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
