Sunset Heights neighborhood [Halloween Special]

Sunset Heights neighborhood [Halloween Special]

Hi, and welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña, and in this episode, we are talking about one of my absolute favorite neighborhoods, Sunset Heights. Okay, we're going to jump right into this one, and one of the many reasons that I love

Sunset Heights is because it's one of the original neighborhoods. It's a historic neighborhood, and it has some of the earliest homes of El Paso. So many famous people back in the day, up to even now, have lived there or currently live there.

It's a super charming place, lots of different styles of homes, and its location is just unbelievable. So you can kind of see I-10 running there. It's that curved highway there.

I'm not sure if you can see that, but Sunset Heights is just northwest of downtown. You can literally walk or ride your bike right into downtown. To the south and west is Mexico. You can see Juarez directly, virtually from your front step or your windows.

Up to the northwest is UTEP, so there's all that college energy there. I mean, there's just so much going on. It's right by Mesa. It's right by everything that you would want to be by if you're into kind of city living.

So I really love the neighborhood. I think it's just so charming. And as you can see, here's a little shot from kind of up on a cliff. This is looking at Mexico there, and a little bit south and west.

This is looking at downtown. This is Sunset Grocery. This is kind of one of the iconic buildings that you'll see when you're driving down I-10. It's just, as you're going to see from some of the homes, they're just really unique,

really fun. Like I said, it is a historic neighborhood. And since we're getting so close to Halloween, I thought I would do a little bit of an episode kind of geared towards that.

I recently attended a Facebook event put on by a group here in El Paso, El Paso Paranormal, Lost El Paso Paranormal, excuse me. They are a really awesome couple that did kind of like a history lesson slash haunted ghost kind of stories from this area.

And since this is such an old area, there's a lot of really fun stories. So I'm going to do my best to kind of recapture some of those stories for you. As you take a look at some of these beautiful Sunset Heights homes, here's just a couple of stories, and I'm sure I am not doing them justice, but I'm going to do my best.

So the El Paso County Historical Society owns the Burgess House, and this is a house back in the day that was built by this couple, Mr. and Mrs. Burgess. Took them a year and a half to build it. The wife passed away right before it was finished.

Her sister-in-law moved in to take care of the family and the kids. And the Historical Society called Lost El Paso Paranormal in to kind of investigate some of that paranormal activity, because upstairs there's a bridal room, and even now it can be rented out for weddings.

But there are stories of seeing a woman in white walking around. There's also an amazing private library here, I guess. And if you're working in the library, and say you walk out for a while, but you leave your papers scattered around, you might come back and, you know, your papers would be all

cleaned up. There's an oak tree in the front yard that's supposed to be over 100 years old. That was planted by Mr. Burgess in 1915. And I didn't find this home, but like I said, it's just one of the great stories.

There was another fun story about the Hickson House. It's a home from the early 1900s that was the home of a jeweler from Chicago. There was a story about kind of a secret window between the saloon and his jewelry store, where he would kind of get these drunk guys to spend all of their money on jewelry.

But the home is supposed to be beautiful, crystal chandeliers, stained glass. And they also did a ghost investigation there, because there were stories of kind of a ghost wearing old-fashioned soldier's clothes that could be spotted. They told a fun story about a young lady who moved in up the street, who would jog down,

and every time she would pass by, she would see this old woman eating breakfast. And finally the jogger decided that, you know, she would finally come over and, you know, say hello and introduce herself. And a younger woman opened up the door, heard the story, got ghost white because her mother

had passed away, actually, in this home. So thought that was a pretty great story. There are actually a lot of apartments, kind of apartment buildings in this space. There's one off of Randolph Street.

And there's a ghost story about if you move the furniture around, the ghosts really don't like that. And so, you know, you would eventually end up putting the furniture back and everything would be fine.

There's another fun story about a park or gazebo now that was a cemetery in 1880. And some bodies were moved. And of course there are questions where maybe some of the bodies left behind. And so that was a pretty fun story.

