomfort when asked to revisit memories that were decades old.
One witness put it simply:
“I don't want to think about it. My mind can't understand what I remember. I don't want my name brought into this. It's an uncomfortable memory. Maybe I'm crazy?”
The Figures Beyond the Fence
The stories did not end with the man in the woods. There were also recollections of small, ghostly figures appearing along the fence line near the nearby school. Some witnesses believed they were children who had wandered from the school grounds. According to one account, even teachers had mistaken the figures for students—only to discover that all of the children were accounted for.
“I remember even teachers who worked at the school thought it was a student, only to realize all of the children were accounted for.”
Whether these sightings were connected to the cemetery, the alleged gatherings in the woods, or something entirely unrelated remains impossible to determine.
Some local stories went further, claiming that rituals performed at the cemetery had awakened something that was not simply the spirit of someone buried there. Witnesses described shadowy figures among the trees, while others believed certain apparitions seemed to imitate the dead.
In the darker versions of these stories, they were not all spirits of those resting beneath the ground. Some were believed to be restless souls that had wandered beyond the realm intended for them. Others believed something else had been awakened among the trees—something that had no place among the dead. These are stories retold, recollections. But they became part of the growing lore surrounding the cemeteries dark memories.
The Investigation (S.C.G.H)
By 2009–2010, the legends surrounding the cemetery had become compelling enough to warrant investigation. After sunset, Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters investigators Maryanne Porter and Deena Smith entered the grounds with basic K-2 meters, REM Pod, recording equipment, and a desire to determine whether there was anything behind the stories.
The investigations soon became a regular part of their work. They returned at least once a month, often every other weekend, and sometimes more frequently, arriving at dusk or after dark. They were rarely disappointed.
K-2 meters frequently lit up. REM-Pods activated without explanation, and electronic voice phenomena were repeatedly captured. They also began seeing small figures moving among the graves—some resembling children, others appearing as short, dark, translucent shadows.
Over time, Porter and Smith became familiar with many of the names on the headstones and their stories. They began speaking to the spirits they believed remained there and often reported feeling as though something had touched them.
At first, the encounters seemed almost conversational. They would ask questions, receive what appeared to be responses, and sometimes even exchange friendly words with the voices they believed were coming through.
But when they reviewed the recordings later, something often seemed wrong.
Beneath the ordinary conversations were other voices, tones, and sounds that felt distinctly unsettling. The more they reviewed the EVPs, the more they questioned whether the voices belonged to the spirits they thought they were communicating with.
Perhaps they were not always encountering who—or what—they believed they were.
One presence, however, seemed different. Near the far gate stood the grave of a man named George. Porter and Smith came to regard him almost as a guardian of the cemetery. Each time they entered, they said hello. Before leaving, they always said goodbye.
It became an unspoken rule: never leave without saying goodbye to George.
Whether George truly watched over the cemetery or whether his grave simply became associated with that feeling, they never knew. But the ritual continued. And as the months passed, the cemetery became more familiar to them—and somehow, more unsettling.
Boulder Creek Cemetery had a story to tell...
The Night Everything Changed
Until one particular night, Porter and Smith believed they were dealing primarily with restless, earthbound spirits—souls that, for reasons unknown, seemed unable to move on. By then, however, they had begun to suspect something more was happening.
They decided it was time to try to help release them.
Drawing from Catholic, Native American, Haitian, and Wiccan practices, they combined holy water, tobacco offerings, rum libations, and sage smudging, calling upon ancestral spirits to help guide those who might be trapped.
Then came the response.
When they asked if the spirits were sorry, an EVP answered:
“We're sorry.”
Almost immediately, one of the investigators was physically scratched across the back of the leg.
For a brief moment, the cemetery seemed to change. It was as though a doorway had opened—allowing some spirits to move on while exposing something that had been hidden behind them all along. The mask had come off.
What emerged was not the presence they believed they had been communicating with, but something dark, angry, and relentless.
That night, the investigators left the cemetery.
But the cemetery did not leave them.
Something went home with one of them.
What Followed Them Home
When Porter and Smith returned home and reviewed the recordings, it became clear that something unusual had happened inside the cemetery.
