CLARIDGE HOUSE
Location: The Claridge Estate is private property twenty miles northwest of Los Angeles on Highway 120 in the San Fernando Valley near Angeles National Forest.
Description of Place: The Claridge House is a fifty-five-room edifice of Tudor-style three-story edifice resting upon eighteen hillside acres of land accentuated by former gardens and out door veranda near a small lake. There is a cemetery and mausoleum on the grounds with graves and markers back to 1822.
Ghostly Manifestations: In 1971, Dr. Timothy Mintz was a teacher of psychology and independent paranormal researcher from out of Stanford University. After years of giving seminars and speeches meriting the benefits of psychic research, he received an interesting letter from a lovely young artist named Troian Claridge. A beautiful artist of exotic grace, she believed she was being haunted by the ghost of her dearly departed husband, noted romance author, Julian Claridge, whose hauntingly romantic tales of lost love and enduring romance adorn the libraries of nearly every lonely lady and unsatisfied wife. Mintz was very interested in his first chance for a serious investigation and arrived with state-of-the-art technology but with little experience in actual ghost-hunting.
Mintz's examination began simply at first, sound activated tape recorders at locations on the property and later to a brand new device designed to detect wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. In paranormal research, it is believed that there is a correlation between spikes in electromagnetic energy and haunting activities. Troian believed that Julian was reaching back to her from beyond death, but he remained oddly silent as Mintz's video cameras caught orbs of light, recorded creaks and groans from the almost two hundred year old structure and the seemingly whispering voices of characters in conversation. Mintz wondered, could Julian be now on a plane of existence with the spirits of his ancestor? If so, could the location have more than one ghost?
One of the ghosts seems to be a woman in a long flowing dress of seemingly Dutch Mennonite appearance. Her visage has been glimpsed peering from upstairs windows, floating past doorways, mulling around corners and once in a frightening capacity, standing over the foot of a bed on the third floor. Troian isn't much bothered by her appearances, but her servants, a cook, two housekeepers and a groundskeeper, have been rattled and disturbed by the phantom moving through the house. Mintz tried several efforts to get this figure on video, but in an odd turn, someone, or something, kept rotating his cameras to face the wall!
What Mintz ended up for his research was more than eighty hours of audio recordings which he later spent diffusing and reviewing for clarity. On February 7th, 1971, he found a spike in the electromagnetic fields around the house that he had somehow forgot to note in his logs, but he later credited that to a lightning strike to a storm that night. For the next three days, the seemingly non-active location was busy with electronic voice patterns (EVPs) occurring at odd intervals. Convinced these sounds were indicative of Julian's ghost reaching out to the realm of the living, he had sound experts at Stanford try to clean up the white noise from the recordings. Bits of coherent voices could be heard saying, "Get me a lock." and another, "She's gas-lighting herself." and most ironically, "There's no such thing as ghosts." Mintz picked out three names he could get from the voices: Sam, Al and Goodie (or "Gooshie"), but he couldn't connect them to anyone in his research of the history of the house. Whoever these beings are, they seemed very curious and interested in observing activity in the house. For some reason, the EVPs ceased the afternoon of February 9, 1971, after a second electromagnetic spike the evening after the San Fernando earthquake, possibly putting the atmosphere back to normal after the lightning strike.
In 1982, eleven years after his visit, Dr. Mintz followed the Hollywood Ghost Hunters Club back to Claridge House for a deeper more in-depth investigation with current up to date technology, but this investigation failed to turn up anything new. By that time, it had been five years since the phantom housekeeper had been last seen standing over Troian as she slept. No EVPs had been detected despite a storm that week, but as the team packed up and began heading out, everyone heard the oak door to the servants quarters in the attic slam shut with a resonating crash.
No one was up there at the time, and the only servant on duty that day was outside with Troian.
History: The Claridge family were members of the Boston elite and aristocracy, the closest thing to royals in the United States. Seeing a future in California real estate, Joshua Claridge located his family to the San Fernando Hills in 1818 where Spanish laborers had built Claridge House on the crest of a hill overlooking a small lake. Later family members created gardens and wineries, but the true history of the family surrounds the more sordid stories of the family. Several of the Claridges experienced violent and unnatural deaths. The most notorious having occurred in February 1840 when Joshua's son, Nathaniel caught his wife, Priscilla, in a romantic interlude with the butler. Nathaniel killed both of them and dumped their bodies in the lake, but he was never prosecuted for the crime. California wasn't a state yet and the local law enforcement agents passed on it as an act of passion. Rumors are that Nathaniel might have used his money and power to keep from going to jail. In 1968, the reputed Claridge family curse reached out to Nathaniel's descendant, Julian Claridge. As he was posing in a boat for a portrait painted by his wife, the wind flipped the boat over and he drowned; his wife, Troian, unable to swim and distressed could only scream from shore for help from the servants, who couldn't locate the body. Four years later on February 9, 1971, earthquakes struck lower California, resulting in major damage to over a hundred buildings and almost a hundred million dollars in damages. The aftershocks shook loose Julian's remains from the cold recesses of the lake...
...along with the preserved remains of Priscilla and the butler.
Identity of Ghosts: Julian's ghost no longer seems to make itself known. The Mennonite housekeeper still appears from time to time with long periods of inactivity in between. There are no known recorded individuals in the history of the house with the names Sam, Al and Goodie.
Source/Comments: Quantum Leap, (Episode: A Portrait For Troian"), Loosely based on East Riddlesden Hall in Riddlesden, Sussex County, England. Family history loosely based on the Collins family genealogy from "Dark Shadows,"(1967-1972, 1990); the Quantum Leap episode was filmed at Greystone Estate near Beverly Hills, California which served as Collinwood for the 1990s Dark Shadows mini-series.
Blooper: In the episode, one of the grave markers has a date of 1790, far too early for a location in the San Fernando Valley. It is conceivable, though, this could be a family member relocated after burial in the East to the family crypt in the West.