There are, I believe, three nice little parks in Sunset Heights. There's another apartment building called the Fairview Apartments that was commissioned by Pancho Villa, and supposedly he stayed somewhere close as well, but it was commissioned by Pancho Villa for a place for his men to stay.

They could watch and see kind of Mexico and Juarez and make reports. This was all during the Mexico Revolution. In the late 1800s, there was a place called Mesa Gardens. It's no longer there.

It's a parking lot now. But it was kind of up on a hill, and it was a crazy place, I guess. Really wild. Had a garden, a museum, an amusement park, a botanical gardens.

There was actually bear wrestling. There was a shooting gallery and shooting competitions. Pretty crazy place. There was this huge band called the McGinty Band that played music there.

So that sounds like a pretty wild and fun place. And finally, if you are up for it, you can search Cardiff Giant, and that's a pretty fun story. It's an old hoax that was pulled back in the day.

This kind of big, mummified body of this prehistoric giant, and supposedly it ended up in El Paso, even in, rumor has it, at that Mesa Gardens crazy and wild place. Okay, and the place that you're seeing right now is called the Turtle House, and this has a great history as well.

So back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the railroad was going in, which was huge, which was one of the things that really made El Paso significant, and a lot of Chinese immigrants were brought in to do the labor on the railroad. But the United States passed the Chinese Exclusionary Act, which said that these immigrants couldn't

bring their family over. So what would happen if they wanted to be with their family, their family would end up living in Mexico. But legend has it that this Turtle House has underground tunnels, and believe it or not,

this has been proven that there are actually tunnels there, but the legend is that there was actually a house or a building in Juarez with this exact same turtle symbol, and the two places were connected by those underground tunnels. So since then, a lot of those tunnels have been filled in with bricks and dirt, but it

was a pretty great story. I guess in the 1980s, there was a truck driving through this alley here, and a big sinkhole opened up, and the truck went in, so that caused them to, you know, maybe fill in some of the tunnels.

And if you are up on your Living in El Paso, Texas episodes, in one of the last episodes I talked about things to do in El Paso and how I went on a Troost architectural tour, and Henry Troost was a gentleman who was responsible for a lot of the buildings in downtown, a lot of the homes, and this is a home that he built and lived in.

He actually passed away here. This is what I believe is called prairie architecture or some type of Midwest influence, those large overhanging eaves that were supposed to protect the house from wind and snow. And so, again, I'm not the expert on architecture, but if you know anything about Frank Lloyd

Wright, who was a famous architect in Chicago, supposedly he came and visited Troost and he saw this home and was like, you know, wow, what is this doing here? So I think this is a really gorgeous home. It's just spectacular.

That backyard there is filled with beautiful plants and it's pretty epic. And finally, we've got the school here. This is a great little school, and yes, there is a story about that. This I don't believe is the original building, or the original was much smaller, but of course

there are stories about how this was haunted, that for a long time the police and the fire would be called for reports of disturbances, but they would go there, the alarms would be going off, but they never saw anything or found anybody. There's stories about figures moving around on the top floor, being a lantern.

There was a janitor who was very brave, who used to live there and sleep there at night, had this dog, and he would go up in the attic and he would see a woman standing there outside the window, but it was actually a reflection standing behind him, and he'd turn around and there wouldn't be any there.

He lived there for 20 years, and after his dog passed away, he would hear the dog running around and felt the dog jump onto the bed, so that's a pretty good story too. So that wraps up most of the stories that I was able to steal from those guys, and I did not do those justice, I am sure.

If you're really into that kind of stuff, check out Lost El Paso Paranormal. They are super awesome and they have just tons of information, tons of great stories, so they're really a great resource for El Pasoans. And I wanted to just end with the idea that, you know, I showed you a lot of really beautiful

homes, but there are still some older homes that are small, very modest. Some homes here are, you know, in bad shape, and maybe the owner's just kind of holding onto them because they know that they're going to have value, but if you are into investing or anything like that, this is definitely a gold mine, and aside from that, thanks everybody

so much, and have a happy Halloween.