Then one of the investigators realized something even more disturbing. Whatever they had encountered appeared to have followed her home. A thick, shadowy humanoid darkness seemed to move across the walls. Her spouse witnessed it as well, and even the family dog reacted, chasing, barking and climbing on the walls after the strange dark shadow, as it visibly moved across the home's cathedral ceilings, almost like a crawl along the walls. Whatever it was, it did not appear to be something that only one person could see.
More disturbing was where its attention seemed focused. It appeared fixated on the investigator who had disrupted whatever was hiding within the cemetery. In the EVP recordings, the presence referred to the cemetery as “MY HOUSE.”
What followed became a nearly three-week spiritual battle. The investigator later described it as a struggle of will and love against hate, as efforts were made to remove the presence from the home and from herself. After approximately three weeks, she knew she had finally forced it to leave—she felt it, sending it back to wherever it had come from.
Later, Porter and Smith returned to the cemetery. The atmosphere seemed different. The intense activity had quieted, and for a time, they believed they had finally closed the door. They thought they had created a safety net between themselves and whatever had been there.
They were wrong.
The trickster had only been pretending, hiding from them in specific.
The Years That Followed
Over the next couple of years, Smith eventually moved out of state while Porter continued her work with Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters. She occasionally returned to the cemetery with other team members and conducted several tours. Activity was still reported, but it never seemed to reach the intensity of those earlier investigations.
Still, Porter never forgot what had happened. The experiences inside the cemetery—and what followed one of them home—were not something the two women openly discussed. Some memories are easier to leave untouched, and eventually Porter stopped investigating the cemetery altogether. But leaving the cemetery behind did not mean she had stopped thinking about it.
2017
Then, in October 2017, something happened that brought those memories rushing back. The bodies of an elderly couple were discovered at the Boulder Creek I.O.O.F. Cemetery by a volunteer caretaker. Authorities believed they had been there for approximately a week. A handgun and suicide note were reportedly found nearby, and the deaths were investigated as a possible double suicide. No foul play was suspected.
When Porter learned what had happened, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was still there.
There was no evidence to support that feeling, and she understood that others might see it differently. To them, it was simply an odd and tragic event. But they didn't know about the experiences she and Smith had encountered years earlier. So, she stayed quiet, yet Porter couldn't dismiss the thought that the couple may somehow have been drawn to the cemetery—perhaps even lured there by a presence that still seemed to linger.
The couple had lived right around the corner from the cemetery, making it even more difficult for Porter to understand why they had chosen that particular place. Although a physical health crisis was believed to have motivated one of the suicides, Porter couldn't completely accept that explanation as absolute. She couldn't understand why one partner would encourage or participate in the termination of a relatively healthy spouse... or why of all places - there. Why that particular cemetery to carry out a self-murder, not one suicide, but two.
It felt diabolical - it felt wrong.
The more she thought about it, the less rational it seemed. Something just didn't feel right. She couldn't explain it, but she couldn't shake that feeling either. She knew she would have to return.
2018
In 2018, Porter did return to the cemetery, this time with someone she believed could finally unmask and remove what she had experienced years before—something she had never been able to completely remove, herself: Don Phillips, a paranormal researcher from the United Kingdom and an expert in occult and malevolent phenomena.
This time, Porter would not be returning alone.
And this time, she intended to find out what had really been waiting for her in the cemetery all along.
The Return
In the late hours of Holy Saturday, March 31, 2018, Porter brought the United Kingdom team to the cemetery that had remained with her for nearly a decade—the same location where she and Smith had conducted numerous investigations years earlier.
For Porter, returning was personal.
At first glance, the cemetery appeared harmless. But as darkness approached and Phillips began speaking in Latin and Sumerian, something seemed to change. It was as though a veil had lifted, revealing the shadow figures once again—small, numerous figures that appeared almost childlike.
It was at that moment Porter realized:
The entities she and Smith had encountered years ago were still there.
Her intuition had been right all along. It was still there; they were still there; they were just hiding.
