Description Of Place: Hardly the picture of a stereotypical haunted house, the Browning House is a one-story Ranch-style structure with a high ceiling supported by large redwood timbers and including four bedrooms and a connected garage.

Ghostly Manifestations: Haunted houses tend to have an archetype. They're usually pictured as old abandoned Gothic Victorians in lonely or abandoned parts of town away from the center of where everything happens. This occurs because the center of town tends to move to wherever the retailers or successful businesses go. When writer Paul Anderson was a young boy growing up in Lauperville, California, he recalled his folks shopping in a small food market on main street down the street from his house on Danvers Street. They soon moved to a larger Big Foods store with an adjoining drug store at the end of New Danvers Street which merged with Old Danvers Street just a block up from his old house. By time he graduated Lauperville High School, his parents were shopping at the brand new Krogers at the end of Route 13, now local Witherspoon Street lined with several nice suburban houses and recent sub-divisions. When he drove back to Old Danvers Road to wax nostalgic at his old house, it seemed like the deserted part of town despite the fact his old grammar school was just a few roads over. He also recalled the Old Samuelson House which he thought was haunted because no one ever seemed to come and go from it. It was a large three-story Gothic Victorian set back from the road on a huge parcel of land and obscured by several trees. Research told him that Mr. Samuelson's widow had last lived there in 1989 when she died, and it was left in the custody of family members who never lived there.

Today, a Burger King and Storage Place mark the spot.

Since then, Anderson has had a long time interest in haunted houses. He even wanted to be a horror writer at one point, but he instead decided he liked eating and sleeping in a house and took up writing obituaries and local stories for the Pasadena Tattler through the 90s. His interest in ghosts, however, never waned, and in 2012, he actually rented and moved into the Old Browning House in Sunland, California with his live-in girlfriend, Stella Donahue. The structure was radically unlike the Samuelson House; it was a one-story ranch-style in a sunny suburban California neighborhood, and it had a long history of scaring away renters. His intention was to write a history about the experiences he had in the reputedly haunted house.

"We moved in on August 20, 2012..." Anderson told the CGS. "I knew it was supposedly haunted. Stella didn't have a problem moving into it, and I kind of took a cue from the Amityville Horror by decorating and arranging the house in much the same way the Browning family had it in the Sixties when they died here. I heard somewhere that would encourage the hauntings, and I even put a doll in the old daughter's room to placate her. I guess it kind of worked because that night Stella woke to the sound of someone moving through the house and asked that the bedroom door be left open from now then."

From that point on, the house didn't seem to make any real efforts to scare Paul or Stella. They heard creaking noises, there would be rare chattering sounds that were more distracting than spooky and doors were often creaking open by themselves, no matter how many times Paul checked them. On August 8, just over a week since moving in, Stella had an experience that pushed her beyond she could take. She was in the shower when she heard the front door open and close and called out to Paul since she thought it was him. Drying herself off, she pulled on shorts and a t-shirt to go meet him, but after a few minutes, she realized she was quite alone. Ending up in the kitchen, she then heard a chair being dragged across the floor of the drawing room and went back through the house to check it out. As she left the kitchen, she then noticed out the corner of her eye a drawer slide open in the kitchen by itself. By her own testimony, she confesses she was more curious that spooked but that "the spook factor was slowly building up." As she was standing in the kitchen trying to regain her bearings, all the drawers and cabinet popped open at the same moment. 

As these events were unfolding, Paul was in the garage working on the circuit board for an antique radio that the Brownings had owned. Thinking he could get it working again, he was tinkering with the electronics when he noticed a basketball roll into the garage. At the moment, his idea was one of the neighbor kids had lost it, so he left his project to collect it and toss it as far as he could in the direction it had come from. Roughly ten to minutes later, Paul was deeply into the circuit board again as the basketball came sailing into the garage as if fired from a cannon, smashing into the lawn tools on the other side with a loud crash and a sudden shock to Paul's heart.

"By that moment," Paul confides. "I was ready to wrap it for the night. I had a small flashlight to look around the yard, but it was cheap. Flickering in and out. So, I turned off the light, closed the garage door and headed into the house where I found Stella sitting in shock on the floor behind the chair in the living room. This was after her ordeal in the kitchen. I asked her what had happened, but she could just point to the dining room. All the chairs had been piled up on top of each other in a reverse pyramid. That was the breaking point for her. I don't know what she was expecting, but she was not prepared for that kind of activity. I tried to get her to stay, but she moved out that night for her mother's house in Altadena. It's taken me five years to get us back to the relationship we had at that point."

After Stella left, Paul continued staying in the house, keeping himself awake at night waiting for activity and typing during the day. While the house was tolerable during the day, he experienced more stuff at night. He'd hear noises like kids going up and down the hall, the sounds of their muffled chatter coming from the children's room which he used as an office. On September 23, 2012, he thought he heard a child giggling so he went into his office, sat on the floor and waited for it to appear to him.

