"I know she's here," says Dorothy Kingren, speaking of the ghost named Lucy. THE PERSONALITY of a departed piano teacher is said to inhabit a downtown Sacramento bed-and-breakfast named for her memory the owners lovingly call it "The House Where Lucy Dwells." Under one of them, there was an old rolled up newspaper. 19 last year, about the second weekend after we bought the house, I was pulling up some of the old thresholds in a back hall. Johnston's supposedly around guarding her hidden jewels."Īs for personal experiences, Cox said, "The owls in the attic scared us to death one time and, yeah, there was one other eerie thing. "One of them is supposed to be the wife of William Johnston, a '49er and California state senator who built the mansion in 1868. "We've been told there are ghosts, but none have turned up so far," said John Cox. An old piano tuner told me that."ĪNOTHER DELTA MANSION about which ghost stories are told is Rosebud, now owned for a year by Cheryl and John Cox, also owners of Sacramento Theatrical Lighting. His first wife drowned mysteriously in the slough and her ghost is still supposed to haunt the place. Talk about someone who might have had ghost stories! Also, one of Jean Harlow's husbands owned it before he was married to her. He says people have told him there's at least one ghost at his Delta inn. I never knew he had designed a mansion in the Delta."īlack, 42, also owns a 500-year-old hotel in Knaresborough, England, near Harrogate, and the Grand Island Inn (formerly the Ryde Hotel). Soon after I bought it, I was going through the attic one day and found a set of blueprints of the mansion that were signed 'J.W. I didn't even know it existed until the first time I saw it. "Only after I bought the house did I find out that I had some connection to it. It likes me," Black said of the mansion, which was built in 1917 by a German financier named Louis Meyers who died shortly after it was completed. Some of the previous owners have died broke, but I have a good feeling about the house. "So much energy goes into building and keeping up a 58-room, 24,000- square-foot house like this that it's bound to reflect some of that energy. I don't even worry about security because it's so frightening." Until you get used to them, they are scary. "There are gargoyles carved into the fireplaces and it's always making its own set of noises. "I HAVE TO ADMIT that the house is absolutely terrifying at night," Black said. The family's housekeeper, for instance, will not stay in the house alone. Things that are passionate always stick to a building."Īs for the Delta's Grand Island Mansion being haunted, Black said it could seem like it to some people. There are some that have negative vibes because they are built on Indian land and the Indians are mad about the intrusion. It is interesting that nuns would have taken over that house for so many years."īolling says it doesn't matter how old a house is. "At the old Stanford House, there's a lot of very strong feminine energy, even if there are no ghosts that I know of.