Phillips Investigation
Inside the cemetery, Phillips’ equipment began to malfunction. EVP recorders failed, batteries drained rapidly, and K2 meters stopped functioning altogether. Without the equipment, there was no way to gauge the intensity of whatever was present—or for Phelps to communicate with Becky, a spirit he claims has helped him from the other side. We were forced to go in completely blind.
Yet once we moved beyond the cemetery grounds, something even stranger occurred.
The equipment began working normally again, and we started capturing EVPs. The voices sounded distinctly human—voices that seemed to belong to people rather than something unknown. But what we heard left us with an unsettling thought: perhaps these were the spirits of those buried within the cemetery, somehow forced beyond its boundaries. As though something else had taken their place inside—something that did not belong among the dead and did not want them there.
Repeated EVPs could be heard saying:
“Help me. Help me. Help us.”
At one point, while inside the cemetery, Phillips asked, “Who is there?”
The recorder captured a voice that plainly answered:
“This is Evin.”
The voice sounded almost jovial, completley human. But Phillips believed it was a trickster entity attempting to deceive him rather than the spirit of a person.
Porter later learned from an associate with Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters who had lived in the area that the name they had heard was not Evin or Ian, as they had initially thought, but likely Ebin—a former caretaker of the cemetery. The discovery led Phillips to the conclusion, that the entity had been mimicking someone whose name was familiar to the location.
“It was uncanny. The voice was as clear as day. We all heard it, and none of us would have known about the previous caretaker,” Porter recalls.
What Happened That Night...
Porter is unable to reveal the explicit details of the investigation or the cleansing / exorcism of the location, that followed that night, out of respect for Phillips' request. Some experiences, she believes, are better left unexplained.
What she can reveal is that they remained at the cemetery from the late hours of Holy Saturday, March 31, 2018, moving into Easter Sunday—something none of them realized at the time. In hindsight, the significance of the date made the night even more profound.
As the first light of morning began to break, the cemetery felt different.
The oppressive atmosphere that had surrounded them through the night seemed to have lifted. On the ground were two large, solid-white feathers, lying in a place where Porter did not recall seeing them before. Birds of that color were not commonly seen in the area, particularly at the cemetery, making their presence all the more unusual. It was a small thing. But after everything that had happened that night, Porter couldn't help but notice. She considers the investigation one of the most unforgettable supernatural experiences of her life. Yet she rarely returns to the cemetery now.
Porter recalls, “I have years of experience investigating the paranormal, but this specific case was Supernatural. It has always been unlike anything else I have experienced, even to this day. Not everyone knows the full details of what happened. There are only a handful of witnesses who experienced what I am revealing. They, too, have remained largely silent about what happened.”
“I kept it quiet, even from the majority of my team at the time, as well as from the public. This is the first time I am publicly sharing and revealing what actually occurred from beginning to end - well at least in a nutshell. My silence was partly because of the uncertainty surrounding the encounter, and the judgement. There were a lot of different elements to it - but mostly I feared that novice investigators—or curious kids—who might go looking for answers at that location. During that era, curiosity could have gotten the better of them.”
“I am grateful for Phillips' help. At the time, we were filming at the Brookdale Lodge, and without his expertise and guidance, I don't believe this chapter would have ever been closed.”
"It's been nearly two decades since I and Smith, had went on that journey, I am just now sharing what actually transpired from the time it began to my final investigation in 2018, about a nine year span with that cemetery.", Porter believes she was brought back there for a reason. Perhaps the experiences she and Smith encountered years earlier were never meant to end with just them. Perhaps her return, years later, was part of something larger—a chance to finally help remove what had remained behind.
Whatever had been there, Porter believes it is no longer able to affect the living or the dead within the cemetery.
And for her, that is enough.
The cemetery had finally grown quiet.
BOULDER CREEK - I.O.O.F. CEMETERY
HISTORY
The mountains surrounding Boulder Creek were once a wilderness abundant with life. Grizzly bears roamed the forests, eagles soared above the redwoods, and salmon filled the streams. Long before the logging camps arrived, Indigenous peoples—including the Achista and Acsaggis—lived throughout these mountains, hunting, gathering, raising families, and living among the forests that had sustained them for generations.
