Sacramento underground on the small screen

A new episode of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures will explore one of my favorite Sacramento-centric subjects: the city’s famed underground tunnels.

Years ago, my colleague Cosmo Garvin wrote a great piece about Sacramento’s underground tunnels (see “The past below”; SN&R Feature; July 17, 2003), which looked at the how the city’s streets were raised following major flooding in 1861:

“It was an ambitious undertaking, which took 13 years to complete. …

“To raise the level of the streets, the city built 10-foot-high brick walls on either side of the existing roads and then filled the space in between the bulkheads with dirt. Front windows now looked out onto brick walls. And the front doors were now 10 feet or more below street level.

“At their own expense, those merchants who could afford to either raised their buildings with jackscrews and filled in below or simply built new stories on top of their old buildings. All over the city, the original ground floor became the basement, the second floor became the first, and so on.”

In the decades since, a mythology has built up around those tunnels. Some claim the underground was a haven for Chinese opium dens; others insist it’s haunted by spirits.

The Ghost Adventures episode has its spirit sleuths checking out the Sacramento tunnels in addition to the Eagle Theatre and the original California Supreme Court as they “hope to connect with the thousands of souls haunting Sacramento.”

Last summer I went on the Old Sacramento Underground tour, and while I didn’t encounter any ghosts per se, the tour was nonetheless fascinating for its glimpse into Sacramento’s very own lost city.

Ghost Adventures airs at 10 p.m. Saturday on the Travel Channel.

Compiled from Popsmart.

Found money

Now that you have given the government your money, those that filed tax returns at any rate, you may want to see if the government has anything to give you.

Check out the California State Controller’s Office unclaimed property page. According to the site, the state government is in possession of more than $5.7 million in unclaimed stuff from bank accounts to mineral royalty rights. Or as the state says more enthusiastically, “You may be one of millions of Californians owed money by the State!”

True, it reads likes something from a shifty sweepstakes huckster or an email from a distressed Nigerian prince, but you may be happily surprised.

I typed in my name and found a long-ago payment slipped through the cracks from a time when I had three corporate owners in about as many months (such is the newspaper business).

Compiled from Cull-de-Sac.