Drum Barracks

Established in January 1862 as Camp San Pedro and soon renamed Camp Drum after Lieutenant Colonel Richard Drum, this post served as Union Army headquarters for Southern California and the Arizona and New Mexico territories during the Civil War. Of its original buildings, only two survive: the junior officers' quarters, preserved since 1987 as the Drum Barracks Civil War Museum, and a powder magazine on private property a few blocks away. Staff and visitors report footsteps and the sound of dragging chains in the house, a woman they call Maria seen in a hoop skirt with the scent of lavender and violets, and objects tossed down the stairwell as if by a child. Unsolved Mysteries featured the museum in the early 1990s in a segment on Civil War ghosts, with witnesses describing apparitions of soldiers, and Most Haunted investigated it in 2005.