PHANTOM MANOR
Location: Eleven miles south of Carson City, Nevada off Interstate 50, Thunder Mesa is in the shadow of Thunder Mountain, a sacred Shoshone site in the Sierra Nevada Mountains between Nevada and California. Thunder Mesa is southwest of Lake Tahoe near the Mokelumne River. The community around Phantom Manor is now used as housing for Fort Champion officers and civilian independents.
Description of Place: Ravenswood Manor, aka Phantom Manor, is a museum landmark perched on a bluff overlooking the ghost town of Thunder Mesa. The elaborate two-story Victorian has an enclosed porch, pitched roof, rounded windows and a weed-choked yard bordered against the old cemetery. The house is adorned with Persian carpets, Dutch-American furniture from New Orleans, English porcelain and rich mahogany balustrades. Though largely uninhabited, the location is a museum protected by the Fort Champion Historical Preservation. Tours are from 9:00-3:00 Monday to Thursday; closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas with special Halloween tours by appointment.
Ghostly Manifestations: A lovelorn bride peeks from windows, a malevolent dark specter lurks over the grounds when not hiding in the cellar, shrill screams emanate through the night, glowing orbs float between and behind the trees and tombstones, doors open by themselves, a handsome patron invites guests through the house, but he does not exist... at least, in the physical sense. Going by such tales and accounts, it is no wonder that the few locals have nick-named Ravenswood Phantom Manor. No one has lived here in almost a hundred years, yet, going by the journals and logs of Captain Wilton Parmenter (1845?-1927), it could very well be one of the most haunted locations in the United States.
As Ravenswood Manor, the structure has historical significance as the former home of the town founder, but the caretakers and and employees that treat it as a museum, publicly refer to it as Phantom Manor because they themselves have been witness to the ghostly activity there. They have experienced things move here that are not to be touched. Doors that are left open will close themselves. After the structure is locked up, people will see activity inside and rush inside to find an intruder who never gets discovered. While it is typical in a structure for objects to be moved, it is not typical at all for these sort of things to happen in a structure which is now a museum.
As Director Ashley Ricci points out: "The items here are worth a lot of money, so they are dusted, but they are not to be picked up. We do not move them from room to room. The gold hairbrush in Melanie's room is always kept in her room, but it has inexplicably turned up all over the house.
"In that room is a big blanket chest and we often go through on a cursory walk-through and it is suddenly propped open. It's a heavy awkward thing to open or close yet we've looked for concealed springs in the lid to explain it popping open.
"Things like the bedspread in the Ravenswood's old bedroom will be found flipped up from the bottom, and the whole mattress will be exposed. This has happened twice within the last month. I'll walk through and it will be fine, but then after me will be one of the tour guides claiming she had to stop and fix the bedspread after me."
George Pitt is the chief groundskeeper and maintenance man. He adds: "The house does not have electricity. When it gets dark, we go by flashlight and a memory of where everything is located, but every so often, we bump into a chair that is out of place or we reach a door that is open when we know they should be closed and we think, 'I know I closed that.' The door to the cellar is kept closed, but we've found it wide open every so often."
Ricci continues: "Just this last spring, I was taking visiting relatives of a officer on a tour and one of the young ladies, a young mom around eighteen carrying an infant, heard me talking about some of the ghost stories and said she felt someone tapping her on the shoulder for the time we were in Melanie's room. She said it stopped after we had left the room, but much of the activity occurs in Melanie's room."
As evident on the tour, there is a manikin in a period wedding dress on display in the corner of Melanie's room, also called the Wedding Room. Back when the house was rented to guests, several married couples slept here as a Honeymoon suite over several years. However, since then, whatever is in the room has tried to get the attention of young moms and has even moved the manikin. It has been scooted over to in front of the window as if she is looking out, but she is usually in the corner out of the way to prevent such sightings. Nevertheless, a white apparition of a woman in a flowing white dress has been seen several times moving through the house since 1890.
In addition to the white apparition, Pitt has seen the image of a man standing on the front porch waving at him. "I waved back at him thinking it was someone who knew me, but as I looked back again, he'd be gone. One of the guides has seen this similar presence sitting on the front porch as if waiting to come in, but they'd open the door and no one will be there."
"When he's not been seen, he's definitely been heard." Ricci adds. "On at least a few locations, I've heard footsteps of someone walking through the downstairs or coming up the stairs. I'll call out thinking it was George, but no one ever appears. Last July, an entire tour heard the footsteps come through the house and approach the stairs coming up. A male guest standing in the hallway looked to see who was coming, but no one came past the corner leading down the stairs to the master bedroom.
"I'm pretty sure he has to be the same apparition seen in 1957." Ricci refers to a story reported before the house became a museum. "Surveyors in that year laying the first asphalt road said they saw the figure of a man standing on the porch and waving them in as if trying to be what they called hospitable. I'm a bit skeptical of the story since the house was already known to be haunted by then, and things were being reported that were more than just a bit believable."
In addition to that benign manifestation, the specter of a black presence has been seen and felt in the basement. Part of the basement was damaged in the earthquake and modern reinforcements were used to support and hold up the house from collapsing. Caretakers storing items down there have seen an extra shadow scooting along the wall or cowering in the corner. It's a very distressing presence to feel and one contractor felt something touch him while he was very much alone. Sometimes the atmosphere down there seems very thick as if something is about to happen. None of the ladies who take turns giving tours like to be in the cellar rooms by themselves.
