OLD SPEARS HOUSE
Location: Thirty miles from San Jose near San Francisco, the Old
Spears House is on the southern most part of the Santa Cruz Mountains within
Mount Madonna County Park, twelve miles from Lauperville near Gilroy on Highway
156 through Hecker Pass. The Spears House is best reached from Highway 17 down Summit
Road and through the Mount Madonna Road entrance. Summit Road runs into Pole
Lake Road which ends at a parking area for recreational activity. There are two
walking paths here: Upper Spears Path to the back veranda and Lower Spears path
to the front of the mansion.
Description Of Place: An empty and deserted stone mansion without
any discernible architectural style, the Spears house is devoid of furniture and
furnishings. The twenty-roof flat roof structure has seven bathrooms, a living
area with a three-sided portico and a 3,600 square foot ballroom all showing signs
of neglect with trees growing against it to mask it from view.. The park around
it is covered in a rolling landscape of red woods, oaks, chaparrals and meadows
crisscrossed with walking trails over 3,219 acres and with facilities including
an amphitheater, large pavilion, restrooms and showers, public telephones, an
archery range, deer pens, 125 camping sites and picnic tables. White fallow and
black tail deer are plentiful with occasional black bear sightings.
Ghostly Manifestations: It has been seen in eleven low-budget movies
and in the background of seventeen music videos. Plagued by vandals, cursed by
drug-users and insulted by devil-worshippers, it has been partially restored as
an exterior set by the movie industry. For children, the rooms and long halls
are a fun place to play. For teenagers, it is a place to stand in the shadows of
their movie idols. Adults might find the house's mysteries a bit disquieting if
not fascinating.
"Stan Laurel first noticed Spears House in 1934 as a potential filming location." The soft eloquent voice of Peter Vincent told us. "Errol Flynn once debated on restoring it back to it's full grandeur, but it didn't make it first appearance on film until the 1951 motion picture, "The Haunted Heiress." Silent film star Milo Booth called it an ideal location for a horror movie."
Peter Vincent is a Hollywood legend and historian. A Fifties child star in England, he starred in a few movies in Hollywood in productions of "Oliver Twist," "David Copperfield" and "A Christmas Carol," but during the Sixties and early Seventies, he was relegated to being a very hesitant horror film star. Behind the scenes, he wrote, directed and advised on several of the most popular movies in movie making history and became a Hollywood historian. He's also an expert on Hollywood hauntings and ghost stories and can tell you all about the ghosts from the Knickerbocker and Hollywood Tower to Mammoth and Paramount Studios.
"Paranormal-wise, " He reveals. "The house is fascinating, but other than that, it's not really remarkable. Until you step between those trees against it, you really don't know its there, and yet, people have seen apparitions walking around it and waving the living in to join them. At night, park officials tell me they hear music coming from the location and sometimes lights coming from it which is odd because there's no electricity going into it."
Over the years, the campgrounds have been filled and clogged with trailers and RVs as movies have been taped on the grounds. The park around the house has doubled for Sherwood Forest, Civil War battlefields, Ancient Greece, Pre-Colonial America and even the Stone Age among other locales. In each production, someone has said or reported something in the vicinity of the house and in 1999, two boys looking for the ghosts came racing out after seeing something that terrified them.
"The first known story I know about the house happened in August 1946." Peter tells us. "It was a post-war picture called "Attack on Blue Ridge Hill" and it starred two singing and musical stars named Don Lockwood and Deanna Petrie. Not a bad picture for a musical, but the script was abysmal and the direction was misguided. Don was coming down the path toward the house for his trailer after some location shots, and for some reason took the longer way around the house than behind it. Now, the way I hear it, as he came around the bend in the path, he met a strange figure in a suit heading toward the house. They caught eyes for a few seconds, this presence stopped and then slowly waved Don in as if inviting him to join him. Don then hesitated and watched as this spectral gentleman continued into the house and then vanished as if he wasn't ever really there.
"A short time after that, there was a prairie picture being filmed here called "The Long Road West."" Peter continued. "It was directed by former Silent Film star Herschel Mabry Aguilera, and was his last picture. It starred Moses Stein, Ann Darrow and Rose Dawson as members of a wagon train heading to California. Their campsite..." Peter took Steve Barnette, Larry Wedekind and Andrea Welch of CGS to the exact location of a film scene on a hill. "...Was located just a few hundred feet from the house. Now, that day, was a hot blustery August setting, and crafts and services kept a table of lemonade, tea and cold water to keep the actors and crew from overheating, and yet, these sudden breezes kept coming through the location. Moe commented that they were unusually out of place. Mabry told me it was as if someone had one of the large industrial fans from the studio and was turning it on every couple of minutes. When I met Rose at the 1958 Academy Awards and asked her memories on filming here, she commented she didn't think the winds were unusual at all, but she could not help be fascinated by the Spears House. Whenever she filmed out here, she felt a longing compulsion to explore it."
