Tag Archives: Haunted House

Winchester Mystery House Tourist Site

Nationality: American/German
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Santa Cruz
Performance Date: 3/25/16
Primary Language: English

The Winchester Mystery House is a house that was built in San Jose, California, in the 1800s, occupied by a husband and wife. As the story goes, as relayed by the informant, the woman in the story was paranoid that her husband’s ghost and others in the house would attempt to haunt her. Then, the woman, to avoid collisions with the supernatural, built several traps to fool her husband’s ghost: staircases that led nowhere, extra rooms, dead-ends, etc.

Interestingly, the house has since been turned into a tourist property, where, playing off the above legend, visits can pay for night tours through the “haunted house”. The Winchester Mystery House remains open to the public. Tours can be scheduled at its official website: http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/

It is impossible to know if the folklore surrounding the property caused the site to become a tourist attraction–or if the folklore was fabricated in order to promote the tourist attraction.

 

Haunted Banana Tree

Nationality: Guatemalan-Thai-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Works at restaurant
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 23 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Thai, Korean, Japanese, and some Spanish

Informant (J.B.) is a 19 year old Los Angeles native. J.B.’s mother is an immigrant from Thailand, and his father is an immigrant from Guatemala. J.B. speaks English, Thai, Korean, Japanese, some Spanish. J.B. and I grew up in the same neighborhood, with mutual friends. One afternoon while overhearing another collection I was conducting, J.B. offered to share a story about his mother.

J.B.: “Back when my mom was a kid she lived in this house that went through a complete change, like renovation. It used to be… a funeral home, but then they turned it into the house. My grandpa bought it without knowing what it used to be, so there would be a lot of weird shit that would happen. Like my mom would wake up by a banana tree, and they would always trip out. A lot of weird shit would happen and they thought it was because it was a death house or whatever. One day she had a really bad fever and she heard a woman crying from out by the banana tree, and she was tripping out. I don’t know what happened after that, she was praying and freaking out and it went away. Nobody else was in the house.”

J.B. is interested in his mother’s ghost story, as it provides a sliver of insight into her youth. J.B. is open to the idea of the supernatural, as both of his parents have witnessed inexplicable experiences which have ultimately become such paranormal memorates.

For children it is common to see or even chase ghosts. I interpret this phenomenon to be not only due to a looser definition for reality, but also the thrill of the unknown (in this case being a banana tree outside the safety of her home).

Haunted House

Nationality: Colombian-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 23 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Informant (A.G.) is an 18 year old student from Los Angeles.

A.G.: “My mom is really religious and my grandma is really religious. I was raised Catholic and I used to go to church and stuff”

While his “dad is Italian” and his “mom is Colombian,” they “both grew up in Columbia” to come here when they were “18 or 19.” Alex’s mom is a “stay at home mom,” and his dad does “construction” and owns some local “properties.” We grew up in the same area of Los Angeles, and started to hang out in high school. He was telling some ghost stories at a party one weekend, so I set up an interview for the following Saturday afternoon. I picked him up and brought him to our mutual friend’s house to conduct the collection.

A.G.: “In my apartment building, we used to live in one of the back apartment units.”

While the family still owns the apartment building, A.G. has since upgraded to a nearby house.

A.G.: “At the dinner table… my brother and sister used to talk about stuff that would happen to them because our house was super creepy.”

Here “our house” refers to the family’s apartment building.

A.G.: “The roofing in the house used to be really fucked up and you could see through the roof to the wooden beams. My sister and brother said that every night there were these two green dots up there looking down into the bunk bed. My sister said that one night it just wasn’t there anymore. They said it looked like eyes or something.”

By only sharing their unpleasant supernatural experiences attached to the old building after moving out, A.G.’s siblings expressed relief in the move to the family. As A.G.’s siblings’ description of the unidentified eyes don’t doesn’t mention them belonging to any particular entity, I inferred that the building itself was responsible. Further, A.G.’s description of the building suggests it was not an ideal environment to grow up. I interpret A.G.’s siblings’ scary story as expression of both happiness for having moved, and fear for the condition of the apartment building.

