by Hans Holzer
Alice wondered about this attitude, and perhaps it was then that her first doubts concerning her ecclesiastical future began to enter her mind.
Shortly after, it was still October 1965, she lay awake in bed at night, thinking of her future at the convent. The clock had just chimed eleven and she was still wide awake. Night after night, she had heard the walking in the hall. After weeks of these manifestations, her nerves began to get edgy and she could not sleep as easily as she used to when she still lived in Brooklyn. Sure enough, there they were again, those incessant footsteps. They seemed to her the steps of a medium-heavy person, more like a woman’s than a man’s, and they seemed to be bent on some definite business, scurrying along the hall as if in a hurry.
Suddenly the night was pierced by a shriek: it seemed directly outside her door, but below. Since she was on the top floor, the person would have to be on the second floor. There was no mistaking it, this was the outcry of a woman in great pain, in the agony of being hurt by someone!
This time she was almost too scared to look, but she did open the door only to find the corridor abandoned and quiet now.
She ran in to speak to the other postulants, regulations or no regulations. She found them huddled in their beds in abject fear. All eight of them had heard the blood-curdling scream!
By now Alice was convinced that something strange had taken place here and that a restless personality was stalking the corridors. A short time later, she and Vera were in their room, getting ready to retire.
It was a cold night, but no wind was about. The windows were the French window type that locked with a heavy iron rod from top to bottom. No one could open the window from the outside, the only way it could be opened would be from the inside, by pushing the rod up.
“We don’t have to lock the window tonight, do we?” Vera said. “It isn’t windy.”
But they decided to do it anyway as they did every night. They put their shoes on the window sill, something they were in the habit of doing so that the small draft coming in below the windows would “air them out.”
After the window was locked, they retired.
It was well into the night, when the girls awoke to a loud noise. The French window had broken open by itself and the shoes had been tossed inside the room as if by a strong storm!
They checked and found the air outside totally still. Whatever had burst their window open had not been the wind. But what was it?
The room was ice cold now. They shuddered and went back to bed.
There is only a small ledge for pigeons to sit on outside the window, so no one could have opened the window from that vantage point. One could hardly expect pigeons to burst a window open, either.
The girls then realized that the novices who had been complaining about the windows in their room being constantly open had not been fibbing. Alice and Vera always kept their windows closed, yet some unseen force had apparently opened them from inside on a number of occasions. Now they had seen for themselves how it happened.
Alice realized that the window had been broken open as if by force from inside, not outside.
“Someone’s trying to get out, not in,” she said, and her roommate could only shudder.
There were other peculiar things she soon noticed. Strange cold drafts upstairs and in the attic. Crosses nailed to the wall next to the entrance to the upstairs rooms. Only to those rooms, and to no others, and not inside the rooms, as one might expect in a convent, but just outside as if they had been placed there to keep something, or someone evil out!
In the main dining room, a door, when closed, could not be distinguished from the surrounding wall. A trick window near the head of the table was actually a mirror which allowed the man at the head of the table to see who was coming towards him from all sides.
Banker Morgan lived in considerable fear of his life, whether imagined or real, but certainly the house was built to his specifications. In fact, trick mirrors were so placed in various parts of the main house so that no one could approach from downstairs and surprise anyone upstairs, yet no one could see the one watching them through the mirrors.
Shortly after Alice had moved into the convent, she began to have strange dreams in which a blonde young girl named Alice played a prominent role.
In the dream, the girl’s blonde hair changed to curls, and she heard a voice say, “This is Alice Morgan, I want to introduce you to her.”
But when she woke up Alice thought this was only due to her having discussed the matter with the novices. Alice Morgan was not the disturbed person there, her psychic sense told her.
To her, all ghostly activities centered around that attic. There were two steps that always squeaked peculiarly when someone stepped on them. Many times she would hear them squeak and look to see who was walking on them, only to find herself staring into nothingness. This was in the daytime. On other occasions, when she was at work cleaning garbage cans downstairs—postulants do a lot of ordinary kitchen work—she would feel herself observed closely by a pair of eyes staring down at her from the attic. Yet, no one was up there then.
The torture of the nightly footsteps together with her doubts about her own calling prompted her finally to seek release from the convent and return to the outside world, after three months as a postulant. After she had made this difficult decision, she felt almost as if all the burdens had lifted from the room that had been the center of the psychic manifestations.
She decided to make some final inquiries prior to leaving and since her superiors would not tell her, she looked the place over by herself, talked to those who were willing to talk and otherwise used her powers of observation. Surely, if the haunted area was upstairs, and she knew by now that it was, it could not be Alice Morgan who was the restless one.
But then who was?
The rooms on the third floor had originally been servant quarters as is customary in the mansions of the pre-World War I period. They were built to house the usually large staffs of the owners. In the case of the Morgans, that staff was even larger than most wealthy families.
Was “the restless one” one of the maids who had jumped out the window in a final burst for freedom, freedom from some horrible fate?
