Haunted Houses

by Nancy Roberts

  “I just love this hotel. I don’t know why we’ve never been here before, for we live in Calaveras County.”

  “That really isn’t far from here. I hope you’ll come again.”

  “Your waitress tells me you have ghosts?” came the unexpected reply.

  “Yes, it seems to be a lady named Mary Phelps.” When they heard that, the group went, “Oooh!” A Mexican gentleman among them turned to the young lady I had been talking with and said, “I’m going into the bar to talk with your husband. I don’t want to hear this.”

  The face of the girl turned very white. “My maiden name was Mary Phelps. My grandmother and great-grandmother were named Mary Phelps, and at one time they lived in this old hotel!” You can be sure that I was as shocked as she.

  The next day she came back, bringing her grandmother, who held in her hand a small, black, leather-covered diary written in Gaelic. She translated as she read from one of the pages written by a Mary Phelps in 1884. The words were, “I have recently lost my little son, Ian, in a hotel-room fire.” In Gaelic, Ian means Jon. The entire family came back and burned a candle in the dining room for the child.

  We heard no more from the spirit of Mary Phelps except on October 26, 1980, just after we did a television show for That’s Incredible. At that time Mary Phelps was seen by a couple from Sacramento who, I think, were hoping to see another apparition who had been mentioned on the television show and who appears here occasionally. There was once a workman living here named George Williams; he would work quite late, and he didn’t always bother to lock his room. When he returned, he would sometimes find that an intoxicated friend was asleep in his bed.

  He would shake the bed until he could get the friend up, saying, “I’m sorry. You can’t sleep here.” George eventually died, but we have had complaints from men who have occupied his room. They say that an angry old fellow has pulled the covers off them and tried to shake them out of the bed, saying loudly, “I’m sorry. You can’t sleep here!” I don’t think he has ever bothered a woman in that room, only men.

  The couple from Sacramento did not see George, but the wife had a vivid experience. She awakened to see a woman dressed in black with a little bonnet on and her arms stretched out, pleading with her.

  “Help me get my baby out of the fire! Help me! Please, help me!” said the woman.

  “We were convinced that it was Mary Phelps. The couple had retired quickly after arriving the night before, and we had no opportunity to mention anything to them about Mary. The entire incident was remarkable. But finding out that Mary was a real person seems the strangest sort of coincidence, like something that would never happen in a million years,” said Millie Jones, staring thoughtfully out at Main Street through the window of the hotel dining room.

  “‘Help me get my baby out,’” she said almost to herself, repeating Mary Phelps’s plea. “The poor woman.”

  A year after this story was written, the Hotel Ione burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was never discovered. From its early years the hotel was subject to manifestations of fire, from the candles relighting to the mysterious smoky form that was sometimes seen floating through the air on the lower floor.

  The Hotel Ione was at 41 Main Street, Ione, California. Should you ask me whether I think it was haunted or not, all I can say is that I felt it was, from the moment I stood in the lobby and looked up the stairs to the second floor.

  RETURN OF THE HANGED MAN

  WHALEY HOUSE (MUSEUM), SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Supernatural happenings are not “out of the ordinary” at the Whaley House, San Diego’s oldest home. It is one of two houses that the state has authenticated as haunted.

  The Whaley House in San Diego has the rare distinction of being authenticated by the United States Chamber of Commerce as genuinely haunted. What does “genuinely haunted” mean? We must visit Old Town to find out.

  The late June Reading, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, was a longtime curator and chief historian of the house. She undoubtedly did more research and knew more than anyone else in the world about the family who built it. Located north of downtown San Diego, it is an historic site that people from all over the world come to visit. No members of the Whaley family inhabit the house—at least none that are still alive.

  Whaley House has been written about in many publications, and if you have been wondering as you read these stories what makes a house haunted, a description by D. Scott Rogo, author of In Search of the Unknown, is enlightening. It seems to describe this house perfectly.

