OLD
SILVER SHAMROCK COMPANY
Location: Santa Mira
is a small census-designated farming community located in Humboldt County,
California, twelve miles south of Eureka on Old Highway 33 and 185 miles north
of San Francisco on Interstate 101. The Old Shamrock Building is located at 252
Shamrock Street between train tracks running north along Railroad Road on the
west, Shamrock Street to the south, Scenic Street on the east and Prospect
Avenue on the north.
Description of Place:
The Old Shamrock Building is a three-story red brick structure covering the size
of a city block and comprising several interlinked buildings with loading bays,
warehouses, office space and exterior walkways and stairways. The interior is a
maze of corridors, stairways and storage space and bays open to vehicles as well
as an intricate basement of rooms with catwalks over a huge storage space.
Surrounded mostly by residences, the structure was damaged by an explosion and
fire in October 1982, and although mostly restored, some of that damage still
exists today. However, since Happy Cow Dairy departed the building for a new
location, the site has fallen into neglect with broken windows and vandalism
throughout.
Ghostly Phenomenon:
On December 11, 1987, Roy Layton, the District Manager for the Happy Cow Dairy
Factory in Santa Mira, California, was roused from a sound sleep and answered
the phone in his house. It was a cold night and flakes of snow were straining to
blanket the already icy ground so he wasn’t really interested in going out
that night. On the phone was Robert “Buddy” Payne, his night supervisor at
the factory. Payne was reporting from a phone booth across the street from the
factory three miles from his home. Through the sketchy connection and clicking
on the line, Payne announced that the night time production staff had walked off
the job and were refusing to go back into the building.
Pulling pants over his pajamas,
slipping into his boots and grabbing his winter coat to pull over his pajama
top, Layton was soon on his way to investigate the problem. Happy Cow was a
well-known successful dairy distributor in the Southwest United States with
distribution as far east as El Paso, Texas and as far north as Seattle,
Washington. The Santa Mira plant had been acquired just a few years prior.
Before then, it had been some sort of year-round Halloween distributor of masks
and costumes that caught fire the week of Halloween in 1982. The destruction was
a major casualty for the town that prospered from its location, and Happy Cow,
ever in search of distribution sites for its company, quickly acquired the site
a few months later. For less than the property’s worth. Despite a few problems
rebuilding the damage to the structure, there had been very few incidents of
note since the building reopened.
Until now….
When Layton pulled up on Shamrock
Street in front of the factory, he found several of the factory workers mulling
around the empty street or lined up and smoking cigarettes unsure where to go
from across the street. Pushing his way through, Layton met with Payne at the
front entrance.
“What’s the problem here?”
“Boss, we have a problem. The guys
say they won’t go back in there. They say the place is haunted.”
It seems just an hour before amidst the
long tracks of moving bottles and cases of milk and packages of their eight
different types of cheese being boxed and sent to stores, the employees had
witnessed the sight of a figure in black lurking over the manufacturing area and
then the sound of a deep throaty laughter echoing through the halls. He had been
seen several times since the place had opened… wandering the halls, looking
down from staircases or prowling around the basement. No one knows who he is,
but until now, the figure was considered just a figment, a rumor, an excuse for
employees to stay off the night shift. There had been a high turnover in the
night watchmen staff…. Around seven just in the last few months, but this was
the first time “the figment” actually appeared before so many witnesses.
“I hated the night shift.” Walter
Ochmonek confessed to a newspaper reporter in 1992. He had retired for six
years, after having worked his way up to general manager. When he was asked
about who the man in black might have been, he described some of the employees
back then felt that he was the original owner of the property, who had died
under mysterious circumstances at the end the 1890s. Another rumor focused
around possible cult activity on the property while it was sitting around empty
in the 1980s. Several people talked about feelings of being watched or
sensations of someone lurking around the building. Even after the night shift
ended, people were seeing this figure drifting or lurking in the basement four
months after the incident, even during the day-light hours. At night, people on
the street looking up at the windows saw the figure looking down on them from
the second floor.
Several years after Ochmonek passed
away, William
Collins of CGS interviewed several surviving workers from the factory and
learned that the ghostly figure was still rumored to haunt the first and second
floors of the old factory on nights when no one was supposed to be in the
building. However, none of them actually ever testified on actually seeing him.
One man remembered that Ochmonek also
mentioned a possible second haunting at the factory in the section next to the
main building which was once part of a private home. Over the course of two
years, individuals said they saw a strange woman drifting through the location,
lurking around corners end generally acting as if she was looking for something
in the closets and storage rooms. Ironically, she was never seen anywhere near
the basement which was considered the most haunted part of the structure.
Employees down there often felt as if they were being watched or had
overwhelming and inexplicable stress attacks.
“Whatever happened down there….
Whatever lurked down there…. It seemed to be the source of the activity. “
Raymond Kravitz, a former Happy Cow foreman. “The Man in Black was always
lurking around it, but the female figure was only ever seen in the other
building. No one had any idea if they were connected.”
When Ochmonek died, Kravitz had
inherited the job of general manager, often working late hours into the night.
He remembers one night on the anniversary of his death, strange noises were
heard in the manufacturing room. It sounded like someone was pounding from
inside one of the milk tanks. He recalls: “When I went to approach the area of
the tanks with the maintenance guy, it came to a full stop. When we moved away,
it started up again. We shut down all the machines and stopped work to see it if
continued. It did. We checked out everything, but our search disclosed nothing
that might be responsible for the noise. After that day the mysterious noises
were never ever heard of again... Until the second anniversary of Ochmonek’s
death.
