In some parts of the Bay Area, ghosts still exist, if you can conjure them.
All you need are waypoints to a vanished time — decaying old buildings, a tombstone or two, a little history and a few old photos — and your imagination. You’ll find those spirits from the past in surprising locations — amid rolling hills in a lovely East Bay valley, for example, or on a muddy island at the south end of the bay.
The towns of Nortonville, Somersville, Stewartville, West Hartley and Judsonville were built around a dozen of those mines. Men and boys dug deep, the grimy fruits of their labor sent by rail and ship to San Francisco, Sacramento and Stockton. Horrific deaths occurred with regularity along the hundreds of miles of underground workings. Tunnels collapsed, methane gas and coal dust exploded. But it wasn’t until the coal seam petered out that residents packed up their belongings and left.
The journey starts at an old mine works with an explosive and tragic history, stops at a graveyard with views to die for, passes through the site of the coal district’s biggest town and mine and delivers you to the quite peculiar residence of a phantom named Jim. Along the way, signs offer photos and information to help your imagination populate these long-gone dwellings.
Midwife Sarah Norton, right, with a member of the Gordon family of Clayton, pictured in a Contra Costa County Historical Society photo on an information sign at Rose Hill Cemetery in Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve near Antioch, Calif. “We find the name ‘White Witch’ for her disrespectful,” says student interpretive aide Miranda Shuba, while greeting preserve visitors on a recent afternoon. “When people ask about the ‘White Witch,’ we give them the backstory. She helped deliver hundreds of children and never lost one, not the mother or the baby. If Sarah Norton was next to you at your birth, everything was going to be OK.”
You can stop here or continue up the Nortonville Trail over a low saddle and down a steep slope to Nortonville, the metropolis of the Diablo Valley Coal Fields. Founded by Sarah Norton’s husband, Noah, it had more than 1,000 residents in its glory days, with a school, stores, churches, hotel and saloons.
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