That way of life changed with the arrival of outside cultures, and, by 1862, Boulder Creek had become a logging community. Towering redwoods were cut down and hauled away, dramatically altering the landscape. The destruction of the forests, along with the suffering and displacement of the area's Indigenous people, would later become part of a darker local belief—that the land had been violated and something had been left behind.
Fire, drought, floods, mudslides, and landslides repeatedly struck the mountain communities in the generations that followed. Whether natural consequences of the rugged terrain or something more, these events became woven into Boulder Creek's folklore.
Tucked away on a wooded hillside near the original town church is the I.O.O.F. Cemetery, established in 1882. For generations, it became the final resting place of Boulder Creek's pioneers, local families, children, and men who worked in the dangerous logging industry. Many of the earliest graves are now unmarked, their stories largely forgotten.
For a cemetery so deeply connected to the community's earliest history, it is perhaps no surprise that stories of the dead eventually became stories of the unexplained.
The Cemetery Takes a Darker Turn
By the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, stories began circulating about young people experimenting with the occult in and around the cemetery. Candles, strange symbols, and other objects were reportedly found among the headstones, believed to have been used in rituals.
Some residents chalked it up to the times. The occult had become a popular theme in movies and youth culture, and to some, this seemed like nothing more than harmless teenage shenanigans. Others, however, weren't so convinced. According to further research and conversations with longtime residents, that may not have been the whole story.
Several elderly residents recalled seeing something different during the 1980s and 1990s. Their accounts described gatherings involving individuals who appeared older, more experienced, and far more serious about whatever they were practicing.
Residents also spoke of a restricted area beyond the cemetery's metal barriers, where an older Native American burial ground was believed to exist. Whether the location was accurately identified or not, the area had long carried a reputation as somewhere people simply did not go.
Yet some reportedly crossed the barriers anyway. Residents recalled seeing people disappear beyond the fenced-off portion of the cemetery. Strange fire pits were also reportedly discovered among the graves, sometimes surrounded by candles, melted wax over the stones, ritual objects, and black charcoal dust scattered across the concrete. No one could say with certainty who had made the fires or what had taken place there. But the remains of activity suggested that whatever was happening was more deliberate than simple teenage curiosity.
And then there was the man...
The Man in the Woods
More than one account described an unidentified man believed to be between thirty and thirty-five years old. He was said to have long red hair and wore unusual, loosely wrapped clothing that some compared to a monk's robes. Several people independently recalled another disturbing feature—dark black markings around his eyes, almost as though he had drawn additional eyes onto his eyelids.
Some thought he was homeless. Others considered him a wanderer. Whatever his circumstances, those who remembered him agreed that something about the man seemed unusual.
He was reportedly seen spending considerable time in the wooded area behind the cemetery's metal barriers. What he was doing there was never established. Some believed he was involved in occult practices, while others refused to speculate.
According to one account, the man associated with five other individuals, believed to be considerably younger than he was—older teenagers or young adults. All five were eventually said to have died, or have suffered from some sort of debilitating injury, reportedly in accidents or other unusual circumstances.
One particularly disturbing recollection involved objects the man was said to wear around his neck and waistband. One witness believed some of them may have been human remains. Even decades later, the witness remained uncertain about what had actually been seen.
“No one would do something like that, would they? What were they doing up there in that cemetery? I don't rightly know what I saw. I know what I think I saw... but I still have a hard time believing it. What he was wearing didn't look fake to me. Looked real enough. He used to hang around with five others. They were young—kids, really. And every one of them ended up dying. Some kind of accident, or something. I don't know. I never did know what they were doing up there. Back then, nobody I knew would go anywhere near that cemetery.”
Those who remembered these accounts were reluctant to discuss them. None wanted to be identified, and several expressed genuine discomfort when asked to revisit memories that were decades old.
One witness put it simply:
“I don't want to think about it. My mind can't understand what I remember. I don't want my name brought into this. It's an uncomfortable memory. Maybe I'm crazy?”
The Figures Beyond the Fence
The stories did not end with the man in the woods. There were also recollections of small, ghostly figures appearing along the fence line near the nearby school. Some witnesses believed they were children who had wandered from the school grounds. According to one account, even teachers had mistaken the figures for students—only to discover that all of the children were accounted for.
