The tragic story of a young man in love

I hope many of our readers saw the story Dave Brooks wrote about the ghosts of “Haunted Huntington” a couple of weeks ago. I found the story very interesting. A couple nights later, while I was lying awake in bed, I recalled a story told to me about 30 years ago by an early resident of our city.

I only wish I could recall who it was.

His wife’s family owned a small house on 6th Street in the 1920s, and when his wife was a little girl, she was coming home one night from her girl friend’s home, and while crossing 5th Street she saw something lying in a vacant lot.

The wind was blowing hard and it was cold that night, she recalled. She went over and saw a young man lying on the ground.

Years later she told her husband that she remembered that the man’s face looked strange and he had a sad expression on what she could see of his face.

She told her husband that she heard a noise behind her and turned to see what it was and when she looked back the field was empty.

She told her husband that she ran home crying and told her parents what she saw. Her father went over to the vacant lot but found nothing out of the ordinary.

Up to the time of her death, she maintained that she saw someone that night and believed it might have been a ghost.

Last week, while doing some research on another story, I ran across a story that seems to match the woman’s.

In August 1919, a young 25-year old Orla D. Sells became engaged to a 15-year old girl in Center, Colo.

The next month the girl broke off the engagement, and her family moved to Huntington Beach.

The heart-broken young lad packed his belongings and headed for Los Angeles.

Throughout the month of October, Orla made several trips down to Huntington Beach to see his former fiancée. But each time she rejected his offer of marriage and would return home on the red car alone.

A strong, cold wind had been blowing the night of Nov. 6, 1919, when Orla Sells made his way to the girl’s home for one last try. The 15-year-old again rejected him, and a few minutes later, at 10 p.m., Orla took out a pistol while he stood in a vacant lot in the second block of 5th Street.

Across the street at the home of O.A. Horn, Mrs. Horn heard what she thought was the sound of a tire blowout and paid no attention to the noise.

The next morning, our pioneer shoe repairman, B.T. Mollica, was walking toward his shoe store on Main Street when he discovered Sells’ body. City Marshal E.E. French had just returned home on Wednesday evening from a two-week vacation in Merced County.

At about 8 a.m. on Friday morning, he received word of the apparent suicide.

Marshal French and C.S. Bundschuh had the body removed to the mortuary. French searched the body and came across a paid receipt for dues from the Elks Lodge of Alamosa, Colo.

Coroner Charles Brown held an inquest, and based on the testimony he ruled the death a suicide.

Orla’s father, William Sells, arrived here from his home in Center, Colo., and was so sure that his son did not commit suicide that he employed the services of a private detective to thoroughly look at all the evidence in the case.

But the detective could not find anything to suggest Orla was murdered.

Orla’s remains were taken to Los Angeles on Nov. 18 on a truck and shipped to his sister’s home in Bethel, Ohio, for burial.

Now, whether the young man that the little girl saw in the vacant lot was Orla’s ghost or some neighborhood kids playing a trick, we’ll never know for sure, but the facts seem to fit what the little girl saw.

Anyone who has ever been in love knows of the pains and heartaches of a lost love, and possibly it was Orla’s spirit that had come back for one last try at winning his love back.

* JERRY PERSON is a local historian and longtime Huntington Beach resident. If you have ideas for future columns, write him at P.O. Box 7182, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.

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