Several Civil War and Western movies were filmed in the park during the Fifties and the Sixties, many of them starred Sixties heartthrob Dash Riprock, and for many of them, the Spears House either served as a hide-out or a shoot-out scene. Riprock was rumored to have affairs with many of his single female co-stars, such as Jocelyn Clarkson, and the house was ideal for sneaking girls off the set. Alan Nesmith, the uncle of TV star Jason Nesmith, was an assistant director in eleven Riprock movies and was often asked by him to set up a table for Dash to wine and dine his co-star. On one occasion, Dash escorted his lady friend into the house expecting to find a nice dinner with wine and candles set up in the house's grand dining room, but on arrival, they found the table cleaned off, the tables and chairs thrown about and the wine bottle sitting undamaged on the floor. A stray animal must have got to the food but managed to leave the bottle unscathed?
"In my entire career," Dash commented years later. "I never starred in one horror picture, but that day, I felt something was trying to teach me a lesson about exploiting the farer sex."
In the Sixties, actress Ginger Grant filmed parts of "A Night Of Vampires" in the house with Moe Stein. This is the case that really made the house reputation because during taping they captured background voices that were not planned and were not part of the movies. Shadowy extras moved in the background, and the generator powering the equipment broke down twelve times. Moe half-seriously debated on calling a rabbi to bless the location, but the studio cancelled the picture midway through and the gamut of the footage ended up on a shelf somewhere.
Through the Seventies and Eighties, numerous actors who had taped in the area or with the house eventually described experiencing something. Dick Van Dyke, Donny Osmond, Laura Claybourne, Richard Crosby, Lee Majors, Markie Post, John Forsyte and Angie Dickinson all described feeling that the house was not as deserted as it seemed. It was just something about being empty and quiet that turned the house into a sensory deprivation and caused people to see and hear things.
"The first time I ever experienced a ghost..." Crosby told CGS. "...was when I was filming a movie at the old Wiltsett House in England and heard a ghostly cavalier in the hallway outside my room. British spirits are quite unlike American ghosts. They're more... romanticized. American ghosts are more ballsy. Their activity is much more elaborate. Take for example my experience in the park. I'm playing a British gentleman, and my role asks me to make a soliloquy, a speech, then turn dramatically and ascend the staircase for my grand departure. I made the lines, ascend the stairs and turn on to the balcony and then suddenly stop. Old Nate, Nathaniel Swift was directing, he asks me, "Rich, what's the problem?" I said, "There's an old man in a suit down there, and he's shaking his head at me." He says, "What old man?" I say, "That old man." I look again, and he was gone. Security searched the place over and never found him, and the weird thing is, they never found him, and he couldn't have gone down the back stairs because there weren't any. They had collapsed several years before."
While movies often film in the park without problem, something always happens when the house is involved. During the filming of the 1984 movie "Billy and Jesse," about an alleged encounter between Billy the Kid and Jesse James, a film crew using the house experienced voices, shadows, footsteps, the sound of water running and the scent of women's perfume pervading through the house. The TV movie starred an unimpressive cast of struggling actors including Robert Wheeler, Ariel Maloney, Patrick Vaughn and Alex Lambert.
"Wow, no one has asked me about that movie in years..." Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions during research into the Farrell House. "But we filmed that in Late September and Early October of 1982 in the Old Spears House at Mount Madonna, and at times, I wasn't sure if we were doing a western or a horror movie. The place was old, drafty... They were trying to save money on sets so the interior was redressed as a gambling hall and we had several extras and shots were reshot and reshot and reshot... The scene with Ariel and I as prostitutes had twenty-two takes because she said something kept touching her, so we changed places, tried again, something is touching her again. We stopped, she changed costume, we tried again... something touched her again. At the time, I'm thinking, "I'm never working with another TV soap star ever again." but in light of other things, I started wondering, "Could this place really be haunted?""
Wheeler reported the figure of a brunette woman eyeing him from afar in scenes, but he never figured out who she was. Oswald Simpson, a camera man, reported to to Raymond Pickler, the director, that there was a shadowy male figure loitering in the background of several scenes. Instead of reshooting, the figure was cropped out. Hector Gomez, a Mexican co-star, spent a lot of time reading and reciting his Bible. His Catholic up-bringing was inserted into the movie when he refused to take off his crucifix from around his neck. Apparently he believed it was saving him from forces in the house.
