The ghosts of Sonoma’s past
When Sonoma’s streets are flooded with little witches, ghosts, fantastic figures, princesses and pirates in the gathering darkness of Halloween night, it reminds me that perhaps Sonoma is haunted. If there are spirits of the past making themselves visible or whose presence is felt by the living, the first question is, where are these ghosts?
The Blue Wing Inn is a two-story, pure adobe building on East Spain Street, opposite the Mission. It was built in Spanish colonial style in two stages, starting in 1840 and completed later in that decade. The first section housed General Mariano Vallejo’s troopers. Two Americans, James Cooper and Thomas Spriggs, bought the building in 1849, doubled its size and named it Sonoma House.
It was an inn, with a saloon and gambling on the ground floor and hotel rooms and some ladies of the evening upstairs. Sonoma House prospered during the Gold Rush from miners paying in gold dust and U.S. soldiers bellying up to the bar. Customers included future Civil War generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Joe Hooker, John C. Fremont and even Ulysses S. Grant, as well as killers like “Three Fingers” Garcia. Co-owner Cooper and his wife, Sara, lived on the premises in the early 1850s and changed the name to Blue Wing.
In 1856, Spriggs died, and when Mr. Cooper complained to the local schoolmaster about the treatment of his son, the educator stabbed him to death. The widow Cooper sold the building to General Vallejo’s lawyer, Martin Cooke, who moved in upstairs. It passed through many owners and uses, and was refurbished and finally sold to the state of California in 1964. The upstairs was divided into rented apartments.
Several responsible tenants reported seeing one of at least three ghosts: a lady with a lamp who appeared to loving couples, a woman bathed in yellow light, and a pirate-looking fellow tromping about in heavy boots and accompanied by a small dog. Recently the state has left the Blue Wing Inn vacant – what a shame.
The historic Ray-Adler adobe, augmented with redwood pillars and siding, is located at the corner of East Spain and Second Street East. A large, two-story gabled adobe, it was originally a single-floor store, built (facing west) in 1848. A second floor was added in 1878. Over the years, there have been repeated sightings of a friendly lady in blue roaming the upper floor of this drafty residence.
Out on Castle Road, the original buildings of the Bartholomew Park Winery have an exotic history. In 1920 a castle-like mansion (which no longer exists) was bought by the state for the Industrial Workfarm for Women – a low-security home for “wayward” women. Another structure, still standing, was built as the institution’s receiving hospital. After an arson fire and then a riot by the “wild” females, the Workfarm was disbanded. The facility was then reconstituted as the State Hospital for the Feeble Minded, and from 1945 to 1957 was the Community Hospital. The morgue in the basement of the one-time receiving hospital has been transformed into a manager’s office. This office, with its eerie history, is haunted, according to well-known ghost-hunter Jeff Dwyer, who refers to unexplained fuzziness in photographs of the room, called an “orb,” which comes and goes.
East Bay native Dwyer has a PhD and has been sleuthing the rumors of ghosts throughout the West. He has written several books about these hauntings. His new, and latest, volume about such spirits and the locations of strange happenings is the “Ghost Hunter’s Guide to California’s Wine Country.” He claims to possess certain psychic powers that aid him in his searches. Recently he led a group of amateur paranormal investigators to suspected haunted places in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino Counties. He was particularly drawn to a community of spirits he could feel at our Mountain Cemetery filled with future ghosts.
Our late friend, Professor Robin Skelton of the University of Victoria, a renowned Canadian poet and leading writer on ghosts that he had tracked (he was a witch), explained to us that he and his trained aides could detect spirits by recording “hot spots” of electric charges in the air. Dwyer and friends refer to “energy” verified by a spectrograph or “feelings of dread,” and the “orbs” which appear on some photographs.
There are also some local ghost stories, which require a vivid imagination and make spine-tingling fun when sitting in the dark. As for me, I’ll get my kicks handing out wrapped candy to the little ghosts swathed in used bed sheets with eye-holes cut out by their parents.
Gerald Hill is co-author with Kathleen Thompson Hill of “Sonoma Valley: The Secret Wine Country,” and five other guides to West Coast wine regions, as well as several other books.
