Lake Elsinore

Hamlet is my favorite play by Shakespeare. I usually read it once every summer. I wonder if my love for Hamlet has anything to do with the fact that I grew up in Lake Elsinore. I found a few random facts about my hometown:

• Current population: a little over 38,000. I think that's the population of USC.


• The racial makeup of the city is 65.61% White, 5.19% African American, 1.29% Native American, 2.05% Asian, 0.30% Pacific Islander, 20.33% from other races, and 5.23% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 38.05% of the population.


• Lake Elsinore was incorporated as a city in 1888 but was inhabited well before then. The lake was once a natural lake but went dry in the 1930s. In the early 1960s it was refilled.


• It was a popular destination in the first half of the 1900s for celebrities to escape the urban Hollywood scene.


• Despite its relatively small African-American population, it has the distinction of electing the first black mayor in the state of California. Tom Yarborough was elected in 1966.


• Lake Elsinore is also home to [...] a group of Paranormal/Ghost hunters called Elsinore Citizen Against the Invasion of Paranormal Entities or E.C.A.I.P.E. The group's main goal is to stop all "evil paranormal entities" that would wish to attack or inhabit a citizen of Lake Elsinore.


• On a 1992 Sightings segment, a local citizen group of ten members from Lake Elsinore claimed to share or knew each other in past lives in 1863 Clarksburg, West Virginia. The paranormal television series claimed the small group experienced a rare phenomena called mass reincarnation. The story was covered on a hard-cover novel From Clarksburg to Lake Elsinore: A Profile on Reincarnation published in 1988, but since was out-of-print.


• Lake Elsinore is said to be the habitat of a lake monster sighted on numerous occasions since the 1850s, but the "Lake Elsinore Monster" had similarities to Nessie of Loch Ness, Scotland, and Champ of Lake Champlain, Vermont. The city developed a recent reputation as a "hot spot" for the paranormal: UFOs or flying "orbs", haunted sites (homes or vacant lots) for ghost activity, and repeated incidents of satanism or vampire cults in the mountains near the city.


• It was named Elsinore after the Danish city in Shakespeare's Hamlet.