I love visiting spooky places on vacation. Here in the United States, I like to explore old places whenever possible. I’m not saying a newly constructed hotel can’t be completely haunted, but there’s just a feeling I get inside buildings that have been around for a very long time that can’t be matched by most newer structures.
That’s one of many, many reasons I love visiting Spain and the Basque Country to visit my family. The buildings there are centuries older than those in use in most American cities, and they’re steeped in history. My paternal family’s farmhouse is home to several ghost stories, and the farms and homes surrounding it have local legends of their own that my great-uncle Luis Mari likes to tell on hikes through the surrounding hills.
I haven’t been able to visit for a couple of years, but I recently read about somewhere I need to see next time I’m there: the ghost town of Ochate. (Basque spelling: Otxate, which in some dialects translates to secret door.)
Little remains of Ochate today apart from the crumbling walls of a few buildings and la Torre de Ochate. Looking at the condition of the structures, it’s clear that this place has been abandoned for the better part of a century. (You might also think there’s a korok or a treasure chest hiding somewhere in there… or maybe I’ve just been playing too much Zelda: Breath of the Wild.)
This place firmly qualifies as “old;” the town of Ochate dates all the way back to the Bronze age. And it was nearly a hundred years ago that it was abandoned. People started leaving in the 1920s when illness spread through the area, after which bad harvest after bad harvest forced residents to look for prosperity elsewhere. According to legend, a brutal murder of one sheepherder by another was the final nail in the coffin of the town’s living history.
But it wasn’t until decades later that Ochate’s paranormal activity really started to heat up. In the 1970s and 1980s, mysterious occurrences abounded: strange lights, disappearances, UFO sightings, and disembodied voices captured on tape.
In 1987, a paranormal researcher named Alberto Fernandez took a team to Ochate to attempt to record evidence of paranormal activity at the site, including electronic voice phenomena (EVPs).
They succeeded, capturing two now-infamous recordings.
EVPs genuinely freak me out. I captured one of my own at the Benson Grist Mill in Tooele, Utah and listening to it gives me the chills every time. Here’s the thing about EVPs though: are they recordings of a spirit who—in that moment—is trying to communicate directly to the person holding the recorder? Or are we capturing evidence of a residual haunting—a psychic impression of a moment long ago, but not an active spirit?
I think the question is especially important in the case of Ochate, and here’s why. In Fernandez’s first recording, the voice of a little girl shouts, “Kanpora!” which in Basque translates to Get out. In the second, a woman’s hoarse voice asks, “¿Que hace aún la puerta cerrada?” (Rough translation from Spanish: What is the door still doing closed?)
You can hear the recordings here:
Get out.
Door.
Fernandez believed (and I’m inclined to agree) that the door in question wasn’t a physical one. The town had been named for a secret door, and he theorized that it was a connection between our world and another. Could the bad luck that befell Ochate time and again have come from a world beyond our own?
It’s a question Fernandez wasn’t able to answer. The very same night he and his team captured those EVPs, Fernandez took his own life.
Or maybe he did find answers to his questions.
Maybe he had to pass through the door himself to learn what waited on the other side.
Additional references:
“Ochate: Leyenda o Realidad?”
“Ochate – A Spanish Ghost Town”