Marin’s Most Haunted Sites, From Sleepy Hollow to Angel Island

It’s Halloween month, and we’re casting a shadow on the most spookily styled spots in Marin.

Easkoot House

Image courtesy of the Marin History Museum

If you enjoy long walks on the beach and tales of Captain Hook, you may want to try strolling Stinson Beach here at 2 a.m. This is the hour Captain Alfred Easkoot, a former owner of the beach property, is said to roam the shore searching for his lost golden hook while keeping trespassers at bay. Recent residents of the house also reported the burglar alarm ringing for 10 minutes despite the alarm being completely disconnected.

The Fireside Inn

Fireside Motel

The Fireside served as one of the region’s wildest gin joints during the Prohibition era. A renovation in 2007 confirmed sneaking suspicions that the speakeasy-turned-motel-turned-housing-development was previously a Miwok burial ground. For many, this explains the many noises and disturbances, reported since the mid-1950s, that became so intense at one point that a séance was conducted — using a cross made with two tequila bottles — to find out what was behind the activity.

HI Marin Headlands Hostel

Marin Headlands Hostel

With a past marked by war, army settlements and secrecy, the Marin Headlands are thought to harbor unseen dark forces. World War II bunkers, batteries, and missile sites line the spectacular cliffside, and two Fort Barry buildings constructed in 1907 — an infirmary and a mansion — now make up the HI Marin Headlands Hostel. Staffers report apparitions of a wandering young girl looking for playmates and of a man with a sore neck in a building where a military officer had hanged himself.

Sleepy Hollow

Even though it’s a community these days, at one time the name Sleepy Hollow locally referred only to a mansion (pictured above), whose charred remnants are still visible today.

Its story starts in 1838, when a man named Domingo Sais received a 6,659-acre land grant from General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo; the grant covered present-day Sleepy Hollow, Fairfax and parts of San Anselmo. Sais leased most of the land that is now Sleepy Hollow in the 1850s to Harvey Butterfield, who fittingly started a dairy farm on the property — Butterfield Road is named after him.

The next owner went into foreclosure and the land came into the hands of the Hotalings, a wealthy San Francisco family. The Hotalings built a mansion at the end of Butterfield Road and named it Sleepy Hollow in honor of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the famous short story written by their friend Washington Irving (and later adapted into film by Tim Burton). They left the mansion soon after, however, returning to San Francisco. The mansion was permanently vacated in the 1950s and eventually burned down.

John Carpenter’s follow-up to Halloween, called The Fog, was also filmed here.

Fairfax’s Camp Bothin

Haunted Marin, Marin Mystery: Is FairFax's Camp Bothin Haunted?, Marin Magazine

The Henry E. Bothin Youth Center in Fairfax is an idyllic West Marin campground that plays host to local Girl Scout troops each summer. However, when the sun goes down at “Camp Bothin,” the historic site has a reputation for guests of another nature.

Some have reported sightings of a nurse pushing her cart down the hallways of Stone House, a foreboding structure that often serves as a dormitory for visiting campers. What reason would the ghost of a caregiver have to appear there? The answer lies in the history of the property, once the site of a convalescent hospital for nearly 50 years.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, dust and ash caused an outbreak of tuberculosis, and both Manor House and the Arequipa Sanatorium were located here. Perhaps those responsible didn’t feel it necessary to learn more about the area’s origins; otherwise, they surely would’ve thought twice about building on a former sacred Native American reservation.

Last spring, bad road conditions forced Doug Paulo of McKinleyville and the girls he was chaperoning to stay an extra night at Camp Bothin after everyone else had left. “We were eating and watching movies on the second-floor balcony,” he recalls. “It was a bit startling to hear a door shut loudly and later that evening see a light come on downstairs. We also thought that we saw someone moving things around — through a window, in a room that was locked.”

While Paulo concedes that small animals or old wiring might be to blame, he won’t rule out the supernatural. “Maybe the place is haunted. All we know is it was not another living person,” he says.

Dominican University

Dominican University
Dominican University’s Meadowlands building, from the Dominican University website.

The most famous ghost at Dominican University is the Blue Boy, or the Meadowlands Ghost, who is said to haunt the Meadowlands building.

The story from Dominican’s website:

“The story of Blue Boy is the most recognized ghost story of Dominican. Most of the students either know the story or have heard of Blue Boy. It has even made its way into the student ambassador tour and orientation meetings. The DeYoung family, who were the owners of Meadowlands before Dominican acquired it, had a son. This son had some mental health issues, and during that time, since the DeYoung family was a wealthy and influential family, they did not let him out of the house to protect their reputation. One day she snapped, and while she was bathing him, she drowned him in the bathtub. Because she was so distraught about what happened, she cut herself and then decided to hang herself. The little boy was named Blue Boy because he turned blue after being drowned.”

Angel Island

Officers
Officer’s Row on Angel Island.

Known as the Ellis Island of the West, Angel Island was where immigrants were cleared to enter the US. The place undoubtedly holds a lot of pain, as immigrants that were detained here suffered from a prison-like environment. as some were humiliated and starved and kept there for extended periods of time. The suffering of these immigrants, mostly from Asia, were carved into the walls in Chinese. One of the most commonly witnessed ghosts is a young bride who hung herself; others have seen ghostly figures wandering through.

One of our own members of staff, Emma Robertson, had her own paranormal experience on Angel Island, which she shares here:

Emma’s Angel Island story: 

“About four or five years ago, my parents and I went to Angel Island for a day trip. We were hiking the island’s perimeter, stopping at the old buildings along the way to learn about the history and explore. Down one pathway, we came across one building that resembled a schoolhouse or church. The windows and doors were all boarded up, but we could peek through a couple of cracks to see in and confirm that no one was in there, nor could they be even if they wanted to. We could also see that there was one large main room and one smaller room attached, but the door separating the two was open, so we could see every part of its interior, and it was completely empty.”

“My dad and I walked around the building while my mom waited; no one else was around us or passed by us during the duration of our time exploring the building. It was raised, so we had to walk up a couple of stairs to what seemed to be the front door. As a joke, my dad said “We should knock.” I agreed, but with dimmed optimism that anything would come of it since we knew there was no one inside or around. He followed the classic knocking pattern — bah duh duh duh duh — and was followed by nothing but silence, even as we pressed our ears to the door and eyes to the cracks in the wood. We started to walk down the stairs after a few seconds of this, discouraged but unsurprised, but we were startled by a very loud and slow two knocks in response that distinctly came from inside the building. My dad and I stared at each other and began running away, as my mom saw us bounding towards her with fear written across our faces. We told her what happened — our stories were identical. My dad and I still believe we heard them to this day.”

Falkirk Mansion

Images courtesy of Marin History museum.

The San Rafael Mansion is said to be haunted by its former owner, Ella Nichols Park. Her husband died when she was still young, and she lived many years as a widow. Built in 1905, the mansion now hosts weddings, and it has been said that she will moan when they recite the lines “til death do you part”.

Lyford House

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The picturesque yellow house is now part of the Richardson Bay Audubon Center and Sanctuary, where it was moved in 1964 to help preserve it. The Victorian home was built by Benjamin Lyford, who a Victorian eccentric who once tried to found a utopian society here. The home was inherited by John Paul Reed, who had fallen in love with Rose Verral, who he could not be with as she was of a different social class. He did leave some land to her however, and she lived there until her death, never moving into the actual house. It is said her ghost haunts the house she could never live in.