It’s been a long time since we did a good old-fashioned Avalon ghost story in this column. To be honest, I had been waiting through the winter for a suitably drab and dreary stretch of weather to “raise the dead” again. But, alas, such weather proved to be elusive. I suppose the June Gloom will have to suffice.
It’s been a long time since we did a good old-fashioned Avalon ghost story in this column. To be honest, I had been waiting through the winter for a suitably drab and dreary stretch of weather to “raise the dead” again. But, alas, such weather proved to be elusive. I suppose the June Gloom will have to suffice.
Like any number of old seaside villages in America with its good times and its bad times, Avalon has its share of stories from “the beyond.” In fact, to hear some folks talk, it would seem you can’t swing an undead cat without hitting a ghost in Avalon.
But I have come to learn over the years that one street in particular—Whittley Avenue—seems to have an inordinate number of such tales.
I’ve already done a column on the “Ristorante dei Fantasme” (the “haunted restaurant”) at the foot of Whittley and the odd happenings there such as plates scooting off tables by themselves, a “shadow figure” moving in and out of the dead-end basement and—as one former employee told me—previously-unlit candles lighting up by themselves without a living soul nearby.
But for this column we’ll delve into some of the hotels and residences along that hallowed street.
Like most of Avalon’s modern-day streets, Whittley Avenue dates back to the late 1880s and was part of the original layout of the town during the George Shatto administration.
The street was named for Frank Paul Whittley, a local rancher whose family had been grazing cattle on Catalina since the mid-1800s. In 1881, Frank married Manuela “Nellie” Adargo. Like many early Californians, Mr. Whittley was both a landsman as well as a seaman and the name of his sailing vessel was, appropriately, “Nellie.”
One of the earliest and most chilling ghost stories I heard upon first moving to Catalina back in the 1990s involved one of the hotels on Whittley. Like most of the hotels on that street, it dates back nearly a century—ample time to have had any number of tales of tragedy associated with it.
Long before cruise ships began to visit the Island and back when cross-channel transportation to the Island in the winter was sketchy at best, winters in Avalon were at once lonely yet peaceful.
On one particularly rainy, dreary winter’s day in this hotel, a friend of mine and his roommate heard the sound of a chair falling and hitting the floor directly above them. Since there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else in the hotel, the two immediately raced upstairs and found a single chair tipped over in the center of the room.
That was odd and unnerving enough. But imagine the chills that went down my friend’s back when he learned later on that fifty years earlier, back in the 1920s, a young man had committed suicide in that very same room. And how did the victim of this suicide accomplish his task? You guessed it: by placing a noose around his neck, standing on a chair and then kicking the chair out from underneath him. Fifty years earlier.
Another set of “Whispy Whittley” stories revolves around a local married couple and their young daughter who lived on upper Whittley for a number of years.
I have been good friends with these people for more than a decade and know them to be good, hard-working, level-headed people. If you live in Avalon you probably know them too, and no doubt like and respect them.
If you’ve seen “The Sixth Sense,” you know that children are supposedly more “open” to such sightings. Skeptics, of course, would argue that children have greater imaginations. You be the judge.
“Betty,” as I shall call her, first noticed strange things when three-year-old daughter “Tammy” would often beckon her to come to a particular closet in the house. “Mommy! Mommy!,” she would say. “Come and see her beautiful dress! Mom, the lady’s here and you have to see her beautiful dress!”
Tammy would go to the closet with mom in tow and insist there was a woman standing there. But mom would see nothing. This happened on multiple occasions.
Another frequent occurrence involved the old Christian Science Church on the corner of Whittley and East Whittley.
Because of the steep climb, the mother-daughter team would always take a short break when returning from Vons by sitting on one of the church’s old stone walls.
“Every time we would pass through that way we would take a break on the wall,” said Betty. “We’d be sitting there and my daughter would say ‘I can’t stand this screaming man. We have to go!’” Daughter Tammy was claiming to see a “man in a suit” standing there on the corner screaming something that, as a three-year-old, she wasn’t able to understand.
“This would happen every single time we passed the church,” said Betty.
“Did he sound like he was trying to warn you about something?,” I asked Tammy once. “Or did he just seem mad?”
“He just seemed mad,” she replied.
I purposely saved the best of the three Betty-and-Tammy stories for last because it tends to defy the “children’s imagination” argument.
Betty’s mother passed away back in 2006 when Betty’s daughter was nary the age of two. Shortly before her death, the mother had stayed for a couple of weeks in the family’s apartment on Whittley.
It was in September of 2006, after the family returned from the mother’s funeral that things got weird. “After my mom died,” said Betty, “Tammy would come and wake me and tell me ‘grandma’s on the couch.’ She would literally get me out of bed.” This happened on a regular basis.
Then came the winter evening when Betty was cooking and daughter Tammy came in once again to announce that grandma was “on the couch.”
But this time Tammy added something else: “She wants you to make her potato soup.”
Betty was floored. “That potato soup was my mother’s favorite soup,” she told me. “There is NO WAY that Tammy could have known about that.”
Is it possible that Betty had made the soup even once while Tammy was a baby?
“No way,” said Betty. “Nobody knew about it. I didn’t share that with anyone. I hated making that soup. I never made it.”
Between now and next week, I’ll see if I can’t drum up a few more “Whisp of Whittley” stories. I know there are more out there …
