was much political upheaval in Old Town as its role as the county seat was ripped away. Soon it became just another colorful neighborhood in the weave of the county’s tapestry. Whaley became a shadow of the man who’d arrived in California to fulfill his destiny and take his place in history. Once known informally as the “Mayor of San Diego” and appointed president of the San Diego City Board of Trustees, he saw his life begin its downward spiral. In 1871, the county clerk rode to the Whaley home courthouse and forcibly took the city records that had been stored there.
On January 5, 1882, Whaley’s daughters Violet and Anna Amelia had a wonderful double wedding; Anna Amelia married her first cousin, John T. Whaley, and Violet wedded George T. Bertolacci, whom she divorced a little more than a year later. Violet suffered a great deal of clinical depression before she took her own life in 1885 (see Creole Café chapter). With the death of their dear Violet and their son Thomas Jr., Thomas and Anna wanted to leave the home’s memories behind, so they moved to what is now downtown. Whaley became an employee of city government and retired in 1888 and passed away in his downtown home in 1890 at the age of sixty-seven. Anna Amelia Whaley passed away in Modesto in 1905.
Thomas Whaley had rented out their home on San Diego Avenue, and it had fallen into great disrepair. In 1909, tourism took hold of San Diego as everyone readied for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona had planted a wildly romantic view of Southern California in the rest of the world’s imagination (see Rancho Camulos chapter). So people continued to come to Southern California and vacation up and down the coast. Thomas Whaley’s son Francis undertook making the home a tourist attraction; he posted signs outside promoting its history and entertained visitors with his guitar on the porch of his childhood home and charged a small fee for a tour. The Whaley matriarch, Anna, along with Corinne Lillian, Francis, and George, one again took up residence in the old Whaley House in 1912. In 1913, the family suffered the loss of Anna at age eighty. A year later, Francis Whaley passed away, followed by George Whaley in 1928. Corinne Lillian Whaley continued living in what must have been a house of spirits by then until her death in 1953.
There’s not much about the Whaley family in today’s history books; even the family burial plot is not especially ornate or conspicuous (see Mount Hope chapter). If it were not for Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO) and the vision they had to preserve the home Whaley left behind, the family name might not be known at all today.
New to the area in 2002, I took a tour of the Whaley House because of my own love for historic architecture. I was taking pictures with my cell phone from all angles, but stopped dead in my tracks as I looked at the digital photo I’d taken while shooting up the stairs. There, midway up the stairs, was the figure of a little boy in period clothing staring down at me. I looked at the picture, at the stairs, and back at the camera. I immediately went upstairs to search the rooms for the child who seemed to have disappeared the moment I took his picture. I found no one. I went downstairs and showed people the photo and asked them if they’d seen the child come down. There was quite a stir, and in all the excitement I’d forgotten to save the photo. During the time my phone was being passing around, the photo was deleted, but the memory of the child dressed in Victorian clothing sitting halfway up the stairs and looking quite forlorn was not.
As I formed my Meetup group, Ghosts Happen, and brought them to the location (see Creole Café chapter), I began a rapport with the people responsible for raising the money to pay the bills every month. Each of them has their own stories of the home, not because they’re gullible people or because they’re prone to hallucinations, but because, I believe, the Whaleys have adopted them as family. The stories I hear are not scary or bloodcurdling; instead, they are rather caring.
The Whaley family altar outside their home on the annual celebration of the Day of the Dead. The streets of Old Town are lined with altars, covered with candles and marigolds, that honor the dead. This is where the procession to El Campo Santo Cemetery begins.
What you find with the staff of the Whaley House isn’t indicative of the history museums you see all over the country—filled with senior volunteers who are desperately trying to save history for the next generation. Instead, you find young people—people who started caring about preserving history in their teens—who were somehow born into the love of history and filled with enthusiasm and innovative ideas to preserve the property and reach out to the community. And when they talk about the ghosts that reside in the Whaley manse, they’re respectful and protective—apparently to give the entities the room they need to coexist on the property.
Victor Santana, director of interpretive services for SOHO, shares that dedication to history and came to the Whaley House through the junior docent program when he was sixteen. You can tell Santana is proud of what SOHO has done for the Whaley home, and that he takes a great deal of care in the way he presents the home to the public. All of the employees are quite protective of the Whaley family and the buildings in the square.
“I think we can all have different assumptions about what ghosts are, and why they’re still here, and what to call them, but unless you hear it directly from them you’re not going to have a definitive answer,” says Santana. “You go with the obvious answer; it’s probably the Whaleys—it is their home. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t be them—they had their good times and they had their tragedies here, but it’s still their home.”
Santana has experienced quite a bit of paranormal activity over the years. His first experience happened on his first night locking up alone. “I was locking up one night after a private tour with a newlywed couple. It was about eleven. I was nearly done when I heard footsteps upstairs, and I thought, ‘This isn’t good—it’s my first night—someone must have snuck in.’ So I went upstairs to see what was going on, and there was no one up there. I came back and the footsteps starting sounding so real and so loud that I actually called my boss at the time and I told her, ‘I think the house is really haunted.’ She asked, ‘What are you still doing there?’ And I told her that I was locking up and still hearing noises like someone is still here. She told me to just set the alarm and lock up. As I’m setting the alarm, I heard a woman’s voice whisper, ‘Why are you still here?’
“For all the years I’ve been here, I’ve not heard anything else … .” Santana shrugs. “But I’ve heard recordings of the voices in the house. The San Diego Ghost Hunters do EVP sessions here [see El Campo Santo chapter]. I’m not a ghosthunter, but I do believe in ghosts. I think it’s really cool what they [ghosthunters] do. I listened to a recording where the San Diego Ghost Hunters ask, ‘Thomas Whaley, are you here?’ ‘Anna Whaley, are you here?’ And then they say, ‘Maybe it’s the little girl who lives here?’ When you listen back you can clearly hear a little girl answering Yes or No questions so close to the microphone, it’s like she’s in the same room.”
As is everyone connected to the Whaley House, Santana is very respectful of the property and the spirits residing there. “Don’t base what you’re going to do on what you see on television,” says Santana to visitors of the Whaley House. “A lot of people come in here and try to offend the ghosts and yell out at them. You don’t go to someone’s house and cuss or call them out.”
Dean Glass, administrative manager of SOHO, had an experience that brought him face-to-face with the master of the house. One thing about all the people working with the Whaley House is that they’re credible witnesses that don’t seem to be the type who see spirits everywhere. I’ve seen many who lie their way through a story, and this is not what they’re about. Each has only a handful of