"According to one extra I once worked with..." Peter Vincent adds to the story of the house. "During the shooting of "Billy and Jesse," Miss Maloney often retreated to her trailer to remove her costume because it was so uncomfortable. During the last week of filming, she had entered the trailer, started disrobing to remove the 19th Century corset and as she looked in the mirror, she discovered someone was standing behind her in the trailer. She screamed and ran out holding the costume up as security guards searched her trailer, but no one was in there. Years later, when I asked her about her experience, she said her face had changed on her, and that the face looking at her was not her own. It was that of another woman."
During the Eighties, the park as well as the house had graduated to being used in music videos. In recent years, singer Brad Paisley blasted the house with his music but didn't have any experiences. Both Will Smith and Brendan Fraser has had separate experiences on location shoots with figures racing down the hill to get to the house. They both described the figure of a small Spanish girl rushing down the hill, darting across the trail and vanishing into the house. Visitors to the park are not allowed to enter the house, but several people have said they have described this little girl watching from one of the windows. At night, park employees have described a woman of Spanish descent wandering the lower trail behind the house and vanishing behind a tree.
"I think she's been seen almost twenty times since I started working here." Donna Lovato is a former actress and now park employee. She drives through the park in a golf cart on patrol during the day and supervises trash removal at night. "Other staff have seen her before I started working here, so she goes back a long time."
In 1998, actor Lochlyn Munro was starring in "Teen Paradise" filmed in the park. One night, he was scheduled to be back early in the morning so he decided to sleep in his RV in the park. Sometime after midnight, he woke up, rolled over to the window and saw the female apparition staring at him through the glass. She didn't have any eyes. The following summer, actor Moses Taylor, best known on TV as private detective Frank Wrench, was filming an episode of his TV series in the park and saw very much the same thing.
"The shot required me to dash into the old house and wait a moment," Taylor said. "But I surprised this woman who spun around and looked at me with that ghoulish face then evaporated. I had the willies for weeks after that!"
Since then, movie studios have been few and far between to rent the grounds for location shooting. "So Random" co-stars Nico Harris and Tawni Hart filmed "Camp Massacre" here with Tracy Lyme and Penny Parker in 2005, and both Tracy and Tawni refused to tape scenes inside the Spears House because it smelled like "something had died in (there) so badly it went in and did it again." However, when Nico runs into the house from Pumpkinhead, the film's serial killer, all he smells is the sweet smell of ladies perfume. That same year, Dick Roberts and Joey Tribbiani playing bank robbers holed up inside the house for the 2002 comedy, "Bank Heist," said the entire time they were shooting, a spectral woman in a white gown was watching them from the balcony.
Most recently, Brad Paisley recommended the Spears House to Robby Ray Stewart, the manager of Hannah Montana, as a good site for a music video. At that time, Hannah had heard a rumor Britney Spears (no connection to the house) was trying to get the rights to re-release Michael Jackson's song, "Thriller." Not exactly believing in ghosts, Hannah wrote the song, "Another Chance," just to trump Britney and do her own haunted house-themed music video. However, behind the scenes, her boyfriend at the time, Jackson Stewart, and best friend Mike Stanley came equipped with cameras and equipment to catch the ghosts on film for an amateur investigation.
During the taping, Hannah's camera crew caught an extra voice on tape and the
shadow of a little girl dancing and hiding in the background.
History: No one knows the exact origins of the house. Built sometime
between 1870 and 1890, it was last occupied in 1922. It was first called the
Spears House around 1930 on the idea that it was once the home for Union Army
Colonel William Spears from nearby Fort Mansfield, but his heirs disputed that
in 1947. Nevertheless, the name stuck. Believed to have once been part of a
Spanish vineyard, the house was discovered when the boundaries of Mount Madonna
County Park was staked and posted in 1947. The park sees almost 20,000 people a
year.
Identity Of Ghosts: A small girl, a beautiful woman, a distant old
man... No one knows who the ghosts are. Property records for the pre-park area
are sketchy or all together missing. Colonel William Spears used the area for
military exercises, but he never lived in the house.
Source/Ghosts: Hannah Montana (Episode: "Halloween-back Girl") Location
based on the Henry Miller House in Mount Madonna County Park in California.
Hauntings based on Hiestand House in Campbellsville, Kentucky, Belvidere Mansion
in Charleston, South Carolina, the El Centro House in Los Angeles, California, Griffith Park in Los Angeles,
California and the Glen Davis
Mining Town in Glen Davis, Australia.