Description: Kane Manor (nee Voorhees Castle) is a two-story stone and brick mansion resembling a castle with a round driveway, enclosed courtyard, turrets and backyard veranda bordering nearby Santa Rosita State Park overlooking the Pacific coast. The interior resembles a museum of fine antiques, parquet floors, grand mahogany furnishings and opulent New England furniture from the East Coast. The house is also riddled with secret rooms, passageways and hidden compartments and rests upon the catacombs of excavated Spanish ruins from the Eighteenth Century dating back to before Santa Rosita was founded. A courtyard fountain now concealed in the bowels of the house has been restored to working order.

Ghostly Manifestations: The story of Kane Manor was first documented as a haunted house in 1953 by reputed parapsychologist Plato Zorba, but unfortunately, in nowhere of his description or research of the house does he clearly or accurately identify the location of the mansion. In the years following Zorba’s death, many of his so-called studies became debunked, discredited or just outright dismissed as fraudulent. In trying to locate Kane Manor, modern parapsychologists debated the opinion that Kane Manor was actually the amalgamated creation of Plato Zorba merging the details and histories of Hill House in Massachusetts, the former Vannacutt Sanitarium north of Los Angeles and the Belasco House in Maine.

In 2001, however, Professor Walter Oldman chose Voorhees Castle in Santa Rosita east of San Diego as a parapsychology case study for his psychology class under the auspices of a study on insomnia. A year earlier, eleven-year-old Megan Voorhees was the victim here of an alleged but never confirmed case of demonic possession before dying of a freak unexplained heart failure. In researching the house, Oldman came to the undisputed realization that Voorhees Castle and the suspect Kane Manor were one and the same. Regardless of his band of amateur ghost-hunters, Oldman still endeavored to document the manor’s supposed ghosts.

According to Plato Zorba’s original notes, many of which seem far-fetched and exaggerated, Kane Manor was possessed by demonic energies and the interior was known to restructure itself. Rooms sometimes vanished and were replaced by windows or hallways, a trait in common with Seattle’s Rose Red Mansion. There are rooms to the center of the house with windows overlooking the backyard despite the fact that halls and corridors surround these rooms. In fact, while Zorba was visiting the house in 1953, he was confused by the fact that after searching through an attic room, he ended up in a north wing bedroom without any conscious memory of traveling the distance himself. While trying to trace his own steps, he became lost in the north wing while he should have been within a few steps of the balcony over the foyer at all times.

Hugh Kane’s antique toy collection sometimes took a life of their own. A life-size clown doll has inexplicably moved from room to room and has persistently been returned to its place in the attic playroom. When Justin Hanson showed Cindy Campbell through the house in 2001, it was discovered sitting in a chair in the upstairs north corridor. After the house became a property of Howell Industries, Thurston Howell IV discovered it sitting at the desk in the study behind the wall of the music room.

Student Cindy Campbell herself seemed located at the center of several phenomenon during Professor Oldman’s covert investigation. She thought she heard child-like voices in the house and was even unconsciously beckoned to the concealed study by forces she didn’t understand. The sounds of children giggling were even heard one night when everyone was talking in the downstairs parlor and no one was upstairs. An overall feeling of dread and sensation of not being alone followed everyone at one time or another. Another student named Alex Monday felt someone touch her in an intimate area of her body while she was alone in her room.

Faint images of other people sometimes can be seen wandering through the house. Strange people have been glimpsed just vanishing through doorways or just out of sight. One figure turned and vanished into the upstairs hall as Theo Keyoko arrived on location, and both Robert “Buddy” Wilkinson and Eugene “Shorty” Meeks noticed a strange lady in white moving through the basement. This Lady in White has been noticed quite often in the house since 1952. Dwight Hartman, Professor Oldman’s assistant, even managed to videotape the shadow of an unidentified figure in the parlor that didn’t belong to any of the accounted students.

Joggers and pedestrians at nearby Santa Rosita Park sometimes experience odd breezes coming from the house. Cold breezes sometimes accompanied by laughter come from the house. A photograph taken during a birthday party in the park shows a Lady in White in a window at Kane Manor when the old manor was supposed to be empty. Computer imagery being used to bring the figure into perspective revealed not just her long dark hair but her eyes missing and her face pulled tight to resemble a skull!

In one odd occurrence, Cindy Campbell found herself sleepwalking through the house. During a deep sleep, she woke up, dressed herself in wardrobe left behind by a previous person who had lived in the house and wandered down to the kitchen without any conscious reason for her activity. Later on, after snapping out of her spell, she had a mental epiphany and realized that someone had been killed in the kitchen and that she was unconsciously retracing the dead woman’s steps.

Psychokinetic behavior in the form of poltergeist activity has also been recorded in the house. Doors sometimes slam shut, and undisturbed objects fall to the floor at times. In the kitchen, all the objects fall in a common direction. Hartman’s wheelchair crashed by itself not once but three times into the same wall beyond his control.