  Rogo says that what is necessary are apparitions, unaccountable cold feelings or sensations of being touched by something intangible, and other phenomena such as lights, footsteps, rappings, movements of objects, unaccountable odors, and presences.

  According to June Reading, Whaley House has exhibited every one of these phenomena and more since 1960, the year it was opened to the public, and “the manifestations are still going on.”

  Mrs. Reading was active in the restoration of the house from the very beginning. The first events she remembers occurred during the early work. I found myself alert for any sound later as I stood beside her and listened in the narrow downstairs hall.

  “One day in the spring of 1960, I had come over here early, intending to see about furnishing the upstairs rooms. Two staff members from the San Diego Historical Society were loaned to me to help with the delivery of the furniture and other items. As I walked to the back door, they followed. When I reached up to unbolt the door, we clearly heard the sound of walking across the upper floor. My companions insisted that someone else was in the house, so I mounted the stairs and called out, hoping to get a response. There was no reply.

  “As I turned to come down, saying, ‘There’s no one upstairs,’ we both looked at each other and said, ‘Well, maybe Thomas Whaley’s come back to look the place over!’

  “Suddenly we heard the sound of footsteps coming from the bedroom above us, as if someone were walking in heavy boots. ‘Who is upstairs?’ asked one of the men. I shook my head, and he laughed about spirits coming back to look things over, and I thought no more about it.” Mrs. Reading and I walked up the stairs together as she continued her story. “At the time I thought another workman had arrived ahead of us, but later when I came to see, no one was up here.

  “At first we were so busy getting the place ready for the public that I was really unaware of unusual sounds in the old house. But in the days after it was opened, I would often hear the same footsteps and find myself going upstairs again and again, sure that someone must be up there. Sometimes it happened when I was busy at my desk downstairs or when visitors were on the lower floor. I would sit at my desk and hear heavy feet descend the hall stairs, but for some reason they always stopped about three steps from the bottom.

  “One morning in October 1962, I was giving a talk to twenty-five school children who were touring the house. This time the sound of footsteps began to come from on top of the flat roof. The school children began to look up at the ceiling curiously and ask, ‘Who is making that noise?’ so I went outside expecting to see a repairman sent by the county. No one was up there. When I mentioned some of these events to people in the neighborhood, they said, “That sort of phenomenon has gone on for years.’”

  The last member of the family to live in the house was Lillian Whaley. She was well aware that unusual things went on there, and, during the many years she lived in the house, she had often complained about them. On one occasion she even told of a heavy china cabinet that suddenly toppled over without cause. That was in 1912, one year before Frank Whaley’s death. Lillian Whaley lived in Whaley House all her life and was the only child who did not marry. She was eighty-nine when she died in 1953.

  On one occasion while Mrs. Reading was guiding a tour, a woman visitor complained that she had felt unseen hands pushing her out of an upstairs bedroom. And many have mentioned smelling cologne, rose water, or the aroma of cigar smoke when they have been al
one in one of the rooms.

  One such tourist, Mrs. Kirby, wife of the director of the Medical Association of New Westminster, British Columbia, was convinced that she had seen the apparition of a woman in the house’s courtroom. Mrs. Kirby described a small, olive-skinned lady in a bright calico dress with a full skirt down to the floor who simply “stared right through me.”

  One of the ghosts who, I am told, has been seen in the house with regularity is Squire Augustus S. Ensworth. Ensworth was an attorney who managed Thomas Whaley’s business enterprises in San Diego while Whaley was in the Quartermaster Department in San Francisco during the Civil War. He was very fond of the Whaley House and took great pride in keeping it in good repair during Mr. Whaley’s absence. Augustus Ensworth’s spirit is said to still hover protectively around Whaley House.

  Mrs. Anna Whaley is presumably responsible for the occasional snatches of piano music. And then there are evidences of the playful spirit of little Tom Whaley, who died in one of the upstairs rooms when he was only seventeen months old.

