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CHAPTER 4

The Whaley House

OLD TOWN SAN DIEGO

The Whaley House is incredibly loved by the community and honored for the pioneering family that once lived there—and it’s one of America’s most haunted buildings.

ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE PARANORMAL has heard of the infamous Whaley House, one of the most visited of California’s historic houses. It’s also a home occupied by spirits—the entire Whaley family and their pets—seem to have made an appearance at one time or another. Built in 1857 for the sum of $10,000 in materials and labor, the wood-and-brick structure was extravagant for Thomas Whaley, a man with big dreams and modest means.

The Whaley family became pioneers in the San Diego area. Born in New York City in 1823, the enterprising Thomas Whaley came to San Diego via San Francisco, where he had a storefront on Montgomery Street during the forty-niner Gold Rush days. His store was successful, perhaps too much so, as it burned down in what was suspected arson. This incident became typical of the Whaley family’s luck. Thomas Whaley was never a wealthy man for any period of time; his luck seemed to ebb and flow in between mysterious fires and family tragedies. His wife, Anna Eloise DeLaunay, bore him six children, none of whom carried the family name forward as Whaley probably envisioned they might when he made the harrowing sea journey to San Francisco.

When Thomas and Anna arrived in Old Town, they found little societal infrastructure. The area was rough-and-tumble—actually, downright lawless—and so unlike San Francisco or New York City. Life on State Street was difficult at best, but they made a life worth living; existing journals and letters show their love for one another.

The land where the Whaley House now stands, purchased for $1.50, was once where a gallows stood, its rope bringing swift justice to those criminals whose bodies were then buried on the same street just a few blocks away (see El Campo Santo chapter). Despite the hardships, the family seemed to thrive for years. Just as Whaley was gaining traction, his store was destroyed in a fire—again. Some say the work of an arsonist. In 1867, he moved the family back to San Francisco while he worked a lucrative job in Alaska and was able to support them in the lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed.

In 1869, Thomas Whaley leased several of the rooms of Whaley House and turned the unused space into revenue; the largest room of the home was converted into a county courtroom—it had also been a dairy, a Sunday school, a morgue, and a store. The rooms upstairs were converted into a theater. Later, the family was once again reunited in San Diego, and everything was going well for the family, but not for the town.

There was much political upheaval in Old Town as its role as the county seat was ripped away. Soon it became just another colorful neighborhood in the weave of the county’s tapestry. Whaley became a shadow of the man who’d arrived in California to fulfill his destiny and take his place in history. Once known informally as the “Mayor of San Diego” and appointed president of the San Diego City Board of Trustees, he saw his life begin its downward spiral. In 1871, the county clerk rode to the Whaley home courthouse and forcibly took the city records that had been stored there.

On January 5, 1882, Whaley’s daughters Violet and Anna Amelia had a wonderful double wedding; Anna Amelia married her first cousin, John T. Whaley, and Violet wedded George T. Bertolacci, whom she divorced a little more than a year later. Violet suffered a great deal of clinical depression before she took her own life in 1885 (see Creole Café chapter). With the death of their dear Violet and their son Thomas Jr., Thomas and Anna wanted to leave the home’s memories behind, so they moved to what is now downtown. Whaley became an employee of city government and retired in 1888 and passed away in his downtown home in 1890 at the age of sixty-seven. Anna Amelia Whaley passed away in Modesto in 1905.

Thomas Whaley had rented out their home on San Diego Avenue, and it had fallen into great disrepair. In 1909, tourism took hold of San Diego as everyone readied for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona had planted a wildly romantic view of Southern California in the rest of the world’s imagination (see Rancho Camulos chapter). So people continued to come to Southern California and vacation up and down the coast. Thomas Whaley’s son Francis undertook making the home a tourist attraction; he posted signs outside promoting its history and entertained visitors with his guitar on the porch of his childhood home and charged a small fee for a tour. The Whaley matriarch, Anna, along with Corinne Lillian, Francis, and George, one again took up residence in the old Whaley House in 1912. In 1913, the family suffered the loss of Anna at age eighty. A year later, Francis Whaley passed away, followed by George Whaley in 1928. Corinne Lillian Whaley continued living in what must have been a house of spirits by then until her death in 1953.

There’s not much about the Whaley family in today’s history books; even the family burial plot is not especially ornate or conspicuous (see Mount Hope chapter). If it were not for Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO) and the vision they had to preserve the home Whaley left behind, the family name might not be known at all today.