In 1943, three young men robbed the Golden State Bank in Reno at gunpoint and came through Thunder Mesa on the flight to freedom to Mexico. Two of them were grabbed at a military checkpoint at Fort Champion, and the third seemed to have vanished until Ravenswood was opened the following morning. Noticing a broken second floor window, the curator called some MPs to search the house and they found the third assailant frozen in shock in the basement huddled in a narrow crawlspace. His fingers gnarled around the wood beams, his eyes frozen in shock and whimpering noises barely audible crying through his clenched teeth, he had to be tranquilized to be dragged out of the house. No one knows what he saw, but whatever it was, he had fired three lead .38 bullets at it, only to watch his shots impact into the stone foundation behind it.
History: Henry Ravenswood arrived in Virginia City, Nevada in 1832, hiring men and equipment to establish Thunder Mesa Mining Company around 1840. The town of Thunder Mesa sprung up around it as well around it. A shrewd and stern businessman, he had been an innkeeper, accountant, printer and even a lawyer, but he was also a romantic and commenced on the creation of Ravenswood Manor in order to send for his wife, Martha, back home in New Orleans. She loved the house, but she did not care for the wilderness that seemed to spread out around her in all directions. They had two children, Jacob and Melanie.
By 1860, the gold in his mines had begun to peter out and Thunder Mesa was losing its inhabitants. Jacob departed had departed for Sacramento as a lawyer and became a California statesman. At eighteen, Melanie had fallen in love with James Mitchell, a technical engineer, and wanted to leave Ravenswood with him, but Henry could bear to lose his daughter as well in the face of his dwindling fortune. What happened afterward is a matter of debate, several stories originating down over the years. According to the most official version, Henry paid one of his most loyal employees to lose Mitchell in one of the gold mines and kill him or else did it himself. Another story claims James and Melanie opted to take both their lives to be together in eternity. If Henry knew the secret, he took it to the grave; he and Martha died in an earthquake that same year. Mitchell's disappearance broke Melanie's heart as she waited for him to return, still clad in her wedding gown, wandering the mansion as she pined for her lost love. Witnesses who saw her later believing it was her ghost.
The earthquake was a bit advantageous as it collapsed mines and devastated the mountainside, uncovering new deposits of gold ore as a result. The new boon must have been advantageous to Melanie in the presence of her parent's deaths, but she was never seen away from the house, her subsequent death years later unrevealed and not released to the public. In fact, her image passing through the house may have inspired all the eventual haunting reports in the house. During this time, Thunder Mesa and nearby Fort Champion grew in size from its inhabitants returning, restoring itself from the brink of oblivion. Mount Prospect Cemetery had also increased in size with earthquake fatalities and now encroached on the Ravenswood property. It had been staked out years before by mortician Walter Latimer as a cemetery in 1840 when the city had been founded, but back then, it was called Boot Hill Cemetery, The Old Boneyard or the Old Ravenswood Ranch because of its proximity to the house. When Melanie was finally laid to rest near her parents, it was called Ravenswood Cemetery.
Ten years later, Thunder Mesa was nearing ghost town status again, sustained only by Fort Champion nearby, but it was considered Federal property. After Melanie's death, the mansion was legally obtained by Isaac Worthington, the town mortician, but he never lived there, instead renting it out to military officers, cavalry officials, Federal agents, politicians and captains of industry, among them a European nobleman named Count Vladimir Sforza in self-imposed exile from his native Romania.
Today, the house is owned and managed as a landmark under the Fort Champion Historical Preservation. One of the people dedicated to making donations to keep it preservation is California judge Richard Forrest, the great-grandson of Jacob Ravenswood.
Much of the house's haunted history has been documented by Jane Parmenter (1848-1934), wife of Captain Wilton Parmenter, who put together much of the house's history into a journal now published and sold by the Fort Champion Historical Preservation.
Identity of Ghosts: According to Jane Parmenter, the distant and lovelorn figure upstairs is that of Melanie Ravenswood while James is represented by the dashing genial ghost bound to the first floor. She surmises they are trying to reconnect somewhere in the house; possibly passing beyond each other unaware of the other's presence. She wondered if the specter in the cellar could be Henry himself keeping them apart. Sforza saw him once during his stay here and described him as a grinning skeletal figure garbed in black, but being of religious and superstitious background, he was not disturbed by the hauntings. Still yet, it is also claimed the house is perennially shared by the ghosts of miners who lost their lives over the years and by the souls of violated Native Americans. The land is supposedly a Native American burial ground, but this is unconfirmed. The 1840 earthquake was said to have been caused by their outraged spirits.
Source/Comments: F-Troop TV-Series (Episode: "V is for Vampire") and Phantom Manor, Frontier Land, Euro-Disney
Hauntings based on Rock Castle in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the Napa River Inn in Napa River, California, Woodruff Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee and Cheesman Park in Denver, Colorado.
Ken Berry (Captain Wilton Parmenter) also played paranormal scientist Elliot Fielding on the TV Series, "Fantasy Island." (Episode: "Ghost-Breaker.")
Thanks to Rhys Davies for the info on Phantom Manor!