“I remember even teachers who worked at the school thought it was a student, only to realize all of the children were accounted for.”
Whether these sightings were connected to the cemetery, the alleged gatherings in the woods, or something entirely unrelated remains impossible to determine.
Some local stories went further, claiming that rituals performed at the cemetery had awakened something that was not simply the spirit of someone buried there. Witnesses described shadowy figures among the trees, while others believed certain apparitions seemed to imitate the dead.
In the darker versions of these stories, they were not all spirits of those resting beneath the ground. Some were believed to be restless souls that had wandered beyond the realm intended for them. Others believed something else had been awakened among the trees—something that had no place among the dead. These are stories retold, recollections. But they became part of the growing lore surrounding the cemeteries dark memories.
The Investigation (S.C.G.H)
By 2009–2010, the legends surrounding the cemetery had become compelling enough to warrant investigation. After sunset, Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters investigators Maryanne Porter and Deena Smith entered the grounds with basic K-2 meters, REM Pod, recording equipment, and a desire to determine whether there was anything behind the stories.
The investigations soon became a regular part of their work. They returned at least once a month, often every other weekend, and sometimes more frequently, arriving at dusk or after dark. They were rarely disappointed.
K-2 meters frequently lit up. REM-Pods activated without explanation, and electronic voice phenomena were repeatedly captured. They also began seeing small figures moving among the graves—some resembling children, others appearing as short, dark, translucent shadows.
Over time, Porter and Smith became familiar with many of the names on the headstones and their stories. They began speaking to the spirits they believed remained there and often reported feeling as though something had touched them.
At first, the encounters seemed almost conversational. They would ask questions, receive what appeared to be responses, and sometimes even exchange friendly words with the voices they believed were coming through.
But when they reviewed the recordings later, something often seemed wrong.
Beneath the ordinary conversations were other voices, tones, and sounds that felt distinctly unsettling. The more they reviewed the EVPs, the more they questioned whether the voices belonged to the spirits they thought they were communicating with.
Perhaps they were not always encountering who—or what—they believed they were.
One presence, however, seemed different. Near the far gate stood the grave of a man named George. Porter and Smith came to regard him almost as a guardian of the cemetery. Each time they entered, they said hello. Before leaving, they always said goodbye.
It became an unspoken rule: never leave without saying goodbye to George.
Whether George truly watched over the cemetery or whether his grave simply became associated with that feeling, they never knew. But the ritual continued. And as the months passed, the cemetery became more familiar to them—and somehow, more unsettling.
Boulder Creek Cemetery had a story to tell...
The Night Everything Changed
Until one particular night, Porter and Smith believed they were dealing primarily with restless, earthbound spirits—souls that, for reasons unknown, seemed unable to move on. By then, however, they had begun to suspect something more was happening.
They decided it was time to try to help release them.
Drawing from Catholic, Native American, Haitian, and Wiccan practices, they combined holy water, tobacco offerings, rum libations, and sage smudging, calling upon ancestral spirits to help guide those who might be trapped.
Then came the response.
When they asked if the spirits were sorry, an EVP answered:
“We're sorry.”
Almost immediately, one of the investigators was physically scratched across the back of the leg.
For a brief moment, the cemetery seemed to change. It was as though a doorway had opened—allowing some spirits to move on while exposing something that had been hidden behind them all along. The mask had come off.
What emerged was not the presence they believed they had been communicating with, but something dark, angry, and relentless.
That night, the investigators left the cemetery.
But the cemetery did not leave them.
Something went home with one of them.
What Followed Them Home
When Porter and Smith returned home and reviewed the recordings, it became clear that something unusual had happened inside the cemetery.
Then one of the investigators realized something even more disturbing. Whatever they had encountered appeared to have followed her home. A thick, shadowy humanoid darkness seemed to move across the walls. Her spouse witnessed it as well, and even the family dog reacted, chasing, barking and climbing on the walls after the strange dark shadow, as it visibly moved across the home's cathedral ceilings, almost like a crawl along the walls. Whatever it was, it did not appear to be something that only one person could see.
