San Diego haunted house? Whaley House Director June Redding – Harold Keen asks “is it haunted?”

CBS 8 San Diego posted this archive film in August 2025. According to the station’s original script, it was shot on 23 April 1962, about two years after the Whaley House opened as a museum, when reporter Harold Keen interviewed its director, June Redding – identified in the script as Mrs. James Redding – who was convinced the house had ghosts.

Standing in the upstairs master bedroom, Redding describes hearing a man’s footsteps crossing the floor above her desk every week or so for months, finding windows open despite their bolts, and a visitor’s story that her family had been driven out by noises there 60 years earlier. She then relays the impressions of a medium from a local parapsychology group – a man hanging from a scaffold, a woman in a purple dress at a back window, and a stocky, whiskered man with a bad leg – and links them to Yankee Jim Robinson, Lillian Whaley and the family’s business manager. Asked whether this proves the house is haunted, she answers that it may.

This interview captures the Whaley House legend near its birth. The stories came from the museum’s own director in its first years, were amplified by a psychic’s “impressions,” and reached television within two years of the house opening to the public – the start of a reputation that has drawn visitors ever since.

Notice how the medium’s readings are confirmed: details are matched after the fact to people in the house’s history, and Redding herself remarks that a mannequin in the house wore a mauve dress like the one described. Footsteps and opening windows in a century-old house with wooden floors have ordinary explanations, and none was tested.