Tag Archives: Haunted House

The Haunted House in Calabasas

Main Piece: 

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the informant and the interviewer.

Interviewer: Tell me about the haunted house that’s in your neighborhood.

Informant: well, it’s actually not in my neighborhood but just a couple streets down. I’ve only been a couple times because you have to take a pretty long uphill hike to get past the gate without getting caught. 

Interviewer: So it’s a private neighborhood with people still living there?

Informant: Yeah it’s just your average suburban calabasas neighborhood, this one house has been abandoned for a solid fifteen years though. 

Interviewer: Well why do people think it’s haunted then?

Informant: I guess most people don’t hahaha but one time I went up there with a group of friends and we had a crazy supernatural experience and never went back. Basically we had our faces up against the window and all saw a face in the distance that wasn’t there before, and we just turned and booked it outta there. 

Interviewer: Oh so you guys actually started the rumor about this place being haunted?

Informant: I guess so! We’ve heard a couple other groups have similar things happen to them at the house though so we all think it’s legit. And I’ve seen enough horror movies in my life to know to never go back there again haha

Background:

My informant was born and raised in California, both of his parents also born Americans. He grew up in the Calabasas area and never believe in the paranormal until his experience at this “Haunted House”

Context: 

I spoke to my informant over the phone amidst the 2020 coronavirus epidemic. 

Thoughts:

While the story of this haunted house is interesting, I was more interested by the fact that my informant didn’t think the house was haunted, but just abandoned, before they went there. Even though other groups have said they’ve seen similar things, those accounts reportedly only started after my informant’s initial scare. This leads me to believe they are actually responsible for the folklore of this house, and it is interesting to see just how far those stories spread even though they don’t talk to the other groups directly. 

Winchester Mystery House

Context:  The informant began to speak of odd places near her hometown and had this place as an example.

Piece: “So I am from San Jose California and there is a really famous house in San Jose called the Winchester Mystery house. And it’s supposedly by Sarah Winchester, who was married to William Winchester, I believe, and um she moved there after he died, I think. But he passed away and he was the manufacturer of this really famous rifle called like the Winchester rifle. So Sarah, after she died like thought she was haunted by the ghosts of the people who were killed with his guns, yeah which is a lot of people. So she built this house, and she just kept expanding it because she was trying to protect herself from the ghosts. So you go to this house and the architecture makes absolutely no sense because she just kept building and building and building so its super vast and she could protect herself from the outside. There are like stairs that lead to nowhere and doors that lead to nowhere and cause like it doesn’t make sense and there is this motif of spiderwebs throughout it like there are windows that look like webs and so like it really looks like a haunted house. I have been there and they actually take a lot of kids on field trips there now, which is weird. And it’s well known and a lot of people go there.”

Background: The informant is a 19 year old USC student who grew up in San Jose, California. She is very well versed in the Winchester Mystery House and has personally been there.

Analysis: This home is a ghost tripping home, attracting people to quest to find or see ghosts. This site in particular has house tours and advertising, indicating that it is in the commercial industry and makes profit from the stories about the home. The motifs in the house further add to the spectacle that attracts visitors, as well as adding to the feel of the environment. It is also interesting how there is an eerie quality to the odd architecture– such as the stairs that lead nowhere. The transitional, liminal quality creates the uneasy energy that plays into the ghost stories associated with the site.

 

An apartment is found haunted by reflection on the window

Context
The informant grew up in Beijing. We were discussing ghost stories when she brought out this story.

Content
A man bought a new apartment. It was on the first floor. Outside the window is the garden, a small grassland in a residential district. He said that when the apartment was being furnished, he often saw an old man staring at him strangely from the window. When he walked outdoors to find the old man, the old man disappeared. When he moved into the house, a friend of his came to visit him. He told his friend that he often saw an old man. He asked his friend to go out and take a look, while he stood indoors to see whether the old man disappeared from the window. The friend went out, and then ran in hurriedly, brought him out and said, “You could not live in the apartment. The old man is a reflection on the window.”