More disturbing was where its attention seemed focused. It appeared fixated on the investigator who had disrupted whatever was hiding within the cemetery. In the EVP recordings, the presence referred to the cemetery as “MY HOUSE.”
What followed became a nearly three-week spiritual battle. The investigator later described it as a struggle of will and love against hate, as efforts were made to remove the presence from the home and from herself. After approximately three weeks, she knew she had finally forced it to leave—she felt it, sending it back to wherever it had come from.
Later, Porter and Smith returned to the cemetery. The atmosphere seemed different. The intense activity had quieted, and for a time, they believed they had finally closed the door. They thought they had created a safety net between themselves and whatever had been there.
They were wrong.
The trickster had only been pretending, hiding from them in specific.
The Years That Followed
Over the next couple of years, Smith eventually moved out of state while Porter continued her work with Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters. She occasionally returned to the cemetery with other team members and conducted several tours. Activity was still reported, but it never seemed to reach the intensity of those earlier investigations.
Still, Porter never forgot what had happened. The experiences inside the cemetery—and what followed one of them home—were not something the two women openly discussed. Some memories are easier to leave untouched, and eventually Porter stopped investigating the cemetery altogether. But leaving the cemetery behind did not mean she had stopped thinking about it.
2017
Then, in October 2017, something happened that brought those memories rushing back. The bodies of an elderly couple were discovered at the Boulder Creek I.O.O.F. Cemetery by a volunteer caretaker. Authorities believed they had been there for approximately a week. A handgun and suicide note were reportedly found nearby, and the deaths were investigated as a possible double suicide. No foul play was suspected.
When Porter learned what had happened, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was still there.
There was no evidence to support that feeling, and she understood that others might see it differently. To them, it was simply an odd and tragic event. But they didn't know about the experiences she and Smith had encountered years earlier. So, she stayed quiet, yet Porter couldn't dismiss the thought that the couple may somehow have been drawn to the cemetery—perhaps even lured there by a presence that still seemed to linger.
The couple had lived right around the corner from the cemetery, making it even more difficult for Porter to understand why they had chosen that particular place. Although a physical health crisis was believed to have motivated one of the suicides, Porter couldn't completely accept that explanation as absolute. She couldn't understand why one partner would encourage or participate in the termination of a relatively healthy spouse... or why of all places - there. Why that particular cemetery to carry out a self-murder, not one suicide, but two.
It felt diabolical - it felt wrong.
The more she thought about it, the less rational it seemed. Something just didn't feel right. She couldn't explain it, but she couldn't shake that feeling either. She knew she would have to return.
2018
In 2018, Porter did return to the cemetery, this time with someone she believed could finally unmask and remove what she had experienced years before—something she had never been able to completely remove, herself: Don Phillips, a paranormal researcher from the United Kingdom and an expert in occult and malevolent phenomena.
This time, Porter would not be returning alone.
And this time, she intended to find out what had really been waiting for her in the cemetery all along.
The Return
In the late hours of Holy Saturday, March 31, 2018, Porter brought the United Kingdom team to the cemetery that had remained with her for nearly a decade—the same location where she and Smith had conducted numerous investigations years earlier.
For Porter, returning was personal.
At first glance, the cemetery appeared harmless. But as darkness approached and Phillips began speaking in Latin and Sumerian, something seemed to change. It was as though a veil had lifted, revealing the shadow figures once again—small, numerous figures that appeared almost childlike.
It was at that moment Porter realized:
The entities she and Smith had encountered years ago were still there.
Her intuition had been right all along. It was still there; they were still there; they were just hiding.
Phillips Investigation
Inside the cemetery, Phillips’ equipment began to malfunction. EVP recorders failed, batteries drained rapidly, and K2 meters stopped functioning altogether. Without the equipment, there was no way to gauge the intensity of whatever was present—or for Phelps to communicate with Becky, a spirit he claims has helped him from the other side. We were forced to go in completely blind.
Yet once we moved beyond the cemetery grounds, something even stranger occurred.
