The Ghost of the Eerie Spaniard: Vicente Canet’s Unquiet Spirit on Morro Rock
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Moonlight still glints on the dark waters of Estero Bay, and the great stone sentinel of Morro Rock rises from the sea like a forgotten fortress. Local lore whispers that a proud Spaniard once claimed the rock as his final resting place—and that his unquiet spirit still gallops toward it on certain nights, seeking the burial he never received.
In 1883, the historian Myron Angel set down a tale that still chills the coast. He wrote of a place many early residents of San Luis Obispo County believed haunted by a Spaniard whose dying wish went unfulfilled. Don Vicente Canet demanded that his body travel to the summit of Morro Rock and rest among the jutting crags and sparse vegetation, within sight of the home he had named El Morro.
Morro Rock thrusts 580 feet above the waves and stands roughly half a mile offshore, its base covering more than fifty acres. A quiet bay separates the rock from the mainland—once called Estero Bay by the Spaniards who settled here.
In 1840, Canet raised a splendid house not far from the shore. He spent forty thousand dollars on labor and materials. Builders plastered the walls with crushed gypsum and laid floors that had sailed around Cape Horn. One wing held a chapel with a raised altar. Canet filled the courtyard with fiestas, bullfights, and horse races. Neighbors claimed he often raced his finest stallion to the water’s edge, rowed across the bay, and spent hours climbing the rock’s flanks while staring out over the open ocean.
Forty years later, Angel published the story under the title The Eerie Spaniard of Morro Castle, or The Legend of Morro Rock. In his History of San Luis Obispo County, he described the adobe as it stood in the early 1880s:
“A Spaniard so loved the great Rock and beautiful bay that he built a splendid home, for the times, calling it Morro Castle. It rose about 1830, more than two hundred feet long, two stories high, with walls three feet thick, iron-barred doors and windows, a court and corridors. A wall almost reaching the roof runs through the weird old garret. Moth-eaten costumes of silk and velvet, still showing gold-lace trimming, lay in heaps on the floor. Old saddles, bridles and spurs lay about.”
Canet asked that, upon his death, bearers carry his body to the top of Morro Rock and leave it beneath a rocky cairn. His family ignored the request. Yet long after both master and horse had turned to dust, people still heard the steed madly galloping down to the shore. On moonlight nights the animal champed and neighed in the courtyard, then raced to the bay. Watchers claimed a misting form stepped into a phantom skiff and rowed toward the rock.
Vicente Canet was already thirty-five when he sailed from Valencia aboard the Spanish naval vessel Asia. The ship reached Monterey Presidio in 1825. Canet jumped ship the moment it docked. Mexican California needed literate military men, and he rose quickly through the ranks.
In 1828, he married Rosa María Josefa Butrón y Domínguez, daughter of Manuel José Butrón and María Ignacia Rita Higuera of Rancho La Natividad. She was wealthy through her well-connected family and twenty years his junior. The couple had at least six children; three reached adulthood.
Canet was at the Presidio of Monterey for twelve years, and in 1840 was administrator of Mission San Luis Obispo and acquired land while raising mission cattle.
Canet was the administrator of Tolosa, now a church. In 1840, authorities removed him from the mission post, yet Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado—his wife’s relative—granted him the 4,400-acre Rancho San Bernardo, five miles east of Morro Bay. In 1841, Canet built a two-story adobe home.
After the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to honor existing land grants. Canet filed his claim under the Land Act of 1851; the United States patented the ranch to him in 1863. In those years San Luis Obispo had no newspaper, so federal notices appeared on the front wall of the Canet adobe itself.
Canet died in 1858. His family interred him in the Canet cemetery on the southeastern side of what is now Highway 1.
In 1870, H.Y. Stanley owned the Canet adobe, and Banning School, the district’s only school, was nearby.
In 1880, his son José set aside an acre around the grave as a permanent family burial ground in the shadow of Hollister Peak. The Canet Family Cemetery contains the graves of 55 individuals, including 11 babies. It is still in use, with one of the most recent interments occurring in 2022.
Four years later, the Canets sold the western portion of the ranch, from San Bernardo Creek to Morro Creek, to Francisco Estevan Quintana. By the 1880s, when Myron Angel visited, the adobe stood ruined on a gently sloping knoll beside the San Luisita, mountains rising behind it. Angel recorded:
“The Castle still stands about two and a half miles south of Morro on a little rise close to the road, iron bars and all. A Swiss family occupies it, and a cow yard is close at hand. Alas for romance in a cow country! Wherever Canet’s body may have been laid, his spirit seems not to have found rest; for it is said that strange noises are heard around the house he built, and slow, stealthy steps measure the length of the garret and seem to descend to the ground outside. The present owner assured us that he seldom entered this place… Moth-eaten remnants of gay, rich Spanish costumes were lying in curious heaps on the floor, but I could well fancy how these garments resumed their former glitter when at midnight they clothed the supple form of the proud Spaniard, and how his fiery steed found his way out of the hills to carry his master in one mad gallop down to the Morro Rock.”
Canet’s widow later married John Simmler, who was postmaster and a justice of the peace. They moved into an adobe on Dana Street. She died in 1890.
Why did Canet insist on burial atop Morro Rock? Folklore from the 1840s and 1850s suggests he believed Governor Alvarado should have granted him both Rancho San Bernardo and the larger 8,045-acre Rancho Moro y Cayucos, which included the rock itself. Did the Spaniard’s hunger for land follow him beyond the grave—or did he simply yearn to rest forever where he once found his deepest moments of peace?
On foggy, breezy evenings, onlookers gazing from nearby cliffs claim to see a dark figure on a horse staring out at the sea before abruptly vanishing.