In his research for his project, Paul even interviewed Samuel "Skip" Cole, the landlord when he came for the rent. Although his parents had never lived in the house, they had purchased it as an investment right after the murders in the house. Although he scoffed at the stories, he didn't like being inside the place, and Paul coaxed him to give him a copy of the list of renters to stay in the house since his parents had owned it. For the next month, Paul tracked down many of the former tenants, many of whom seemed to be friendly until he said why he was calling. Unfortunately, once he mentioned the house on Maple Street, they usually hung up and refused to talk.

Meanwhile, Paul keep getting random paranormal events separated by long spates on non-activity. On October 13, 2012, he heard the radio he he thought he had fixed trying to come to life. He started having the feeling of being watched and started setting his alarm to wake him up at night to get experiences. 

On November 4, 2012, he woke up to the sensation of the sheet on his bed moving on his bed. Admittedly, his first thought was that Stella had returned to him, but when he looked behind him, he saw the outline of a woman lying next to him in bed. She was actually much taller than Stella, but when he pulled the sheet off the bed, no one was there. Yet, the imprint of a person was still in the bed. Even more frightening, when he glanced to his side, he noticed the sheet had fallen over the shape of a small boy by his side. Stunned and surprised, Paul reached to claim the sheet, but the figure suddenly jerked its head toward him, as if suddenly noticing him, and vanished out the side of the sheet, leaving it fluttering to the floor. In his writing, Paul wondered if the boy didn't want him to see him or if he was just unable to appear. Finally convinced he had made contact, he resolved himself to make contact with the father, who he felt was the strongest presence in the house.

Meanwhile, of the former tenants, the only person to make contact with Paul was Sue Dryer, the previous tenant, who still lived locally. Paul met up with her on November 5, 2012 at her house in Altadena. Living on disability, she was a quiet reclusive woman who Paul found charming and friendly, but as they talked, she seemed to start reflecting the anxiety she had lived with on Maple Street. In an interview that started off like a small chat, Sue described activity that started two weeks after she had moved into the house. Cabinets and doors opened and closed, muffled voices came from rooms and closets, shadows moved through the house and strange noises followed her around. Her son even seemed to have an imaginary friend named Tom. Fascinated at first, she tried to communicate with it, but it didn't want to talk to her or reveal itself to anyone else. She became increasingly religious to defend herself, but that only made it worse. One night as she was going down the hall, she was pushed to the floor, and she woke up to a psyche imagination at the hospital. In a sense, the activity ruined her marriage.

The night of Sue Dryer's interview, Paul recalls waking up to the sound of the antique radio turned on and headed to the living room to turn it off. As he returned to bed, he heard the dining room chairs being dragged around again and turned around to see one of the chairs behind him. In his mind, it was almost as if someone was sitting and watching him. This activity was followed by the radio getting turned on again full blast, surprising him so much that his flashlight got flung down the hall to his bedroom. He then watched from the living room as the light was being bounced all over the place as if being played by a child.

"I have to confess..." Paul remembers the incident. "I was terrified, but somehow, I mustered myself to head down the hall, and try to sneak up on it. However, when I did that, I apparently forced it to retreat into the bedroom closet where the light was still sliding back and forth under the door. Once again, I head the muffled sound of children's voices through the door, so I tried talking to it, but it wouldn't communicate, and when I opened the door, nothing was there but my flashlight." 

Since moving out, Paul hasn't talked about what actually forced him to leave the house, but he has ashamedly confessed to trying to use a tape recorder to catch EVPs in the house to get Tom to talk to him. Of that night, he only says: "Up to that point, everything was mild, but eventually, it was as if the ghosts were tired of me in their house and decided it was time for me to go.

"By the way," Paul adds. "I later learned that the Samuelson House had been taken apart and reassembled elsewhere instead of getting demolished. It's now located in a historical neighborhood in Hitchcock, California."

History: Not much is known about the origins of the Browning House, but it is believed it was built as part of the huge Sunland Housing Development in the Late Fifties to create numerous cheap and affordable family homes between 1955 and 1965. Not much is known about the families who have lived in the house since then, but since 1975, it has been owned by the Cole Family, who has owned it since and renting it. Unfortunately, no one lives in the house for very long. Even today, the house stands empty with the last known occupant having lived here in December 2015.

Identity Of Ghosts: The house was once owned by Thomas and Laura Browning from 1973 to 1975. He was a former maintenance engineer in the United States Army turned contractor, and she was a former restaurant hostess turned housewife for their two children, Madeline and Bobby, aged eight and five, respectively. For unknown reasons on December 11, 1975, Thomas left work late and disappeared for a few hours, eventually wandering home after dark. Using a snub-nosed revolver he was keeping for a friend, he shot his wife and kids in their beds before taking his own life in the living room. Madeline's parents coming for a visit that weekend found the bodies. The police found no existence of a break-in, no discourse in David's life or any signs of financial trouble. Without any reason for the murders, neighbors an investigators chalked the reason up to some form of battle fatigue despite the fact that Thomas never saw any active duty. Nevertheless, Paul believes their spirits are still in the house.