  “An event occurred just before Christmas,” Mrs. Reading recalled, “when several of us were in the old courtroom getting popcorn and cranberry ropes and other old-fashioned ornaments ready for the tree. One of the hostesses very quietly went around to get a good view and shot a picture of all of us. After the film had been sent off and developed, she brought in the prints. To her own and everyone else’s amazement, over at the edge of the group stood a woman in a period dress. The resemblance to Mrs. Whaley was striking.”

  The eerie things that have happened to guides in the house and to tourists as well do not occur every day. Sometimes weeks go by and nothing out of the ordinary occurs—nothing, that is, that would send chills down one’s spine or cause one to shiver on a warm day. But then something will take place that no one can explain. June Reading told the story of such an event.

  “In the early 1980s a lovely college girl named Denise Pournelle worked at the house during the summer, and, from the moment she arrived, she went around telling everyone how she would love to see a ghost. Things like this can be dangerous to say, particularly in certain houses where even the walls may be listening. I always thought it was like tempting Providence, but Denise kept right on. I talked with her and advised her to be patient.

  “‘Denise, sooner or later you are going to hear wailing, you are going to hear music, and you’ll even get the feeling that someone is touching you. You will have all kinds of things happen to you.’ Of course, I was right.

  “It was during Christmas vacation and she was like a child loving to dress up in costume. We always do that here at the house on special occasions. That afternoon we were all in our old-fashioned long dresses and there was a cold rain most of the day, so we had very few visitors except for one little boy. This boy walked all over the house trying to hear the sound of a ghost. He also sat on the stairs, thinking that, if he concentrated, he might hear footsteps. The kids that come here are so cute. I remember him because he had on a pair of tennis shoes that were unusually clean.

  “The hostesses were sitting around because there was so little activity. I hadn’t eaten anything, and it was getting into the afternoon, so I told them I was going out to have a late lunch. When I came back, they were all waiting for me at the front door. Before I could even get my coat off, they said, ‘While you were gone, we heard the footsteps upstairs, not once but twice. There was a long pause, and then they started again.’

  “Denise’s dark eyes were sparkling, and her pretty face was filled with excitement, so I said, ‘Denise, why don’t you come upstairs with me? I’m a little suspicious.’ I had that little boy with the tennis shoes on my mind instead of any ghost, because that child could have slipped away from the ladies without their noticing it and gone upstairs into one of the rooms.

  “Denise picked up her long skirt, and up we went. The first place we walked into was the master bedroom, and two windows were standing wide open. It was pouring rain, the rain had come in and was all over the floor, and the curtains were dripping wet. I was angry and said to myself, do you suppose that boy came up here, opened those windows and prowled around?

  “Together, we looked in the other rooms but could see no evidence that anyone had been in them. The rain was so bad that it was almost dark out, although it was only about two-thirty in the afternoon. So I began to close the windows, but the frames are all the original white cedar that swells up just like a sponge when it gets wet. They were so swollen that I could hardly close them, and I certainly don’t know how anyone could have pulled them open.

  “I could not get them bolted, and I said, ‘Denise, you are going to have to go downstairs and get a hammer.’ She said, ‘Let me try it,’ and together we finally got the bolt over. Then we walked into the nursery and, once there, began to relax because nothing was out of place. Suddenly, just a few feet behind us, a man’s deep laugh rang out. Denise said, ‘Did you hear that?’ I said, ‘What did you hear?’ She said, ‘I heard a man’s laughter.’ I said, ‘So did I!’

  “‘Let’s get out of here!’ Denise cried, and with that, she picked up her skirts and down the stairs she went—lickety split. She dashed over to the telephone and called her mother. I knew that we had both heard laughter from the past. I felt what I can only describe as an intense electric shock go the length of my back, and for a few seconds I stood there frozen, truly unable to move. I have never had anything affect me in such a way.

  “As for Denise, her face was white and her eyes were terrified. I would never have imagined we could get down the stairs so fast in long dresses. It is a wonder we didn’t break our necks. I don’t recall Denise ever mentioning any desire for a supernatural experience again.

