The holiday we know as Halloween originated in ancient Celtic cultures that once populated present-day England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and parts of France.

Roger Castle worked at Cuesta College’s Interact Theater as a technical designer in the ’70s and ’80s. Even though he has heard that "the college really doesn’t appreciate these stories being told," he was willing to talk about the ghostly encounters he had there. Out of respect for the college, which still employs him half-time, he asked that he be interviewed by telephone at his home.

I called Roger twice, once to interview him and once to check something. The phone didn’t ring either time. I would dial his number, and the minute I finished dialing, he’d answer. Coincidence? Perhaps–once. But twice?

Castle told me that before he became a technical designer, he’d served as a caretaker at Cuesta, and helped find a location for the then—newly formed Interact Theater. Back then, the college occupied several buildings that had been abandoned by the California Conservation Corps. One was an old chapel.

"We opened the doors to a building that hadn’t been open for months and months," Castle said, "and it was perfectly clean. I mean perfectly. There were no bugs, no dust. It was eerie. That was the start of it."

The old chapel, which become the new theater, was the site for some strange occurrences.

"Once we were in a converted choir loft that had been remade into a lighting area. We were all working [late]," Castle said. "While we were up in the lighting room, we heard the front door open, and [someone coming] up the stairs. But no one came. We went to the door and opened it, and no one was there."

After Castle and other students began talking about the incident, they realized that even if someone had come in, they shouldn't have heard them. The theater had a new steel door and the steps had just been carpeted.

The strange happenings seemed to come more frequently whenever the theater did musicals.

"The ghost didn’t like musicals at all," Castle said. "We’d hear voices coming from what used to be the office of the chapel, voices full of the kind of energy and emotion that would have been there when it was a chapel.

"I can’t explain it. Things would just sort of creep up on you. It wasn’t really dramatic–things would just happen and then you’d think about it later and realize it couldn’t have happened that way. "Once I was working late in the light booth, and I saw car lights sweep through the theater. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, those are car lights at the back of the theater.’ Then I thought about it. "Wait a second–we blacked out all the windows! How could it be?"

Creepiest of all wasn’t something Castle saw but something he heard.

"Late one afternoon I came into the theater alone. I unlocked the door and heard a piano playing upstairs. As I climbed the stairs, chords turned into notes, and the notes slowed, and by the time I reached the top, the music stopped. There was no one there.

"I’m enough of a hippie to buy the logic that the chapel was a very emotional place and that powerful feelings could stay in there, and that’s what I believe caused these things to occur. It doesn’t really scare me. It’s just a bunch a little things that sneak up on you. But I have to admit, finding that no one was playing the piano when I got to the top of the stairs–that was really something."

A Victorian home on Ocean Avenue in Cayucos, which is currently being restored, was built by a Captain Cass in 1867.

The new owner had dreams of turning the house into a bed and breakfast, but has had to put those dreams on hold. Morro Bay archeologist John Parker was hired to make sure that the restoration of the house meets the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act.

Parker said he personally didn’t experience visits from the supernatural while working on the house. But in his research he turned up a tale by someone who did.

"Because of my work, I was able to read the diary of Captain Cass’ niece," Parker said.

"After the Captain died, she and her husband went into the house late at night. It was still completely furnished, with things packed up in boxes. She writes that he had–oh, what do they call those things?–a wooden box that played music by metal discs with holes in it. Well anyway, they went into the music room, where he died, and it suddenly started up. They both ran out of the house. It was significant enough for her to write it down in her diary." Parker said he came across something else in her diary that was also peculiar. She wrote about a water tower, but Parker couldn’t be sure if it was on the Cass property or if it belonged to her mother.

"Usually, tanks in older houses are elevated so that the water flows into the house by gravity. If people didn’t have a hill on their land to place a tank, they built a tower," Parker said. "Usually the room underneath the tank was a shop or something like that. Well, according to this diary, either her mother or Cass’ wife, I’m not sure which, stored her canning jars underneath the water tank. The niece writes in her diary that she was sorting through the jars when she found one with human fingers in it.

"They were pickled!"

Melanie and John F. Hodges bought the legendary Rose Victorian Inn in Arroyo Grande last February. All the tales they’d been told about a little girl’s ghost in the tower room didn’t stop them from making it their home.

The Hodges have renamed the mansion "the Victorian Pitkin-Conrow House" (for two of its earliest owners–Pitkin, who built it in 1890, and Conrow, who bought it in 1905), and they continue to host weddings and parties in its lush gardens and banquet room. But its rooms are off-limits to overnight guests. Once it’s completely repainted (in beach-glass colors, blue and green) it will be hard to identify it as the legendary Rose Victorian Inn, known as the home of Alice–a laughing little girl ghost who loved cats.

A psychic described Alice to the author in a book called "Ghosts of the Haunted Coast."

"She looks about nine years old. She is wearing pigtails, long dress, small apron. She is laughing. She knows you can’t see her."

The Hodges have not seen any evidence of Alice, or for that matter of the many cats that were said to hang around the tower room where, according to legend, Alice loved to look out. "Actually we have a dog who chases cats," said Melanie, "so not very many come around here any more." Melanie said that because the tower is so high–nearly 60 feet–when she opens a window it "seems to suck the air up and papers and things fly around." But she credits that more to natural than to supernatural causes.