New to the area in 2002, I took a tour of the Whaley House because of my own love for historic architecture. I was taking pictures with my cell phone from all angles, but stopped dead in my tracks as I looked at the digital photo I’d taken while shooting up the stairs. There, midway up the stairs, was the figure of a little boy in period clothing staring down at me. I looked at the picture, at the stairs, and back at the camera. I immediately went upstairs to search the rooms for the child who seemed to have disappeared the moment I took his picture. I found no one. I went downstairs and showed people the photo and asked them if they’d seen the child come down. There was quite a stir, and in all the excitement I’d forgotten to save the photo. During the time my phone was being passing around, the photo was deleted, but the memory of the child dressed in Victorian clothing sitting halfway up the stairs and looking quite forlorn was not.

As I formed my Meetup group, Ghosts Happen, and brought them to the location (see Creole Café chapter), I began a rapport with the people responsible for raising the money to pay the bills every month. Each of them has their own stories of the home, not because they’re gullible people or because they’re prone to hallucinations, but because, I believe, the Whaleys have adopted them as family. The stories I hear are not scary or bloodcurdling; instead, they are rather caring.

The Whaley family altar outside their home on the annual celebration of the Day of the Dead. The streets of Old Town are lined with altars, covered with candles and marigolds, that honor the dead. This is where the procession to El Campo Santo Cemetery begins.

What you find with the staff of the Whaley House isn’t indicative of the history museums you see all over the country—filled with senior volunteers who are desperately trying to save history for the next generation. Instead, you find young people—people who started caring about preserving history in their teens—who were somehow born into the love of history and filled with enthusiasm and innovative ideas to preserve the property and reach out to the community. And when they talk about the ghosts that reside in the Whaley manse, they’re respectful and protective—apparently to give the entities the room they need to coexist on the property.

Victor Santana, director of interpretive services for SOHO, shares that dedication to history and came to the Whaley House through the junior docent program when he was sixteen. You can tell Santana is proud of what SOHO has done for the Whaley home, and that he takes a great deal of care in the way he presents the home to the public. All of the employees are quite protective of the Whaley family and the buildings in the square.

“I think we can all have different assumptions about what ghosts are, and why they’re still here, and what to call them, but unless you hear it directly from them you’re not going to have a definitive answer,” says Santana. “You go with the obvious answer; it’s probably the Whaleys—it is their home. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t be them—they had their good times and they had their tragedies here, but it’s still their home.”

Santana has experienced quite a bit of paranormal activity over the years. His first experience happened on his first night locking up alone. “I was locking up one night after a private tour with a newlywed couple. It was about eleven. I was nearly done when I heard footsteps upstairs, and I thought, ‘This isn’t good—it’s my first night—someone must have snuck in.’ So I went upstairs to see what was going on, and there was no one up there. I came back and the footsteps starting sounding so real and so loud that I actually called my boss at the time and I told her, ‘I think the house is really haunted.’ She asked, ‘What are you still doing there?’ And I told her that I was locking up and still hearing noises like someone is still here. She told me to just set the alarm and lock up. As I’m setting the alarm, I heard a woman’s voice whisper, ‘Why are you still here?’

“For all the years I’ve been here, I’ve not heard anything else … .” Santana shrugs. “But I’ve heard recordings of the voices in the house. The San Diego Ghost Hunters do EVP sessions here [see El Campo Santo chapter]. I’m not a ghosthunter, but I do believe in ghosts. I think it’s really cool what they [ghosthunters] do. I listened to a recording where the San Diego Ghost Hunters ask, ‘Thomas Whaley, are you here?’ ‘Anna Whaley, are you here?’ And then they say, ‘Maybe it’s the little girl who lives here?’ When you listen back you can clearly hear a little girl answering Yes or No questions so close to the microphone, it’s like she’s in the same room.”

As is everyone connected to the Whaley House, Santana is very respectful of the property and the spirits residing there. “Don’t base what you’re going to do on what you see on television,” says Santana to visitors of the Whaley House. “A lot of people come in here and try to offend the ghosts and yell out at them. You don’t go to someone’s house and cuss or call them out.”

Dean Glass, administrative manager of SOHO, had an experience that brought him face-to-face with the master of the house. One thing about all the people working with the Whaley House is that they’re credible witnesses that don’t seem to be the type who see spirits everywhere. I’ve seen many who lie their way through a story, and this is not what they’re about. Each has only a handful of stories for the length of time they’ve been working at the house, and all of them preface their stories with a type of story that explains how they wouldn’t believe their own stories had they not lived through them themselves.

