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Mexicali, the capital of the Mexican state of Baja California, is a young city by Mexican standards. It was built in 1903 when irrigation canals from the Colorado River allowed for agriculture to blossom in the middle of one of North America’s harshest deserts. Although Mexicali is not steeped in history, it does have its share of urban legends and tales of terror. Here are four ghost stories from this Mexican desert metropolis.
Number One…. The Lady of the Five
Many years ago, in the center of old Mexicali there lived a woman who mistreated her children a lot, yelled at them, hit them and locked them in closets for hours. Years passed, then her children grew up, got married and abandoned her.
The lady felt guilty and remorseful, so she decided to go to church to talk to the priest and told him all the things she had done to her children over the many years. The father, upon hearing what the woman had committed, told her that her sins were many, and that a mother like her could only travel to Rome to find God’s forgiveness there. The lady was very poor, however, and had no way to pay for a bus trip to Tijuana, much less a long journey to Rome. So as not to seem too insensitive to the woman’s dilemma, the priest allowed her to beg for alms in front of the church. To make her penance harder she should only accept five-centavo coins and if anyone were to give her coins of another amount, she had to return them.
The woman left the church and that same day she began her penance. Every day she sat in front of the church to ask for money. Many people were surprised to see that when they tried to give her coins of greater value, she rejected them, so they began to call her “The Lady of the Five. “
Years later, and shortly before she was able to get enough money for the trip, the lady became seriously ill, and she died. Days after her death, a man walking in front of the church saw a woman wearing a veil on her head with a very humble appearance. The woman approached him and asked for a five-centavo coin. He didn’t have any, but the man offered her a twenty-centavos coin. Then she uncovered her face, and it was the face of a skull. She then yelled at the man for not giving her what she asked for. He ran away in terror.
And so it happened that many people reported the same thing, and misfortunes happened to many of them shortly after. The story became so popular that in Mexicali, for many years, it was customary to always carry a five-centavo coin if you went out on the street just in case you crossed paths with the Lady of the Five.
Number Two… Hidden Treasure – and More – in the Cerro Prieto
The Cocopah Indians called this small volcanic mountain, Wee Naay. They believed that it was once a gigantic monster that had tongues of fire, and it used those tongues to flick out flaming rocks whenever it became angry. Geologists believe that the volcano has been dormant for nearly 10,000 years, so these legends of an active volcano date back to a time deep in prehistory. The magma dome below the mountain is the reason why Mexico’s largest geothermal generating plant is located next to Cerro Prieto. Various telecommunications towers call the crest of the volcano home and inside the crater people have historically left messages with pebbles and rocks on its flat surface. In recent years, locals have created a gigantic black vulture image in the center of the crater approximating an ancient Cocopah petroglyph. The vulture allegedly can be seen from space by satellites.
Besides the earth monster legend of prehistory, the mountain has legends dating back to the late 1800s from the decades before Mexicali was developed as a permanent settlement. There is one legend of three brothers who struck it rich in the area by finding gold near the Colorado River Delta. The brothers worked for years gathering the gold and smelting it into bars. Eventually, they needed a place to stash their treasure, so they supposedly hid all of it in a volcanic tube or cave somewhere on the Cerro Prieto. The three brothers died tragically together in an accident, and they left behind no map for anyone else to find their treasure. Since those days, many treasure hunters have been poking around the volcano in hopes of stumbling across this legendary hoard of gold. Over the years, some unprepared people – blinded by their own greed – have not taken proper precautions in the summertime when temperatures rise to close to 120 degrees in the area. The mountain has had its share of fatalities because of this, and as a result, there are legends on top of legends there, including those involving the ghosts of the three gold-mining brothers and the sordid tales of the restless spirits of dead treasure hunters who still haunt the slopes of the volcano and scare hikers and other visitors. To this day, no gold has been found, or at least no one has come forth and admitted they have found any treasure there.
Number Three…. The Ghost of the Forgotten Piano Teacher
From a hidden place in an old school in Mexicali the sound of an old piano played by hands that no longer belong to this earthly world has been heard countless times. The piano of the Leona Vicario Elementary School has become a legend in this city where the sun burns even in the shadows and the sound of the keys resonates from the basement of the institution where children play without knowing of the presence of an entity that wants to return to playing the instrument. The story goes that the music teacher died many years ago in that place and although it is unknown exactly how 
she died, over the years it has been said that on the last day before summer vacations the teacher was playing the piano by herself alone in her classroom. When the security personnel came to knock on her door to tell her that the doors to the school were going to close, the woman did not hear them because of the loud sound of her music, and so the security personnel left. The teacher did not realize until a few hours later that everyone had already gone, and she had been left alone and locked in that place. Her heart held the hope that someone would come to rescue her. She decided to play the piano loudly in a desperate attempt to draw the attention of passersby. However, hours and days passed, and the teacher fainted due to lack of water and food until one day she died. It was not until two months later when the staff returned from vacation that the teacher was found dead at the scene. They say that to this day you can still clearly hear the piano being played loudly and frantically without anyone being inside the school. It is believed that it is the lost soul of the teacher who plays melodies trying to be heard and for someone to come and rescue her from the confinement in which she was trapped.
Number Four… The Child Phantoms of the House of Culture
As Mexicali is a relatively new city by Mexican standards, its very first elementary school opened in the year 1916. A stone’s throw from the Mexican border with the United States, it was called the Cuahutémoc School in honor of the Aztec emperor of the same name. Over the years, the school building served many functions. After the elementary school was moved to a larger facility, the building became a teachers’ college. In 1974, the building changed functions once again and became Mexicali’s House of Culture, which it remains to this day.
The building is supposedly the home to two ghosts of elementary school children. According to legend, in the early days of the school, probably the late 1920s, the school was being sprayed with 
toxic chemicals to combat a severe cockroach infestation. Little did the exterminators realize, but a little boy, 8 or 9 years old, had locked himself in one of the ground-floor bathrooms and was unaware of the fumigation until it was too late. When the school opened the next day, they found the lifeless body of the little boy in the bathroom. Since then – even well into the 21st Century – people have claimed to hear the cries of a small child, gasping for air and begging for someone to unlock the door. The other ghost at Mexicali’s House of Culture is that of a little girl. This macabre legend has some interesting variations. Sometime in the 1930s a 9-year-old girl crashed through a second story window at the school and fell to her death. In some tellings of the story she was pushed through the window by an unknown assailant. In other versions of the story she jumped on her own accord, committing suicide deliberately. In still other renditions of this sordid tale, the little girl was either possessed by demons or was under the spell of a witch, which caused her to take a flying leap through the window. Whatever the details may be, to this day people claim to see the apparition of a small girl dressed in 1930s clothes wandering the halls of the House of Culture as if lost and trying to find a way out.
REFERENCES:
Trujillo Muñoz, Gabriel. Mitos y leyendas de Mexicali. Mexico City: Editorial Larva, 2003.