However, Stephen Schultz, executive chef at the former Inn, recalls a night in 1991 when a couple who checked into the tower room left in the middle of the night.

"They were sitting on their bed upstairs and they noticed ‘butt prints’ on the bed–indentations in the sheets that looked just like a child had been sitting there," he said.

"They got up and left even though it was the middle of the night."

The quiet and peaceful Mission in the rural community of San Miguel hardly seems a likely setting for the brutal murders that occurred there sometime in 1848.

One of the murderers, a man named Lynch, confessed when he was caught by a posse near Santa Barbara.

The way Lynch told the story, he’d started out from the gold mines in the company of three men–two Americans and an Irishman. During the night, the Irishman murdered the two Americans and robbed them of the gold they were carrying.

Buying two horses with some of the gold, Lynch and the Irishman continued south. At La Soledad Mission, five men joined them, three of them sailors Lynch believed to be deserters. An Indian boy Lynch knew only as John fled the Mission to join their party.

This group arrived at Mission San Miguel in the mid-afternoon. to stop for the night, and were given something to eat. That evening they sold the gold stolen from the two dead Americans to their host, John Reed, for about seven dollars an ounce. Reed bragged that he had more gold than the boy, John, could lift.

The wayfarers left the Mission in the morning, but the thought of Reed’s gold lured them back. By about seven o’clock that night they were back, sitting on a bench in the Mission and talking with Reed. One of the men, a fellow named Barnberry, who was cutting sticks with an ax, stood behind Reed. Suddenly Barnberry struck Reed with the ax and then John, the boy, jumped up and stabbed Reed with a knife.

Then they went through Reed’s rooms and killed the women and the children. Altogether, they slaughtered 13 people in the Mission that night–Reed, his family, and his servants. Their bodies, discovered by a mail carrier who arrived at the Mission early the next evening, were buried in a common grave behind the Mission.

Accounts in two books, "Mysterious California" and "Ghosts of the Haunted Coast," tell of a psychic, one Debbie Christenson, who went into a trance when she visited the Mission. Later she said she’d seen blood everywhere. Her companions watched in horror as she lurched in pain. Then a mysterious spot appeared on her back. The spot turned red, like the mark from a blow, and later it began to bleed. Christenson said the spirits at the Mission "could not rest until they were moved from a common grave."

She is known as the Pink Lady because she’s been seen wearing a pink dress as she hovers among the graves of the weed-choked cemetery in Adelaide.

Adelaide is a lightly-populated region in the hills west of Paso Robles. Settled by Mennonites in the 19th century, it was one of the first planned religious communities in California. All that remains today is the schoolhouse and the cemetery.

Nearby are several abandoned quicksilver mines. The fortunes of Adelaide fluctuated with the alternating success and failure of the mining operations.

Legend has it that a diphtheria epidemic swept through Adelaide in the 1880s, taking many lives–including the Pink Lady's two children. The Pink Lady visited and brought flowers to her children’s' graves every Friday until one day, overcome with grief, she too died.

She can be seen to this day, the story goes, on Friday nights between ten and midnight, wandering among the headstones: the ghostly figure of a lady in a pink dress.

The Pink Lady is so well known that Ray Dodd, owner of a 1,400-acre ranch in the area, said that he was contacted by two L.A. television stations who wanted to try and catch her on film. "I told them to come on up and I would show them what I know," said Dodd, who is 84 and a third-generation Adelaide resident. "I never heard from them again."

Dodd said some of his son's classmates used to go to the cemetery every Friday night just to sit there, but they never saw the Pink Lady.

The cemetery dates back to the 1880s, Dodd said.

"The people who owned the ranch donated the land, it forms a triangle, and wasn’t much use for farming," he said. He can confirm there was a diphtheria epidemic in the late 1880s because "my grandfather lost all three boys and his wife in it."

"The year I was Pioneer Day Marshall I did a little research. The quicksilver mine is what really got the community started," he said. "The name comes from the fact that three families moved here and each one of them had a daughter named Adelaide."

As far as he knew, none of them wore a pink dress.

"Are they going to tell that story again?" said Norma Moye, executive director of the Paso Robles Main Street program. Moye’s ghost, Mr. Moody, has gotten a lot of coverage, either because he is reputed to be so nice or because he haunts one of Paso Robles’ most stately Victorian houses.

Garland William Brewster built the house at the corner of 18th and Vine streets between1890 and 1895 on land deeded him by Mary Moody’s father after Brewster married his daughter.

Mary Brewster died of pneumonia in one of the upstairs rooms in 1931. Her brother also died of pneumonia in the house–also upstairs.

"I can understand everyone dying of pneumonia in that house in the winter–it’s freezing in there," Moye says today.

Moye said that when her daughter, Patty Baldwin, was in high school, she saw Mr. Moody.

"She said he was tall and thin and wore a black suit with an old-fashioned vest."

Her daughter described her otherworldly visitor to the former owner of the house, who instantly said, "That’s Mr. Moody!"

Moye said that although she has never seen Mr. Moody, she knows he’s there.

"Sometimes the hair will stand up on the back of my neck, then I know he’s around. But he’s a nice ghost. He protects the house." Æ