As the sun dipped behind the mountains and the lights of El Paso began to glow, dozens of people gathered at Tom Lea Park on Oct. 5 with lawn chairs and blankets for an evening of ghost stories and local lore. The autumn breeze carried laughter and conversation for Lost El Paso Paranormal’s monthly series, Paranormal in the Park.
Hosted by author and tour guide Heather Shade, the free event invited locals to share stories, explore haunted history and connect with local folklore. For Shade, the series began in order to bring the community together without having to worry about ticket prices.
“It’s just a more lowkey way we can have the community gather together and everyone can be included. That was the idea behind it.” Shade said.
Across the park, clusters of people settled across the grass. Among them was Mandy Mendoza, who came with her family to celebrate a birthday.
“We’d been out and about, and we’re fans of horror and anything macabre,” Mendoza said. “So, when we saw this event pop up, we said, ‘Let’s go check it out.’ I definitely believe there are energies around us we can’t always explain. El Paso is a pretty old city, a lot of people have passed through, and those stories deserve to be shared.”
Sitting nearby was Kylie Logan and her mother, who were waiting for their first paranormal event to begin. Logan said she found the paranormal interesting and believed in it due to her own experiences growing up.
“I used to play with a Ouija board. Things would end up happening here and there,” Logan said. “It was really weird. It was really, really scary.”
When Shade began her first story of the night, she took the audience back to 1897, when a devastating flood destroyed much of downtown El Paso. Families fled to the foothills where a small community called Stormsville took root.
“Can you imagine it being asleep and sirens start going off, the sirens that they wind. The levee had broken, and a wave 10 feet tall was coming right into El Paso. People were jumping out of bed, grabbing their children and what belongings they could.” Shade said.
As the park lamps flickered to life, Shade moved to one of El Paso’s most famous hauntings: El Paso High School. Designed in 1916, the building’s tall columns and stone stairs earned it the nickname “The Lady on the Hill,” the perfect setting for a ghost story.
The school’s Legend, Shade explained, is long and full of mystery, from sightings of a ghostly girl wandering the upper floors, sealed off classrooms and a basement once used as a morgue.
“The famous part of the haunting is the ghostly girl people have claimed to see on the upper floors area even from outside at night in the upper windows looking out,” Shade said.
Shade also shared a a more personal story of her sister’s own eerie experience while working as a substitute teacher at the school.
“One day she heard a girl crying right outside her classroom door. She looked out and no one was there. Then she hears the crying again, down the hall, just around the corner. Thinking ‘These kids are messing with me’ She gets up and looks but there’s no one and nowhere anybody could have gone.” Shade said.
Though no record confirms a student’s death at El Paso High School, Shade said the legend is strengthened by the school’s imposing presence and the stories passed through generations.
“They [the stories] have a lot of classical elements to them. It’s the location, I mean, it looks haunted from the outside,” Shade said. “So as soon as you start telling someone about it, it captures the imagination, and then the history bleeds in and leans into that.”
As the storytelling wrapped up and the crowd began to disperse, Shade said her favorite part of hosting Paranormal in the Park is sharing El Paso’s history while bringing people together through a shared curiosity of the unexplained.
Despite her fascination with the supernatural, she considers herself more as a skeptic than a believer. What draws her most is the process, connecting stories of hauntings to the city’s past.
“I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, per se. I believe in the possibility,” Shade said. “I love the process of research and investigation, putting the puzzle pieces together to see if we can match what people might be experiencing with something we can find in history.”
As the last of the crowd folded up their chairs and the park had emptied, Shade said that’s what keeps her coming back, the stories, laughter and chance to keep El Paso’s history alive through the people who joining her to hear it.
Jewel Ocampo is a staff reporter for The Prospector and may be reached at [email protected].