“It’s been about six years now,” said Glass of the morning that gave him a story that still gave him goose bumps (I noticed) when he told it. “I was opening up the house one morning and walking up the stairs, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye something that looked like pants legs in between the rails. I cocked my head and looked up—and there was a man standing there. His hands were outstretched on the railing at the top, and he was staring straight at me. He had really distinctive eyes—if you look at the portrait of Thomas Whaley in the parlor, they were the same eyes … really piercing. Lillian Whaley used to call them the ‘Intelligent Whaley eyes’ [see whaleyhouse.org to find out more; Lillian’s papers are now available there]. He was just staring right at me. He startled me because no one was supposed to be there. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, but I couldn’t see the style of the hat because I just saw from underneath. He was shades of gray; I don’t remember if I could see through him or not. He had a look on his face like he was wondering about who I was and why I was there. And the next moment he was gone. Another thing I remember is that he was in his mid-twenties; not an older man like Thomas Whaley was when he died, but I always got the feeling it was Thomas Whaley.

“I always say hello to anyone who may be seeing or hearing me,” said Glass. “And every time I go up the stairs—every time—I always look to see if he’s there. All these years later, and I still look for him.”

Facility Manager Robert Daniel Wilson has worked at the house for three years and is a favorite of tourists because he seems to know everything about the property and the Whaley family.

“I always say that my experiences are very limited because I’m not very sensitive to the paranormal aspect of the house. I just get the basic things that someone would get if you’re in the right place at the right time,” says Wilson. “They’re [the ghosts] not evil, believe me—if people were getting hurt here, I wouldn’t be working here. The spirits here are intelligent, and I believe they know what’s going on here. For instance, Thomas Whaley knows that the money spent on tickets here helps keep the house in its present condition. He understands this because he used to do the same thing by renting out the rooms in his home.

“I was working here one Friday morning when a woman poked her head in and asked what the house was all about. I gave her a brief history. She spoke with a very thick French accent and was difficult to understand, but she told me she’d be back. She brought back eight foreign-exchange students, and in about thirty minutes her group was in the courtroom and they seemed to be having a good time touring the home. On her way out, she thanked me and told me she’d be back on Sunday with more students. I told her we’d look forward to seeing them.

“She was back on Sunday with more students, and they were in the courtroom and she kept asking the same question over and over again, but I couldn’t understand her. One of the other docents came in and we figured out she was asking if we could ‘do it again’ over and over. Well, we didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she looked back in the courtroom and smiled and nodded at us. Apparently, the last time she’d come in, the chandelier was swinging, and she thought we’d rigged something to do that. And when she looked back in the courtroom, the chandelier was swinging again—she thought we’d done it! She willed it to happen on her own. I like to think people have different levels of spiritual attractiveness; just like we’re attracted to people with similar interests, so are spirits. I think that would explain a lot.”

Carrie Higginson, former gift-shop manager, worked on the property for four years and recalled an incident similar to one described in the Creole Café chapter. “I was running in between the gift shop and the Whaley House porch, and on the far left side in between the first two pillars—when you’re facing the street—I slipped and my arms went up in the air and my feet went flying out from under me facing the avenue. I thought I was going to break my head on the bricks—I should have broken my head on the bricks because of the way I was landing. Instead, I brushed myself off and hoped that no one had seen me. The next day, my coworker pointed out I had a bruise on my arm that looked like a handprint—it was a right-hand imprint on my right arm, so I had a thumb-bruise outline going diagonally and four finger outlines on the outside of my arm. I thought the bruise was dirt; I poked it in a few places, but there was no pain whatsoever. It freaked me out, and I still don’t presume to know what happened.

“A lot of my coworkers will give personalities to the ghosts. I’m not quite ready to do that … well, except for the ones in the gift shop. I notice if I don’t say goodnight to Mrs. Verna, who was the previous occupant of the home [saved from the wrecking ball and moved to the Whaley Complex Community Park], I have problems with the lock. I mean, it’s the same lock—I use it every day, it’s the same rotation, and sometimes when I don’t say goodnight, it just clicks funny, and I’ll remember that I didn’t say good night. When I remember this and say, ‘Good night, Mrs. Verna,’ the lock is fine again.”

Corinne Lillian Whaley, the youngest child of Thomas and Anna Whaley, wrote about her memories of Old Town, and they were compiled into a book titled California’s Oldest Town (available at the Whaley House gift shop). She used Old Town’s plummet from the up-and-coming to the dilapidated place it became as a metaphor of her own mortality. The book is a wonderful collection of her memories growing up in the Whaley home, a definite must-read for anyone interested in what life once was in Old Town. Corinne Lillian was the last full-time resident of the home, living there alone with her memories that still echo through its hallways and stairwell.

The two old palm trees at the entrance of town stand like old and trusted sentinels, the only living witnesses of my own growth and fall. Never again shall the same happy-hearted people walk my streets and share the primitive pleasures of the olden time. I stand today a dilapidated monument of the past. I am, indeed, deserted.

—Corinne Lillian Whaley, Nov. 26, 1882