The equipment began working normally again, and we started capturing EVPs. The voices sounded distinctly human—voices that seemed to belong to people rather than something unknown. But what we heard left us with an unsettling thought: perhaps these were the spirits of those buried within the cemetery, somehow forced beyond its boundaries. As though something else had taken their place inside—something that did not belong among the dead and did not want them there.
Repeated EVPs could be heard saying:
“Help me. Help me. Help us.”
At one point, while inside the cemetery, Phillips asked, “Who is there?”
The recorder captured a voice that plainly answered:
“This is Evin.”
The voice sounded almost jovial, completley human. But Phillips believed it was a trickster entity attempting to deceive him rather than the spirit of a person.
Porter later learned from an associate with Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters who had lived in the area that the name they had heard was not Evin or Ian, as they had initially thought, but likely Ebin—a former caretaker of the cemetery. The discovery led Phillips to the conclusion, that the entity had been mimicking someone whose name was familiar to the location.
“It was uncanny. The voice was as clear as day. We all heard it, and none of us would have known about the previous caretaker,” Porter recalls.
What Happened That Night...
Porter is unable to reveal the explicit details of the investigation or the cleansing / exorcism of the location, that followed that night, out of respect for Phillips' request. Some experiences, she believes, are better left unexplained.
What she can reveal is that they remained at the cemetery from the late hours of Holy Saturday, March 31, 2018, moving into Easter Sunday—something none of them realized at the time. In hindsight, the significance of the date made the night even more profound.
As the first light of morning began to break, the cemetery felt different.
The oppressive atmosphere that had surrounded them through the night seemed to have lifted. On the ground were two large, solid-white feathers, lying in a place where Porter did not recall seeing them before. Birds of that color were not commonly seen in the area, particularly at the cemetery, making their presence all the more unusual. It was a small thing. But after everything that had happened that night, Porter couldn't help but notice. She considers the investigation one of the most unforgettable supernatural experiences of her life. Yet she rarely returns to the cemetery now.
Porter recalls, “I have years of experience investigating the paranormal, but this specific case was Supernatural. It has always been unlike anything else I have experienced, even to this day. Not everyone knows the full details of what happened. There are only a handful of witnesses who experienced what I am revealing. They, too, have remained largely silent about what happened.”
“I kept it quiet, even from the majority of my team at the time, as well as from the public. This is the first time I am publicly sharing and revealing what actually occurred from beginning to end - well at least in a nutshell. My silence was partly because of the uncertainty surrounding the encounter, and the judgement. There were a lot of different elements to it - but mostly I feared that novice investigators—or curious kids—who might go looking for answers at that location. During that era, curiosity could have gotten the better of them.”
“I am grateful for Phillips' help. At the time, we were filming at the Brookdale Lodge, and without his expertise and guidance, I don't believe this chapter would have ever been closed.”
"It's been nearly two decades since I and Smith, had went on that journey, I am just now sharing what actually transpired from the time it began to my final investigation in 2018, about a nine year span with that cemetery.", Porter believes she was brought back there for a reason. Perhaps the experiences she and Smith encountered years earlier were never meant to end with just them. Perhaps her return, years later, was part of something larger—a chance to finally help remove what had remained behind.
Whatever had been there, Porter believes it is no longer able to affect the living or the dead within the cemetery.
And for her, that is enough.
The cemetery had finally grown quiet.
Electric Voice Phenomenon: Three things going on in this EVP. 1# Smith, asks if they are sorry. 2# Porter suddenly hears someone talking & replies hello. #3. Something unseen touches Porter's leg, and she states, "Something came up on me". When replaying the audio we hear a disembodied response early on saying "Were sorry".
Copyright & Use Notice This story, its purpose and content, including the investigation report, research, documentation, historical material, images and personal experiences described herein, is the exclusive intellectual property of its author and Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters. This work may not be copied, reproduced, republished, distributed, altered, adapted, recreated, claimed as the work of another person or entity, or used for commercial purposes, monetary gain, or any other purpose without the express written consent and permission of the author. ©2026MaryannePorter. All rights reserved. Some images are simulated reconstructions or digitized renditions / reconstruction That means especially you, A. G EVP Boulder Creek Cemetery "The Early Years, S.C.G.H - "Were sorry" 2010.2026S.C.G.H®.™© |
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