The ghost of Hugh Kane who owned the house from 1948 to 1952 seems to be by far the most dominant of the ghosts. When she was eight-years-old, Megan Voorhees saw him several times in 1998 wandering through the house, and at night, standing over her bed as she tried to sleep. She described him as a huge man, some seven feet in height with a heavy brow and his hair parted down the center. Her mother never saw him, but often heard the sound of a strange man laughing out loud from the attic bedrooms. A year before her death, Megan even screamed that he was in bed with her ,and her mother came running several times only to find her daughter screaming hysterically. Despite being the middle of summer, Megan’s room became extremely cold; her mother noting that she could see her breath.

For unknown reasons, Kane seemed interested in Megan, and following a company business party in spring of 2000, she became distant and withdrawn. Her mother noticed her talking to empty rooms and getting answers to questions she couldn’t have known. Activity in the house picked up, and noises and voices soon started coming from Megan’s bedroom. Father Andrew Harris from the 2000 dinner party arrived to give his religious support to Mrs. Voorhees, but when he tried to lend support to Megan, she attacked him in a lewd manner. Harris then asked Father James McFelty to come to the house without telling him he suspected that Megan was possessed. On October 31, they stayed up all night trying to exorcize Megan of whatever possessed her as screams and noises came from the basement of the house and objects flew around the room. At sunrise, the house finally settled and the noises went away. As they tried to wake Megan, they discovered she had died in her sleep of what was believed to be a heart attack

The so-called exorcism was never reported publicly and never mentioned in the newspapers. For these reasons, the account is considered unsubstantiated; Professor Oldman picked up the story from Father Harris, but Father McFelty remains adamant that he was never part of an exorcism at Voorhees Castle. Mrs. Voorhees moved away and both Father Harris and Father McFelty vowed to never speak of it again. A year later, Professor Oldman obtained permission from Howell Industries to use the house for a weekend. As they departed Monday morning, Cindy Campbell noticed a sinister brooding figure sitting on the backyard veranda and staring up to the house with demented intent. On the surface, her description of the figure nearly matches that of Megan Voorhees.

History: Originally Keaton House, the main portion of Kane Manor was built in 1898 by Archibald Keaton as a gift to his wife, former actress Cora Faris, but they sold it in 1920 to a vague character named Uriah Bloodworth (as according to the notes of Plato Zorba; no person with his name is listed in the county census records), who used the location as a funeral home, but he lost the place during the stock market crash and retired to Florida. Bloodworth is reputed to still be alive, but Keaton House was next acquired by textile magnate Hugh Ronald Kane in the Late Fifties to Early Sixties. He ended up adding another wing to the structure, expanding  upon the house catacombs and creating gardens for his wife, Victoria. Much of the renovation was supervised just to placate his wife, Caroline Drew, reportedly a relative of Archibald Keaton, as part of a ruse while he carried on with a mistress, Victoria, later hired as a potential nanny. Victoria even lived in a room in the new wing of the house, now named Kane Manor, away from Caroline’s knowledge and carried on her affair with Hugh. Caroline, however, came home unsuspectedly one day and caught Hugh and Victoria in the kitchen in the midst of sexual intercourse and killed them both before killing herself - at least, that was what was then the official police account. Years later, manservant Justin Hanson revealed he had been in love with Caroline and that after she was killed by Kane, he killed Kane and Victoria and burned their remains in the left over crematory in the cellar from Bloodworth's time. Hanson stayed on caring for the house for several years, staying on as caretaker when the house was acquired by Santa Rosita State College as housing for Nancy Voorhees, the dean at Rosita Beach State College, but he vanished into obscurity following his 2001 confession. After the university defaulted on the lease, the house again returned to the custodianship of Kane Industries, which itself fell into the possession of Howell Industries along with all of Kane’s holdings. Uninterested in the house due to its lurid history, the company quickly sold it to the college for less than forty percent of its worth.

Identity of Ghosts: According to Plato Zorba, a number of eleven ghosts haunt the structure, but only a few have been identified. The presence of Hugh Kane has been felt as well as that of his mistress, Victoria, and his wife, Caroline, the two of them locked in eternal conflict. There are no records of children having ever lived in the house, yet, the sounds of their ghosts still occur. Zorba even posed a theory the house was haunted by spirits of the dead left over from Uriah Bloodworth used the edifice as a funeral home, but this revelation seems a stretch even by his standards.

Comments: Scary Movie II (2001), Hauntings derived from the movie and its motion picture influences.

• Santa Rosita and Santa Rosita State Park, “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963)
• Howell Industries, “Gilligan’s Island” (1963-1965)
• Plato Zorba, Thirteen Ghosts (1960)
• Hill House, The Haunting (1963/1999)
• Vannacutt Sanitarium, House on Haunted Hill (1999)
• Belasco House, Legend of Hell House (1973)

MAIN PAGE

Other Hauntings