  “After we began to talk about it downstairs, I remembered that the place where we had been standing when we heard the laugh was right over the location of the old gallows that stood there before Thomas Whaley built this house. He had watched the hanging of a colorful man named Yankee Jim. Imprisoned for attempting to steal a boat, Yankee Jim’s crime does not seem as grave as the sort for which men were ordinarily sentenced to hang. Unfortunately for him, his trial came upon the heels of the Indian uprising of 1851, when San Diego had been under martial law and any sort of disorder occasioned swift and sometimes harsh action.

  “Yankee Jim did not take the sentence of hanging him seriously, and, believing he would be pardoned at the last minute, even made jokes on his way to the gallows. But he was not pardoned. His last moments were painful, indeed, for when the wagon in which he was standing was pulled from under his feet, his neck remained unbroken. He continued to live for almost an hour, until he finally strangled to death.”

  Is it possible that the laugh they heard that afternoon was Yankee Jim? “It may be,” admitted Mrs. Reading. “I sometimes wonder if certain sounds remain forever in the atmosphere, or perhaps accessible, and now and then something we do sets them off. Then we hear that sound again exactly as it once occurred. The footsteps, the laugh, even the old-fashioned melodies we occasionally hear playing in the music room of the house . . . Thomas Whaley once wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘My wife is the best little woman in the world, loved by all, she is proficient in music, plays and sings.’ Perhaps she is still heard here.

  “I could tell you many other strange things,” continued June Reading, “but the sound of that deep laugh shocked me more than anything else that has ever happened to me in this house.”

  For those who are fascinated by ghost stories, it is said that four different ghosts have been identified at the Whaley House. The noisiest of all is reputed to be that of Yankee Jim.

  Whatever your tastes, you are welcome to enjoy a tour of this early home of the Old West. Located at 2476 San Diego Avenue in San Diego, California, Whaley House, with its rich and violent chronicles of yesteryear, is open to the public daily year-round. For more information, call (619) 297-7511 or visit whaleyhouse.org. For those who suffer from the summer heat elsewhere, the cool breez
es off the bay and temperatures during the day ranging between 65 and 75 degrees are delightful. Bring a sweater for evenings outdoors.

  THE HOUSE THE SPIRITS BUILT

  THE WINCHESTER MANSION, SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  It could be a nightmare to find one’s way out of the Winchester House, particularly for the terrified young girl in this story.

  A luxurious black carriage cruised slowly through one of Boston’s old neighborhoods, along a once fashionable street lined with what were once grand houses. Now paint peeled from most of them, and soot from coal-burning furnaces gave the neighborhood a bedraggled look. The driver peered at the front of each building, trying to make out the numbers. He stopped before a dirty mustard-colored house with cream trim.

  Standing nervously on the porch, he turned an etched, brass doorbell, which made a jarring, metallic sound. How strange to make a trip to this neighborhood just a day after the great man’s funeral. Whatever could Mrs. Winchester and her niece expect to find here? He waited. Would anyone answer?

  Suddenly the knob turned and the door opened. The driver stepped back, startled. On the threshold stood a tall woman with deep-set, olive-colored eyes. Her pasty white face was shaped like a hatchet and her black hair, pulled back severely, was wound in an immense twist on top of her head. She wore a long, somewhat shabby brown dress and an ancient shawl. The driver’s usually impassive face must have reflected shock, for the woman looked at him harshly and then glanced at the fashionable carriage in front of the house.

  “She will have to come in, you know. Go tell her that Mrs. Raven is ready to see her.”

  He went back to the brougham, opened the back door, and relayed the message just as it had been given him. A gloved hand emerged and rested upon his arm as he helped a tiny, heavily veiled woman in black from the carriage. She was followed by a younger lady, wearing a hat with a soft veil wound about its brim. The driver, Charles Farnham, accompanied them to the front door, where the older woman made a peremptory motion for him to return to the carriage. When he looked back, the pair had disappeared into the house.