Blood Wall in Prison

The Ghost of Hornitos

One tale, handed down from generation to generation by Chinese Americans whose ancestors lived through these times, tells of an unfortunate Chinese miner in Mariposa County, south of the CPRR line, who was thrown in jail after he accidentally wounded a white miner in an altercation. Imprisonment did not satisfy twenty white men loaded with whiskey. They wanted blood. They stormed the jail and managed to slip a rope through the bars and around the prisoner. The gang gleefully pulled and pulled, squeezing the man’s body against the bars until suddenly his agonized screams stopped. The rope flew out soaked with viscera. His body had been cut in two and his head battered to a pulp. The jail cell was a mass of gore. For years afterward, prisoners who inhabited the murder cell swore a Chinese ghost haunted the place. Try as they might, jailers could never completely cover over the bloodstains on the walls. They were still faintly visible more than seventy-five years later, the lingering presence of what became known as the Ghost of Hornitos (Chang, 2019, p. 161).