Mt. Madonna State Park

A girl in a long white dress is said to ride a horse through the fog over the hills of Mount Madonna and vanish, and visitors have described her walking the wooded verge of Pole Line Road near midnight and sitting in the back seats of cars trying to hitch rides; others say Henry Miller himself haunts the ruins of his mansion, one of his favorite places on earth. The legend is of his daughter Sarah Alice, who died on the property when her horse was startled and threw her; one account has its foreleg going into a gopher hole and the animal coming down on top of her. Sources disagree about her: some give her as eight years old, dying on 14 June 1879, others as twelve, in 1875, and the Miller family plot is in Colma, not at the park. Henry Miller was born Heinrich Kreiser in 1827, reached California in 1850 and became the Cattle King, holding over 1.25 million acres and a million head of cattle at his height. He built a summer estate in the redwoods above Gilroy, within reach of his Bloomfield Ranch. The mansion burned in 1901, which is why only concrete footings, stone walls and a few broken steps remain.