Haunted House in Jakarta

Nationality: Thai
Age: 75
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Van Nuys, CA
Performance Date: April 24, 2016
Primary Language: Thai (laotian)
Language: English

Papa’s (my grandpa’s) friend and him were living in Jakarta and in the house they were staying in… a house which they rented… which was haunted because the wife sees all the spirits when the men are out working. There are always noises and sometimes she saw people in the kitchen… doing something in the kitchen, and the husband doesn’t believe her. He says, “I don’t believe. That is nonsense. I wish I could see the ghost. I wish he would show me.” One day he was sleeping, and he looked up and he had a calendar of two girls dancing. He looked at the calendar and it was moving and dancing. The girls pictured in the calendar were moving as if they were real. He was so scared. So from that time on he believed. They eventually figured out that under that house was a cemetery. The ghost followed them from this house to another house they lived in, I even heard stories about it later on. Since that time he was so scared and never mentioned it anymore.

Background: My grandpa was a civil engineer whose work required him to constantly move from place to place. This is interesting to hear secondhand from my aunt, as my grandfather passed away. He told this story to her many years ago. This really embodies the essence of folklore as this version of the story may have been different from the original that my grandfather would have told. I conducted this interview live at my uncle’s house, so this story was told to me in person. I really find this story to be very compelling as the belief of each person who lived in the house varied about the spirits — from the wife and husband, to my grandfather. This was very interesting for me to hear about some of the interesting places my grandfather lived and some of the amazing things he did all over the world.

Luther’s Ghost

Nationality: American
Age: 81
Occupation: Retired Dietician
Residence: Berkeley, CA
Performance Date: March 18, 2015
Primary Language: English

Informant: Great Aunt Charlotte was sick in bed once, and she looked up and saw the ghost of her tiny granny—quietly, quietly rocking in her rocking chair, smoking her corn-cob pipe.

Me: You believe in ghosts?

Informant: Oh, yes. The house in Berkeley was haunted, you know.

Me: Really?

Informant: Oh, yes. It was Luther. I passed it on the stairs, sometimes, and I could feel the inner—inner, you know—the inner stuff. And Uncle David said he always saw the rocking chair on the porch rock by itself. And I—we had a couple people—a couple people say they saw the lights flickering, going on and off. It was Luther.

The informant (my grandmother) was born in Missouri and has lived in Berkeley, CA for close to sixty years. She has always been a remarkably hard worker; she was raised by her uncle on his farm, where she more than carried her own weight, and, after completing four years at Penn State (where she was the only female Chemistry major at the time), she insisted on paying her uncle back every dime of her tuition. The informant moved out to California, went to graduate school at Mills College, and became a nutritionist working with nursing homes and other care facilities to develop standards for feeding different types of patients. After having two sons, the informant became the President of the Parents Association for the Head-Royce School in Oakland, CA and remained an active member of the Claremont Book Club.

This particular set of anecdotes came while the informant and I were discussing her house in Berkeley, which she was forced to sell a few years ago for financial reasons. The informant admits to “checking up” on the house frequently to see what the buyers have been doing to remodel it, and was outraged to find they’d changed the layout of the living room (a room visible only from the rear of the house, which means the informant broke into the gated backyard of a property she no longer owns to peer through the windows). Given her attachment to the house (she and her husband owned it for over forty years and raised two sons there), I was no all that surprised to hear that she thought the ghost of her late husband—Luther—haunted the place.

The informant specified feeling a kind of ghost energy, seeing objects move on their own, and flickering lights as signs of her late husband’s presence. All these phenomenon, in my opinion, are easily explainable. The informant is old and her staircase is very tall; perhaps the “energy” she felt was a response to the physical exertion. The rocking chair was stationed on the outdoor porch, so perhaps the wind rocked it. The house was in dire need of renovation (thought the informant would disagree), and I don’t doubt that the electric wiring through the house was ten to twenty years out of date. However, the informant firmly believes that the cause of these phenomenon was her husband’s ghost—no doubt, her belief stems from FOAF (friend of a friend) instances of ghost encounters, such as Great Aunt Charlotte’s, and a wider group of family members who seem to believe.