Haunted Santa Barbara: Insidious Apparition Lingers At This Park

In the southeast part of Santa Barbara, the largest privately-funded park in the United States – Elings Park – sits sprawled across the cityscape.

Whether it’s hiking or playing sports, running around on the playground equipment or just enjoying beautiful landscaping that gets your motor running, you can be assured that Elings Park is going to have it all for you.

Just make sure that you leave before dark, because sometimes things get a little spooky after nightfall…

Updated 2/10/2020 – Those who have seen her call her Queen Maab, after the Shakespeare line of course.

If the local rumors and the stories of those from elsewhere who have spent any length of time in the park are true, she comes out as the sun is setting each night, and wanders the park like a shadowed breeze.

She is the spirit queen of the realm, a dark and beautiful woman whose presence lingers long after you have run away in terror.

The Ghostly Woman Walks The Lonely Paths Of Elings Park At Night

This Queen Maab has been known to whisper details of her life, and sometimes a visitor will hear what he or she at first assumes to be a breath of wind blowing through the trees, but which will carry with it the resonant vibrations of chilling words.

Unlike so many restless spirits, who wander the earth after they have perished (often at the hands of another), Queen Maab seems to be paying some sort of penance for her own act of murder.

Whispers are all the details she gives, and the rare person who hears them generally does not have enough information from which to extrapolate the whole story, but it is safe to say that she suffers from guilt over something she did in her earthly life.

Her Haunted Eyes Tell A Story Of Sorrow And Fear

The Ghostly Woman Walks The Lonely Paths Of Elings Park At Night

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“In the old days,” says one man, whose native forebears left the area over a century ago, but who came back and resettled their roots within the past twenty years or so, “it was understood by my people that the woman was to be left alone.

That she carried the sorrow of her deeds, and that for one reason or another she was doomed to carry it alone.

There were no thrill-seekers trying to make her come out at night, or trying to get her to release the secrets that she carries to the wind.

“If anything, people didn’t want to know, because whatever it was that had her so troubled might be visited in some way upon you if you were to pry it out of her.

People today may be smart, but they seem to lack the wisdom that members of my tribe once had in the long ago.

It would be best for everyone if they left her alone; let her grieve the mistakes she made in the past life throughout the course of this one, and perhaps check yourself on a regular basis to make sure that you don’t end up making the same mistakes – after all, how would you like to spend eternity suffering for the sins of your past?”