WALKER HOUSE
Location: The Walker House is located at 1964 Houghton Street in
Hill Valley, California at the intersection of Highway 395 and Highway 8, 12
miles east of the community of Grasse Valley (not to be confused with Grass
Valley, California) and 20 miles east of Bishop near Lake Crowley in the Lower
Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Description Of Place: Surrounded by numerous turn-of-the-century
homes in a residential neighborhood off the John F. Kennedy Parkway, the Walker
House is an idyllic two-story blue-gray American Federal structure with three
bedrooms, two bathrooms, a basement and an attached garage. Best described as a "structure
trapped in time," the interior has not been changed or updated since the
1960s, seemingly preserved since the last renters lived in the house in 1978.
Ghostly Manifestations: Every town has that sort of house. The sort
of residence where no one seems to live yet still manages to exist in this
dimension. It is usually the sort of structure where no one is ever seen coming
or going, and, yet, it still seems to have someone living there. The neighbors
never see the occupants, but the property is still being maintained by
someone... or something.
The Walker House is one such house. It remains a local fascination for local urban explorers who enjoy visiting abandoned structures, but when they visit this house on Houghton Street, they get the inexplicable feeling of being watched as well as the sensation that someone still lives there. The truth is they're half right; the house is a rental property. No one really lives there, but the owners aren't one of them.
"To understand the Walker House, one must go back at least fifty years." James Strickland, a local CPA at Hill Valley Community Bank, responds. He doesn't live on Houghton; instead, he lives in a two-story ranch-style mansion with a view of Lake Crowley. "The last resident to live there was Alex Walker, and he lived there by himself after the death of his father in 1953. Afterward, he left the house almost exactly preserved to his parents memory, not even entering their old bedroom to clean it for several years."
However, it is not Dennis Walker, Alex's father, whose spirit seems to live there, but Henrietta Walker, his mother who may still preside in the structure. For this part of the story, one must turn to Virginia Lane, Strickland's mother, who was set to marry Alex in 1964.
"My mother was terribly afraid of that house." Strickland continues. "When she met Walker, he had not lived in the house for over eleven years, and when she convinced him to finally sell it, it created a rift between them that sent her into the arms of my father."
According to stories passed through the Strickland family, Virginia felt the house was haunted by Henrietta Walker, and she still had a strong control over Alex when he returned to it after several years. From the first time she visited it, she reported feeling a presence there, a sensation of being watched. She described the inexplicable scent of roses, Henrietta's favorite flower in the house. In fact, she kept a rose garden on the property when she was alive, but over the years, the plants had died and had been excavated from the grounds. Yet, the scent returned. While packing ceramic bric-a-brac, she also detected the scent of brownies from the kitchen while the oven was cold to the touch and unused. On her return, the objects she had packed would suddenly be back on the mantle of the fireplace.
"The odd thing is..." Strickland adds. "This stuff was happening when Alex wasn't around. Reportedly, he was always getting more boxes or packing up the things in his old bedroom, so it's entirely possible he was gas-lighting her because he didn't want to sell the house, but my mother was more convinced Old Henrietta didn't want her in the house or even taking her son away from her. Whatever happened, my mother would not go near that house and even had panic attacks driving past it. She told me in years before she died that she saw the kitchen revert itself back to how it must have looked in the 1930s and that an old vacuum cleaner suddenly appeared in the living room behind her. She says she saw Henrietta Walker standing and staring back at her from the top of the staircase before turning and running from the house. I saw the look in my mother's eyes; she was convinced the house was haunted."
As far as anyone knows, no one knows where Alex Walker is today. He never made contact with Virginia, the woman he was set to marry, after that incident. He never returned to work in the customer relations department at South Seas Food either. He just seemed to vanish into that house.
"Despite my mother's reservations about the house, my father purchased the property uncontested as an investment... or so he says..." Strickland adds with an eye roll. "I actually think he thought it would be good therapy, but that never worked out as well as he hoped. He tried rented it out over several years but again.... with that place, things never go the way you think."
Between 1970 and 1978, when the house's reputation became notorious in the area, the blue-gray Colonial had had thirty-eight tenants. The longest tenancy was just over eighteen months; the shortest eleven days. James Strickland doesn't have a full list of people going back to 1970, but he does recall a few names from the last few years like Judith Bateman who rented the house in May 22, 2015 and moved out June 2, 2015 after waking up in the middle of the night to an old woman standing at the foot of the bed.
