Ghosthunting Southern California. Sally Richards
House chapter) and that although they’d been smelling his cigar smoke for a good long while, I was the only one who’d ever seen him in the store. Feeling like I’d just walked into the Twilight Zone, I purchased a few things just to bring some normalcy back to my life, thanked her, and drove straight home.
Since that time, I’d walked into the store at least two dozen times hoping to find the woman I’d met that night to apologize for my behavior, but I always missed the times she was working, and it wasn’t for another eight years that I’d finally see her again. I walked in and introduced myself.
I refreshed her memory about that night and asked her if she remembered me. “Yes, I totally remember—it’s been a while,” said “Cathy,” smiling and remembering the incident clearly.
I also had my five-year-old with me, who found everything (breakable) in the store fascinating. Luckily, Cathy is a retired elementary school teacher who has the patience of a saint. I asked to interview her for the book, and the rest of the story unfolded. The store used to have an auxiliary store that just happened to be where the Creole Café’s indoor seating is now (see Creole Café chapter).
“The Whaley House is legendary, but I used to be the biggest skeptic before I started working over there,” Cathy said. “I used to feel a presence in the room with me when I worked over there. I also used to hear what sounded like children running around, and I’d get my hair tugged at and I’d hear children laughing. I also heard ‘Momma’ whispered to me a few times. I used to smell jasmine perfume that Mrs. Whaley is known for. One time I felt something lick my foot and I gave a little scream and a docent came over and said, ‘Oh, that’s just Dolly—the Whaley’s dog.’
“We used to have a bunch of wind chimes, and one day they all went crazy and people came over to see if there were children playing with them, or what was going on. Then all but one stopped, and that one just kept dancing on its own. We had quite a crowd—there seemed to be a lot of energy around—and all it once it smelled like roses.”
“Although the little store was not known for being haunted, the store would get visitors declaring there was a presence there, and requests to investigate further. A husband and wife who were regulars used to come in when we were located by the Whaley House. They were there once, and there was pounding on the wall—at first I just thought it was the Creole Café, but then I remembered that our walls didn’t touch. He was taking pictures—and there was the face of Anna Whaley! It was quite an experience. When we were getting ready to close that store, there was this image coming through the mirror on the back wall (see Creole Café chapter) that looked like it was developing—into a picture of Thomas Whaley.”
Several years later when it was the Creole Café, in a series of photos I took in the mirror, I captured an image developing as it became a girl. Her translucent skirt spilled out onto the floor in front of the mirror before she disappeared when someone else took a picture of the mirror with a flash.
During the years Cathy has worked at the store on San Diego Avenue, many people have come in to tell her about the paranormal experiences they’ve had in and around the Old Town area. For years she’d been aware that the ghost of Thomas Whaley had been seen, and although she had many experiences at the other store involving her senses of touch, feel, smell and hearing, other than the chimes, she’d not witnessed any paranormal occurrences.
“Then one day,” explained Cathy, “they were doing some work on the road, so I had to leave my car in the state-park parking lot. It was about a quarter to ten in the morning when I passed by a gentleman in period clothing sitting on the bricks in front of the Whaley House—of course, there’s nothing odd about that because there are tons of people dressed in period clothing around here. But, there was something about his penetrating eyes and the way he looked at me and said, ‘Good morning.’ So I looked back just a second later and he was gone.
“The man I saw was much younger than Whaley was when he died. I searched and searched for a picture of Mr. Whaley when he was younger. I couldn’t find anything, but one day I was watching PBS and they had a special on Old Town—and there it was, a picture of young Mr. Whaley. I’d been taping it and I rewound it and took a picture.” Cathy pulled out her cell phone and she showed me the young Mr. Whaley. “It was him—that’s who I saw out in front of the Whaley House.”
It was at that point I realized I hadn’t tried to identify the spirit I’d seen. Although it had been a while, I had taken down some notes that night in my journal. I went back and looked at the notes and dug around on the Internet to find pictures of Thomas Whaley. In the end, I decided the man I saw might not have been Thomas Whaley. My apparition was a tall guy, his boots were on long legs. He was also dressed more in the style of Doc Holliday, with a duster, boots, button-up shirt, and one of those old riverboat-gambler kind of hats popular in the mid-1800s. His face was also broader, with a full salt-and-pepper beard, and he had stunning blue eyes.
Julie Kitterman, a sales associate at Four Winds, has also experienced a number of things at the store. “We had an antique chief’s rug,” says Kitterman. “The rug seemed angry about being here, and people would come up and make comments to us about it not having good energy. There was also this bin of things in that room, and to get the container out the door you’d have to hold it way up—and we would have seen someone do that. But, one day it was just gone.”
Kitterman is used to smelling the cigar and the sweet perfume wafting through the store, but she also remembers a mobile, but centralized, foul-smelling odor that came and hung out in the store for a while. The store has a lot of sage in case a room needs to be “cleansed” of negative energy that comes to visit every once in a great while; the spirit energy attached to the smell finally left after they burned enough sage, and the spirit probably realized the losing battle it was waging against the store’s usual good cheer and positive environment. There is a lot of spirit activity in this store as many of the store’s more precious artifacts are vintage Native American art; one can literally pick up a piece of vintage art and feel the decades it has lived and the artisan’s energy first put into it.
“There used to be a stand out front, and the woman’s daughter used to run it—she was a teenager,” says Kitterman. “One day she came in and told us a little boy had come out of the store who was about seven. He was dressed in period clothing, and he talked to her for a little bit and told her his name was Sebastian, and then he just disappeared. Sometimes when I lock up at night, the light in the bathroom will go on and I’ll have to go back in and turn it off. One night that happened, and I went to open the door to turn off the light, and all of a sudden it felt like someone was keeping it from opening from the other side. Then the pressure from the other side let up, and I turned off the light and locked up.”
Carol DiBene, owner of Four Winds, began collecting Native American art in preparation for opening the store in 1992 with her husband, who had reconnected with his heritage at the Round Valley Reservation (Wailaki tribe), where his mother lived. DiBene’s love and knowledge of Native American arts continued to grow, and she knew she could do better than the shows she’d been doing—it was time to open a store. Her store has become one of the most stable and well-known stores in the Old Town community; you’ll often see people from all over the country shopping there and arranging to ship their items home.
“In the other building I would close up and hear someone come up, and I’d go to open the door—and there would be no one there,” says DiBene. “We’d also get a lot of cigar and sweet-smelling violet-like smells. There was a man who came in and filmed, and he captured seventeen different entities on his computer—and all of these different voices. People come in and sometimes I’ll mention Mr. Whaley to them, and then all of a sudden it will begin smelling like cigars, or sometimes lavender. They come and go as they want, but we’re not frightened of the spirits. It feels like we’re being watched over and protected by Mr. Whaley because we’re women; we’re good with having him—them—here. They’re not harming anyone—and this was their home first.”