Then her thoughts turned to the Communist Russian occupancy of the building. Had they perhaps tortured someone up there in her room? The thought was melodramatically tempting, but she dismissed it immediately. The figure she had seen in the hall was dressed in the long dress of an earlier period. She belonged to the time when the Morgan Hall was a mansion.
No, she reasoned, it must have been a young girl who died there while the Morgans had the place and perhaps her death was hushed up and she wanted it known. Was it suicide, and did she feel in a kind of personal hell because of it, especially now that the place was a convent?
Somehow Alice felt that she had stumbled upon the right answers. That night, the last night she was to spend at the convent prior to going home, she slept soundly.
For the first time in three months, there were no footsteps outside her door.
For a while she waited, once the 10 o’clock bell had sounded, but nothing happened. Whoever it was had stopped walking.
* 68
The Guardian of the Adobe (California)
CASA ALVARADO IS California’s best preserved adobe house, one of the few Spanish houses still standing and inhabited by people descended from the original settlers who had come to this land with Don Gaspar de Portola and Padre Junipero Serra in 1769.
The casa stands on an ever-shrinking piece of land which was once the proud property of two Spanish gentlemen named Ygnacio Palomares and Ricardo Vejar. They received it jointly in a Mexican land grant in April 1837, the Mexican Republic having by then replaced the Spanish crown as the dispenser of such favors. It was fertile, but empty, territory before then and the government liked to encourage potential ranchers in settling here. To get an idea of the immenseness of such sweeping grants, one must only remember that the ranch, even as late as 1
875 when the original grant was reconfirmed by the American authorities, encompassed 22,340 acres.
The two gentlemen divided the land between them, with Señor Palomares taking the lower half, which became known as Lower San Jose, while his friend and partner Vejar took the Upper San Jose for his estate. The choice of the name of San Jose for the land was not entirely accidental.
It was on March 19, 1837, that the above named two gentlemen, in the company of a certain Padre Salvidea of San Gabriel Mission, were taking a break from the day’s activities underneath a giant oak tree on the property. They had been surveying the land that was soon to become theirs officially and the good Padre decided to bless it right then and there. Since it was the feast day of St. Joseph, they dedicated it to that saint, and St. Joseph has been venerated in the area ever since as a special “local” protector.
Señor Palomares realized he had a huge piece of land on his hands, and, being a gregarious fellow, invited some of his neighbors and relatives to come with him and settle in this fertile valley. Among them was a certain Ygnacio Alvarado and his wife Luisa Avila, who were deeded a piece of land south of the Palomares home itself. The only stipulation was that a room be set aside in the new house to accommodate St. Joseph and to serve as a sanctuary for religious services.
The Alvarado home was duly built of adobe and wood as was the custom in 1840, in this part of the world. Adobe is a natural plaster mixture of soil and is made into bricks that can withstand the ravages of time, if not of human desecration.
The house consists of a spacious sala or parlor, forty-two feet long, and originally there were ten adobe rooms making up the square building, a shingled roof, and portico running alongside the house on all sides, graduated to the surrounding ground by three wooden steps. One of the adobe bedroom wings was destroyed by a later owner, the Nichols family, who replaced it with three new redwood rooms containing Victorian fireplaces. They don’t exactly fit in with the rest of the house but some day, perhaps, the house may be restored completely to its original splendor.
The main portion contained, in addition to aforementioned sala, a large, square dining room, a den, two kitchens and a winery and blacksmith shop. The Nichols family had no use for the latter two items and replaced them with a water tower.
That large sala was the sanctuary the original owner had promised to maintain, and the altar stood at the north end during services to St. Joseph. However, the Mexicans are also a practical and joyous people, so after each Mass, the altar was turned to the wall and a fiesta held in the same room, which was obviously suitable for both church and ballroom!
That homey practice came to an end when the Pomona Land and Water Company acquired the estate. At the same time, the parish priest of St. Joseph’s in Pomona took over the Mass which was no longer followed by a fiesta, churches being what they are.
As the years went on, Señor Alvarado was stricken with paralysis, and confined to his bed. But he ordered his house to be kept open to all his friends, and despite the owner’s illness, it continued to be filled with many people, coming and going, and the sounds of hospitality. Doña Luisa, the owner’s wife, ministered to the throngs, dressed in black, as was the Spanish custom, and wearing a white neck scarf over the shoulder, pinned at the throat with a brooch of Spanish gold. The Alvarado dances continued to be gay affairs.
The community that had sprung up around the estate produced many children and before long it became necessary to build a school, because the Casa Alvarado, where the sessions had first been held, proved much too small.
In the early 1870s, therefore, a plain frame building, the new school, was erected southeast of the adobe.
The two adobe houses—the Palomares site and the Casa Alvarado—became the property of the Nichols family, owners of the Pomona Land and Water Company, in 1887, but eventually the heirs sold the Palomares house. They kept the Casa Alvarado and one day a couple from Sherman Oaks, by the name of Fages, visited the house and immediately fell in love with it. They were and are antiquarians, and the casa was just what they wanted. Devout people, they asked St. Joseph to intercede on their behalf, and sure enough, six years later the house was for sale. What made their possession even more appropriate was the fact that Mrs. Isabella Fages is a direct descendant of the original Alvarado family and thus it was in a way a homecoming for both family and house.