Analysis
Because the old man is a reflection on the window, he is a ghost in the house. The main motif of the story is that mirrors or mirror-like object (window in this story) can show the reflection of ghosts, even though ghosts cannot be seen directly. Notice that the ghost is an old man. The old man must have some unfulfilled wishes that connect with the apartment – he probably lives in the apartment. To me, the story reflects the anxiety of the working force who fail to pay enough attention to their aging parents.

Haunted House in Crockett, Texas

Collector: Do you have any ghost stories you could share with me?

CW: Yes, when I was a young girl growing up in my hometown of Crockett, Texas there was a house located on the edge of our town that everyone believed to be haunted. It was a very old beaten down brown house with all the windows boarded off. It was said that a very old man who we called “Old Man Hinkle”, lived there but no one had seen him in years, so everyone thought he had passed away and his ghost haunted the house. However, when me and friends would go by the house it was always very spooky. We could hear noises coming from the house but never any lights or anyone coming in or out of it. I remember one time some kids from our town claimed to have gone inside one night and saw a ghost in there but who knows if that was true. Another time  I was near the house and could hear what sounded like screaming but I never saw a ghost or went inside the house. 

Collector: What impact did this haunted house have on your childhood?

CW: It was my favorite thing on Halloween. On already such a spooky night for us kids we would always sneak off and go by the house. It always felt like such an adventure and was very fun for me and my friends. 

Collector: Did the whole town believe the house was haunted?

CW: All the parents knew that it was just an abandoned house of course, but for us kids it was widely believed and everyone seemed to know about it. 

Collector: What do you think about the house now?

CW: Well, since I do not believe in ghost I don’t believe it was haunted or anything. But, when I go home to visit my family in Crockett I sometimes go by it and it gives me fond memories especially of my Halloweens growing up. I also wonder whether or not the kids in Crockett still believe it is haunted or know about “ Old Man Hinkle”.

Context: This informant is a sixty five year old woman that was born and raised in Crockett, Texas. She has moved around the world since leaving Crockett to go to college. However, she still frequently visits the town. This performance was collected in person at her home in Palm Desert, California

Analysis: This legend is an interesting one because it sounds a lot like ghost stories and haunted house stories seen in popular culture. It has all the aspects of many movies and television shows, like a small town, scary house, and kids wandering near the “haunted house”. It seems to be a unique part of her communities folklore and a unique part of my informant’s childhood.

 

Marjorie Jackson’s House

Context & Analysis

The subject, my mother, and I were getting coffee for breakfast and I asked her if she could tell me some stories about her childhood. The subject’s father (who has recently passed away) was a history professor in the Midwest. The family moved frequently because of this, which made it difficult for them to settle in a single area for too long. The subject stated that this was one of the most memorable urban legends, or ghost stories, that she knew of as a teenager living in Indiana. This legend is a classic example of the ‘neighborhood haunted house’ and also happened to be a traceable true story that was of large international interest. According to usatoday.com, Marjorie Jackson—an heiress to the Standard Grocery Chain—hid as much as $15 million in various places in her home—“in closets, toolboxes, garbage cans and vacuum cleaner bags” (usatoday.com). In 1977, Jackson was killed when two burglars broke into her home and shot her in the stomach. It is interesting that the subject did not point out the infamous nature of this story in her narrative, instead presenting it as an urban legend. While the “hole” aspect of the story seems to be more of an embellishment, the rest of her account aligns with the documented case of Jackson’s murder in 1977.

(Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/21/murdered-heiress-mystery/72590690/)

Main Piece

“When I was in high school there was this house that a lady was murdered in; her name was Marjorie Jackson, um, and the house…so people went in—supposedly she hid money in her walls and under her mattresses and stuff and she didn’t have any money in the bank so she hid it all over her house, so supposedly people [burglars] came in and after they heard those rumors and they killed her and there were holes all over the walls. So, like, me and my friends sometimes [laughs] would go to the house because nobody wanted to buy it so we would sneak in there and there really were holes all over and it was probably not safe to go in there cuz it was kind of [laughs] condemned. That was Marjorie Jackson’s house.”