He also recalls Michael and Justine Keaton who lost the mortgage on their house in nearby Bridgeport in the George W. Bush housing fiasco of 2005. They had three kids between the ages of five and eleven, had no money in the bank and Mike had just lost his job at Coast Foods. After numerous tenants had come and gone, Strickland decided to play the odds and gave them the first month rent-free and things started getting better from there. Mike got a job in the Hill Valley Sanitation Department, and Justine found work as an assistant at the high school and became friends with local Kiwanis Club member Elyse Baxter. Elyse offered to help the Keaton's get settled by watching the kids in the Day Care Center at her house during the day, but when she came to the house at Houghton, she didn't feel comfortable.
"No matter what kind of day it was..." She recalls. "You could enter that house and feel as if a veil had been dropped over your face. I don't know what it was, but it was as if you had traveled from one world to another. Now, I don't believe in ghosts, but there was just something off about that place."
According to Elyse, the Batemans had experiences they originally tried to pass off but only started to escalate as they tried to move things around and make the place their own. Pictures they hung crashed down from the walls, the door to the master bedroom would close by itself and resist being opening at times, the house would creak and moan miserably at night and the inexplicable scent of brownies pervaded the house at odd times. An antique clock in the living room just started working one day, and the electricity would go off for no reason. Mike thought the house needed re-wiring and contacted James Strickland about it. Meanwhile, the children also described an old woman who would enter the rooms, look at them then just continue on her way. Mike thought they were imaging things, but as was planning to rewire the house, something terrified him so bad as he started taking down the light in the dining room, and he quickly moved his family out of the place. The kids even left some of their toys behind.
And then there was the Harts, a charming freshly married couple who thought the house would be a nice place to live as they started their life of marital bliss, but then Henrietta took one of her walks down the staircase and into the kitchen to start dinner and the Harts fled to a hotel.
"The house became kind of notorious after the Harts." Strickland confesses. "Up until then, the stories were kind of a clandestine family legend, but Baxter's husband, Steven, was struggling for a good Halloween article that year for the local news and filmed a segment on the property, repeating a few stories from the Batemans, the Christies, the Haggertys and the Bowers among other old renters plus making up some stuff on his own, like claiming the house was on an old cemetery and people had been murdered here. I sued him after that, but to this day, I still get calls from ghost hunters wanting to spend the night there."
After a few years of compromises and bartering, Strickland allowed the CGS to conduct an over-night investigation of the structure in June 2015, almost exactly a year after the Harts had moved out of the house. A complete scientific, video and auditory examination was performed by Steve Barnette, Larry Wedekind and Carla Garrity to try and provoke a response that never happened.
"No electricity, no AC on the hottest night of the year..." Garrity commiserated afterward. "We did not get any evidence. No balls of light, no voices, no footsteps, no smell of roses or otherwise. Henrietta did not visit us that night...."
However, a frame of the digital camera
footage shooting the length of the upstairs hallway did catch something odd. During the
night, a car traveling down Houghton and turning on to Serling Street cast its
headlights into the front boys room on the second floor. As the lights
illuminate the room, a pattern of matrixing kind of becomes obvious... looking
like a small boy peeking out through the crack in the door as he notices the
camera.
History: Not much is known about the history of the residence. It is
believed the house was built during the 1900s housing boom in Hill Valley on
property once owned by Albert Hill, a descendant of the town founder. Once
surrounded by open fields and orchards, the land has since been divided into
several individual suburban properties and Houghton Street has been expanded at least
twice, reducing the original property to a third of what it was in the
Sixties.
Identity Of Ghosts: Henrietta Walker lived in the house between 1921
to her death in 1939, survived by her husband Robert and son Alex who lived in
the house until 1964.
Source/Comments: The Twilight Zone (Episode "Young Man
Fancy") - Activity based on Pest House in Cramerton, Pennsylvania and the
Old Gibson House in Great Falls, Montana
Hill Valley from "Back to the Future"(1986/1989/1990)
Coast Foods from "Gilligan's Island" (Episode: "Not Guilty")