“I think Ochmonek was coming back and
trying to warn us of a potential equipment failure.” Hector Tarlek, the last
of the Happy Cow maintenance men. “When the structure became too dated and
electrical issues with the building became too common, we had a new building
built elsewhere and moved into it, reusing many of the parts from the original
tanks. When we disassembled that tank, we learned the internal seals were
breaking down, and at full pressure during the day, the explosion would have
taken out much of the building and several lives.”
Today, the old Silver Shamrock-Happy
Cow factory still exists, but only as a dilapidated unused structure. It was
briefly used as a civic center, and the local
thrift center uses it as a seasonal Halloween haunted house. Guests
passing through still see the man in black and think he’s part of the act. The
female apparition is still seen from time to time, mostly in the weeks leading
up to Halloween. In 2010, a contractor checking the building said he saw her in
the hallway to a storage room and departed with a description of her.
Curly dark brown hair, normal height,
dark gray shirt, light gray jacket and blue jeans with a dark smoky mass where
her face should be…..
History: The Happy
Cow Dairy Factory was built over the site of the Old Silver Shamrock Novelty
Company in Santa Mira, California. The Silver Shamrock was founded by wealthy
Irish businessman Conal Cochran, who after World War Two built a fortune with
the Silver Shamrock Toy Company in Ireland, later traveling to the United States
to break into the novelty company selling everything from toys to Halloween
masks. Through its tenure, it produced only three types of masks, the skeleton,
the witch and the jack o'lantern. The rubber masks were of high quality, but
never to the extent of companies like Distortions Unlimited in Greeley, Colorado
with its retinue of over thirty assorted characters.
In the Forties, Cochran traveled to the
small dairy community of Santa Mira, California in Humboldt County and took over
a line of shops and warehouses on Atkins Street (now Shamrock Street). Founded
in 1887, the town was a remote farming town founded by Welsh and Irish settlers
from Connecticut, twelve miles from Eureka and twenty-one miles east of former
Myers A.F.B., which was the scene of a reported but now debunked
extraterrestrial account in 1956, known locally as the "Giant Pea Pod
Incident." (This alleged incident was the basis of a movie in 1978.)
Through Silver Shamrock, Cochran was a huge financial benefit for the city and
saved it from bankruptcy. Around seventy-five percent of the 1,873 people in
town worked for Silver Shamrock in some capacity, and by the 80s, the population
swelled to 3,500. However, Cochran also employed numerous drones or “agents”
who handled the company’s distribution, publicity and promotions, but no one
knows who these people were.
On October 31, 1982, there was a small
explosion and fire that damaged much of the structure and manufacturing areas.
No one knows what the cause was, but it is generally believed to have been
caused by a disgruntled former employee. Cochran disappeared after that,
possibly fleeing home to Ireland, but many believe he was killed in the
explosion. In the aftermath, the government seized the property, Cochran’s
assets and his bank accounts. The speculation was Federal tax evasion, others
believed Cochran was arrested for being a wartime Nazi sympathizer. Whatever the
reason, his whereabouts have never been revealed.
Through the Early 80s, Cochran’s
lawyers, guided by his son, Connor Cochran, fought the Federal Government to
hold on to what was left of the company assets. The property, however, by now
had been sold to Lucky Cow in 1987. According to Lance Cartwight, a Eureka
reporter covering the excavation, when the grounds of the structure were dug up
for restoration, several items were found buried in a separate part of the
basement and recovered; the items were not released publicly in the newspapers.
Among them, several mannequins with mechanical moving parts, several fried
computer terminals, an elaborate closed-circuit camera system through the
location and surrounding buildings, an unusually high content of shattered
English sandstone and several dead bodies, three appeared to be a family of
three, but the fourth was the headless remains of a woman. Their identities have
never been revealed.
Identity of Ghosts:
The identity of the Man In Black has never been revealed, but several theories
have been proposed. One candidate is that it is the ghost of Zachery Trenhome, a
town businessman from the 30s and 40s who had started out as a mortician, grocer
and preacher and later went into reality. He owned the full range of stores
along Atkins Street that Cochrane wanted, but he resisted selling the property
to him in the Forties in order to hold it for his sons. When he disappeared in
1947, Cochrane was suspected in his death, but the police could never make a
case.
It’s also alleged the ghost is that
of Cochrane himself, said to have died in the explosion of his company, but
others claim the specter has been lurking along Atkins Street/Shamrock Street
since the 1920s. In that regard, it is believed the apparition is an old funeral
director who was run over by horses while crossing the street in the 1890s. One
version says its the ghost of a train conductor who was killed a bit north on
the tracks when a stopped train car rolled over him. Still yet another theory is
that it is a cult worshipper who took his life in a ritual while the site was
abandoned.
The identity of the female specter is
even harder to link to a known person. The general theory is that she was
murdered in a black ritual here during the site’s period of abandonment. Quite
a number of women have vanished along or near Old Highway 33, but whether she
was any of them has yet to be discerned.
Source/Comments:
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) - Activity based on the Old Gurney
Factory in Prattville, Alabama and the Old Sloss Factory in Birmingham, Alabama
Distortions Unlimited - “Making
Monsters” (2011-2013)
“Giant Pea-Pod Incident” -
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956/1978)