Whaley House

Thomas Whaley, a New York merchant, came to San Diego in 1851 by way of the Gold Rush and in 1856 began building a two-storey Greek Revival house in Old Town with bricks from his own brickyard. Finished in 1857 at a cost of more than $10,000, it was the finest house in Southern California and the first brick building of its kind in the region. Over the next two decades it was the family home, Whaley’s general store, San Diego’s first commercial theatre – a converted upstairs bedroom where the Tanner Troupe performed in 1868 – and, from 1869, the county courthouse.

The Whaleys knew grief there. Their son Thomas Jr. died of scarlet fever at eighteen months in January 1858. In 1882 their daughter Violet married a man who turned out to be a fortune-hunting con artist; the marriage collapsed, and in August 1885, aged 22 and suffering from depression, she took her own life in the house. Thomas Whaley moved the family to a new home downtown, and the Old Town house stood empty for years until his son Francis restored it around 1909. His sister Corinne lived there until her death in 1953.

The ghost stories are almost as old as the house. According to the museum, it stands on ground once used for Old Town’s gallows, and the best-known early ghost is James “Yankee Jim” Robinson, hanged in 1852 for stealing a boat; Whaley himself is said to have heard heavy footsteps he attributed to Robinson. Accounts of where exactly Robinson was executed differ, and some histories place the hanging in the nearby Campo Santo cemetery.

The house opened as a museum on 25 May 1960 under the San Diego Historical Shrine Foundation, with June Reading as its long-serving director. Television presenter Regis Philbin said he had an encounter there while filming in 1964, and claims that the US Commerce Department once certified the house as haunted have circulated for decades without any supporting document. The Travel Channel later called it “America’s most supernatural home”, and the current operator, Historic Tours of America, markets it as “America’s Most Haunted House”.

Visitors and staff describe heavy footsteps upstairs, the smell of cigar smoke and perfume attributed to Thomas and Anna Whaley, a lifelike girl in a long dress in the dining room, cold spots, and unexplained activity in the old courtroom. Philbin said he saw a figure he took to be Anna Whaley.

The upstairs hallway and bedrooms, the parlour and dining room, and the restored 1869 courtroom, which the museum says is especially active; reports come both on daytime visits and on evening and after-hours paranormal tours.

The Whaley House appears in TIME’s 2008 list of America’s top haunted places, on America’s Most Haunted, Fact or Faked, Ghost Adventures and BuzzFeed Unsolved, and inspired the 2012 film The Haunting of Whaley House. It anchors Old Town San Diego’s ghost tours.