After moving in, they had a priest, Father Mathew Poetzel, bless and rededicate the house and grounds to St Joseph, and they placed a plaque telling its remarkable history upon the outside wall. The land had dwindled over the years and was now not much more than the ground required to have a homestead.
A little to the south there was once a wooden barn, part of the estate. That barn, dating back to the 1840s, had long since been turned into a house. Despite its proximity to the Casa Alvarado, it belongs to different owners, and has been separated from the rest of the estate for many years. But to those who see the Rancho San Jose as one entity, it is of course still part and parcel of the original land grant.
Of course, the city of Pomona has now grown up all around this spot and the air isn’t as clear as it used to be when Don Alvarado rode about his ranch. The freeway comes close to the casa now and gasoline fumes do too, but no one can touch the grounds themselves. The casa is secure from greedy speculators and the shrine to St. Joseph will probably outlast them all.
All of the energies of the Alvarado family have been directed toward the preservation of the landmark in its original state and no sacrifice is too large to safeguard it.
It goes without saying that nothing has been changed in the casa since the house passed back into the family again. But the partial destruction by the Nichols family, whose New England practicality did not understand the sentimental attachment of the Spanish settlers for their own ways, had left the house scarred, if not damaged. This must not happen again, and Mrs. Fages watches the construction work around her with a wary eye. In a way she holds the fort against incursions from hostile strangers exactly as the first settlers did.
What happened to the barn between the time the Nichols family sold the Casa Alvarado and the moving in of the present owners is not certain, but just prior to their occupation of the place it was a home already, and not a barn. A Mr. and Mrs. Bolt lived in it. Mrs. Bolt died in it, of cancer, often rending the night air with screams of pain.
In the meantime the house suffered somewhat from the weather and when the Leimbach family moved in a few years ago, it was clear to them that they would have to do some repairing and remodeling to make the old barn into a fine home. Meanwhile they are, of course, living in the house. It is only about thirty miles from Los Angeles on the freeway, and most convenient in terms of Los Angeles suburban living conditions. The entrance to the house is from the side, and downstairs there is a kitchen, a bedroom, and the living room, from which a staircase leads to the upper story. Two bedrooms make up that part of the house.
After they moved in the Leimbachs knew their house had once been used as a barn and hayloft: they even found a hay hook in the downstairs bedroom and knew that horses had once lived in it! But this did not bother them in the least, of course, nor did it bother their two daughters, Denise and Dana. The two girls were aged twelve and ten respectively at the time of their arrival at the house.
Jo Ann Leimbach, a woman in her thirties, her husband, somewhat older, the two girls, and an occasional cleaning woman, Mrs. Irene Nuñez, were the only people occupying the house.
Or so it seemed at first, anyway.
* * *
Mrs. Leimbach wasn’t particularly interested in psychic phenomena, but as a child she had had a little precognition, such as the time she had known her grandfather had died, although he was far away from the family, and how her mother would tell her about his death.
But this had been a long time ago and none of these things were in her mind when she and her family moved into the converted barn on the Alvarado estate.
On September 12, 1967, she
was in her sewing room, which is located in a separate building away from the main house. The main house was empty except for Mrs. Nuñez, who was cleaning the guest bedroom upstairs. Normally a courageous woman, Mrs. Nuñez felt uneasy this morning, as if she were being watched by someone she could not see.
This was the first time she had been alone in the house. Was it getting on her nerves? She is a woman of Mexican descent and the area is closely tied up with her people, so it could not be that she was out of her element, and yet she felt very much estranged at this moment. She turned around to see if there was perhaps someone in the room, after all.
As she turned, she clearly heard footsteps coming toward her. Immediately she froze in her tracks and the footsteps went right past her. There was no one to be seen, yet the floorboards reverberated with the weight of a person, quite heavy apparently, rushing past her! She caught herself running down the stairs, but then thought better of it and returned upstairs. The uneasy feeling was still present, but seemed quiet now.
Had she told her employer about her experience she would have encountered understanding, not scorn. For Mrs. Leimbach had already found out by then that there was someone other than flesh-and-blood people in this house. In February of the same year, she found herself in the house with her two girls, while her husband had gone out to attend to his income tax report. The girls, then aged ten and twelve, were in the kitchen with her that evening, when she clearly heard heavy footsteps upstairs.
This was immediately followed by the sound of someone opening and closing various drawer and of doors being violently opened and slammed shut. It sounded as if someone were very angry at not finding what he was looking for, and frantically going from room to room searching for something.
Thinking of how it would affect her children, since she could not possibly explain these sounds to them rationally, she jumped for the radio and turned it on loud so the noise would cover the sounds upstairs. Then she went out and brought the dog into the house and tried to get her to accompany her up the stairs. Tried is right, for the animal absolutely refused to budge and sat at the foot of the stairs and howled in utter terror.