EC: Pick an age 7 or 10
Interviewer: 7
EC: So, when I was 7 years old my parents and I took a trip to the Whaley House in San Diego. It’s old, it’s like this old western town?
Interviewer: Were you going to the whaley house looking for ghosts, or just to see what it was?
EC: My family is into weird freaky stuff like that and it’s the most haunted house in America so my parents were into that. We also thought it was a museum more than a haunted house.
For the most part it seemed sort of like a hoax. My parents thought it was more like a museum than a haunted house but it was like a cute little museum house with a courtroom, a store, and stuff like that so I just thought we were on a boring tour.
So I was looking for stuff to do in this old house, and the tour guide said that it was possible to feel a presence, but it still felt unrealistic and a hoax.
We walked into their dining room which was a pretty small room and it was a pretty big group, 15-20 people, and I wasn’t paying attention or listening to the tour guide because it was a bunch of history I didn’t know since I was 7.
I am wearing this little pink, magenta little hoodie, and I was just looking around the room and staring at things. I stared at the dining room table and remembered that I thought it looked a lot like my grandma’s house, and I am standing near the table with my hands by my side. I wasn’t the only kid on the tour, and so I am just standing there and I feel this other little kid grab my hand.
I didn’t think anything of it because there were other little kids and I was a really cuddly child. So I feel this little hand, and I remember its smaller than mine and I have small hands, and literally there was nothing there.
My mom said I shot my hands back into my pocket and I was really spooked about it because it felt like holding my mom’s hand, like it was real.
And I really wasn’t the sort of kid to make a big deal of things so we finished the tour and my mom just kept asking what happened and eventually I told her that, like, I don’t want to sound crazy, but I really felt a hand holding mine.
My mom tells me that in that room, what the guy was talking about was that the youngest daughter who was part of the whaley family, I don’t remember her name, contracted something, maybe TB? And died when she was still really little.
The thing was that people would say especially little girls or moms would feel a girl grabbing onto them if they were taller or holding their hands. They say it’s because she was really close with her mom.
But when I told her that and I told her that I wasn’t even listening, she agreed that it was really weird even though she knew it was a hoax.
Everything I was wearing and stuff was more from her perspective, but what I remember is looking to my right and expecting to see a person holding my hand, and even after I looked over I could still feel the hand holding mine but there was nothing there.
Context: This story was told by the informant, who got most of the story and the context of the Whaley family from her mom, and her perspective on the informant’s physical reaction. The actual reaction to the ghosts was all from her perspective. The informant has always believed in ghosts, but the part that made it feel like a gimmick to her was the way that she thought ghosts should have appeared to her, versus how they did (alone like her room, vs. in a museum). She has since been back to the Whaley house twice, and nothing has happened to her since. This story was told to me alone.
Analysis: The informant believes that it was truly a ghost, 100%. She thinks it’s an interesting house, and that when she was little, she didn’t fully see it as a scary place, but as she got older, the energy felt heavier. At first I really believed that the story was a hoax, but as my friend explained more about the story and the way that it genuinely moved her and changed the way she thought about ghosts, and even that visceral story that has stuck with her for so many years, I feel like it has to be a true story, or at least have some sort of truth behind it.