In 1897, for the second time in 30 years, an epidemic of tuberculosis swept across the Southwest. Southern California was particularly hard hit. The disease was highly infectious and there was no cure. It was a slow cruel killer. The fever it induced was so high you felt you were being burned alive, and it cut off your air slowly, filling your lungs with thick black bile until you suffocated. It was like drowning slowly in a dark, stagnant lake.
With hospitals and sanitariums filled to capacity, residents did the only thing they could when a family member showed signs of infection: They were quarantined lest everyone around them die. Thousands of people died agonizing, slow deaths and the screams of those tormented souls were heard throughout these facilities and homes.
Across San Diego County, ironically a place where many sought refuge from the disease, barns and field workers' houses became sad prisons of isolation for the doomed.
The Torrins house at the Fairgrounds was no exception. In February of that year, Mr. James Torrins, the 38-year-old owner of the Torrins house and his youngest daughter, Elisabeth, only 6 years old, were struck. The father gathered the little girl in his arms and they headed into a barn by the racetrack that still stands on the Fairgrounds.
James' wife, Annalisa, would spend hours every day on a bench across from the barn, talking to her husband and daughter through the window, and watching as the disease's insidious effects slowly tortured them to death. After two months, Elisabeth's little body was wracked in pain. Her father could no longer cool her fever or calm her continual coughing. Her cries for help could be heard all the way to the Torrins house, where Annalisa often stood in an upper-floor window at night and watched as the horror unfolded in the dim light of the barn's small windows.
As Annalisa's sister was to tell it more than 40 years later, one night when Annalisa was watching her husband and daughter through the open window, she saw him take a pillow, and cover the suffering girl's face until her small body stopped writhing and lay still.
Annalisa felt as if she had been nailed to the floor. She couldn't breath and she couldn't move. She watched him take a shovel, scoop up the little girl's limp body in his arms and carry her out of the barn.
In a panic, Annalisa rushed down the stairs and followed James out to the small graveyard used for dogs and racehorses, a graveyard which is preserved to this day behind the Fairgrounds' main racetrack. Her hopes of finding Elisabeth alive were dashed when she reached the graveyard and saw her lifeless form lying on the ground next to where James was digging. The night air was bone-cold and Annalisa's exiting breath was an eerie opaque mist. As she approached the child, she instantly noticed that the air around Elisabeth's body was deadly still, and it was at this moment she realized her adored daughter was gone forever.
James, madly digging and oblivious of Annalisa's presence, continued his cruel task. He finished the grave, buried Elisabeth and walked back to the barn. On his face was a look of wild torment that frightened Annalisa to her soul.
Compelled to help James, but unable to move from her daughter, Annalisa remained at the grave all night. When the sun broke, exhausted and grief-stricken, she dragged herself to the barn, trying to ease her misery with the thought that she at least still had her husband.
She felt more peaceful as she approached the barn, as it seemed James's horrific coughing had slowed. The only sound now coming from the barn was a rhythmic creaking. Thinking that James was inside pumping water into the wash basin, she tapped on the small window. Receiving no response, she tapped again and looked closer. To her horror, in the shadows of the barn, James's body swung from a rafter, his eyes wide open and a look of terror on his face.
Screaming, Annalisa ran to her home, climbed the steps to her room, slammed the door and refused to leave. Day after day, she sat in her window, hoping once again to see the images of her dearly loved husband and daughter through the barn window.
Annalisa became a recluse, never leaving the Torrins house again until it was sold in 1922, the year an epidemic of TB returned to plague San Diego. She moved back East to live with her sister.
Some say the story's not true.That yes, the epidemic hit the farm, and yes the father and daughter did get sick, but he did not suffocate his little girl out in that barn.
Annalisa's family knows otherwise, as do the dozens of Fairgrounds staff and visitors. Over the years, they have reported seeing the ghostly vision of a distressed and sorrowful woman, frantically running through the stable area.
And on dark and moonless nights, some have seen a tormented male specter roaming the same area with a wrapped bundle in his arms.