FOWLER ESTATE
Location: Seventy miles east of Palm Springs on Old Highway 10, Hitchcock is one of the Southeast California towns hampered by the opening of Interstate 10 in 1947 redirecting traffic from Las Vegas away from the highway. A quiet tourist town of only about 1,573, the town has developed notoriety as a UFO mecca for tourists, similar to Roswell, New Mexico. Rendered all but invisible to that phenomenon is the Old Fowler Estate located on a hill four miles out of town off Fowler Boulevard.
Description of Place: A split-level two-story stucco mansion of fifteen bedrooms, the mansion includes a grand ballroom, dining hall, game room and a library study. The immediate grounds include an above-ground pool, pool house, tennis court and a vast garden with a palm-lined driveway. The once vast Fowler property, comprising of seventy acres of grassy fields and arid desert, has been sub-divided and is expected in the near future to be suburbanized.
Ghostly Manifestations: In 1977, an eighteen-year-old high school graduate named Jesse Cuoco in a mad rush to achieve his independence from his family launched into a scheme that lasted a successful fifteen years. He had heard of the long-deserted Fowler Estate replete with furnishings and capable of sustaining its own water and power and had moved into as an illegal squatter using a P.O. Box to get his mail. Living rent-free and investing his own money into preserving the structure to the best of his ability, he continued this facade for some time until relatives of his live-in girlfriend and guests learned the truth. The court system awarded him the house for improving on it, but he still had to pay back property taxes. The land fell to Provine Properties based near San Diego who still had a vested interest in it. Again, Jesse became resourceful: selling his story to Hollywood and finally going public with the hauntings there.
From the moment Cuoco had staked his claim, he felt he was being shadowed by a very feminine presence, but as a rational and logical person, he wasn't as rattled by his experiences as most people. Early life in the house was an adventure in curiosity, later life became a matter of habit until he felt safe to invite guests and have parties. In the beginning, his mind was not focusing on ghosts. He would sleep in an upstairs bedroom and hear the roof breathing over his head. Sounds of it cracking and bending, the support beams grinding together, the roof seemingly expanding and resting... He was sure it was just the wind.
There were images of an unseen figure in the house. Cuoco would see a figure moving out of the range of his vision, but there were several female manikins in the house. A previous female tenant must of had her clothes tailored for her, and these must have been what Jesse was seeing. The atmosphere within the structure would seem to be oppressive and inundating. He would having overwhelming feelings of melancholy and depression, and not know why, but as soon as he went outside, he'd be okay.
In February of 1983, Jesse and his girlfriend, Nicole Winslet, were wakened in the middle of the night by a woman's voice screaming the name "Harry." Wondering who it was, Jesse ran into the hallway and looked down to the first floor, but there was no one in sight. Sometime later, Nicole emerged from a shower and wiped the steam off the mirror to see another woman's face staring back at her. Jesse's friend, Michael Samms, moved in with them that October to look for the ghost. He put a closed-circuit camera system in the house and was soon inexplicably getting large fields of light getting photographed at infrequent intervals. He suspected these were caused by sunlight leaking into his system, but one image shows a gigantic female face only a few feet from the camera in the foyer.
Nicole's sister, Gillian, also saw the ghost. She was a tall full-figured woman in a white blouse and dark skirt ascending the staircase and vanishing into the kitchen. As soon as she described that sighting, Nicole testified as to having seen the exact same thing on three occasions. Their best friend, Crystal Anderson, had seen the same figure of a woman, only this time garbed in a white bathing suit in a chair by the pool.
After his possession of the house became public and the hauntings published, Jesse was soon getting requests from local bored teens wanting to see the shapely brunette apparition. After three months of harassing requests, he turned opportunistic again and turned the house into a year round haunted attraction with both animatronic and mechanical hauntings. One of the largest if not the scariest haunted locations, he promises that most of the ghosts are fake...
...except one.
History: The estate was designed and built in 1933 by Judge William Fowler, one of the town's main council members. His son, Russell, had been a casualty in World War Two, leaving the bulk of his estate to his granddaughter, Nancy. A withdrawn and introverted heiress, she had been in and out of mental therapy until her death in 1958. Her philandering husband, Harry Archer, had been written out of her will, leaving the bulk of her estate to Jess Paterson, her loyal family manservant. When he passed away in 1963, the estate was sold to Harmon Realty which was out of business by 1973. The deed to the former Fowler properties vanished when the Harmon holdings passed into the custody of Provine Properties of Santa Rosita, California, making it easier for the courts to award legal ownership of the house but not the land to Cuoco in 2005.
Identity of Ghosts: Nancy Archer? Although he has never known her, Cuoco expresses a fondness and lost-time love affair with the memory of the lost heiress who if she was still alive today would only be in her seventies.
Source/Comments: Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (1958) - Loosely based on the Miles Mansion of Vevay, Indiana and Raven's Grin Mansion in Mount Carroll, Illinois.
Santa Rosita, California from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1965)