It is well-known that tragic deaths can cause a home or
place to become haunted. What is not as well known is that an act of evil can
also bring about a haunting. Many people who have severely haunted homes later
discover that horrific acts have occurred there such as satanic sacrifices,
black magic, murders, suicides, acts of sexual perversion, devil worshipping or
some other awful event. These types of hauntings can be distinguished from
others by their particularly evil nature.
In the 1970s, the city of Los Angeles was gripped in terror
by the hideous crimes of Charles Manson. He and his gang went on a spree of
murders that shocked the nation. Manson was eventually apprehended by the
police. He was put on trial, found guilty of murder and imprisoned.
The
evil nature of his crimes made a lasting impression on the public. However,
what is not as well known is that his crimes have left a trail of haunted
houses -- homes that were forever changed by the events that occurred there.
Margaret Patterson (not her real name) has been a
real-estate agent for over twenty-five years. She had heard about the murders,
but never really paid much attention to them. But then, her job as a
real-estate agent brought her right to the door of one of the houses where the
Manson gang had committed a ghastly crime.
It all began when a lady came into the office looking for a
home in the Santa Monica mountains. As Margaret says, “I worked in real-estate
and this woman came into my office and she wanted to buy a house. I asked her how
much she could spend. I don’t know what it was, but it was like twelve thousand
dollars or fourteen thousand dollars. Most of the houses were going for about
twenty-five thousand then. That was probably like the early seventies.
“I didn’t have anything and she went on and on about how she
just wanted a place that was habitable and she didn’t care all that much about
it. She wasn’t fussy, and she only
wanted to be here in the canyon, and on and on. She reminded me of a gypsy-type
lady, overweight with a muumuu on, a fortune-teller type, you know what I
mean?
“So finally, she kept pushing, and there was this one house
that we had that was vacant. They were asking thirteen-five. It was very small.
It was a one bedroom, almost a tree-house type little affair, among the trees.
I had never been into it before, but it was on the market. We had a key in the
office.
“So I said, ‘There is this one place. It needs a whole lot
of work and so forth, but if you’re not fussy and all, I’ll show it to you.’
“So she got in the car and we drove up there. She was really
excited. She just said, ‘This is going to be perfect. Everything is great.’ We
parked in front; it was up on the side of a hill. You had to walk up a lot of
wooden steps to get to it, and you entered on the balcony. And she said, ‘Oh,
it’s so beautiful. There’s oak trees. This is just terrific.’ And so on and so
forth.
“So we got there and I opened the door. We went in. We saw
that it was vacant. She just started wandering around. t wasn’t all that big. I just sort of stood
there. I hadn’t been in it before. And after about three minutes, she began to
sort of change. She said, ‘Something’s going on here.’ And she didn’t wait for
me to answer. She said, ‘Gee, I’m feeling something. I feel something. It feels
heavy in here. What is it? I don’t know what it is.’ She said, ‘I’m not feeling
good about this.’ She said it was heavy. She kept going on. She said,
‘Something’s happened here. Did something happen here?’ And she went on and on.
“So the thing that I knew ahead of time -- and I wasn’t
going to tell her; I didn’t know how to deal with it actually, but I decided I
wouldn’t say anything to her about this particular house. Because I never have
to talk about it because she might not like the house. And if she did like it,
I would have to tell her. But the bottom line was, this was the house that
Charlie Manson murdered somebody in. And she picked up the vibes on it. And I
didn’t tell her anything. I’m sure she didn’t set me up to do that kind of
thing. She picked up on some kind of energy that was happening there. I
couldn’t believe that she was picking this up.”
The lady kept on talking about something evil having
happened there so Margaret eventually told her the truth. Needless to say, the
lady didn’t buy the house.
Today there is a disclosure law requiring real-estate agents
to reveal if a murder has occurred in the house. Back then, however, there was
no disclosure law. Margaret was stunned that the lady was able to somehow sense
the fact that something bad had happened there.
She was glad that she was under no obligation to try and get
the house sold. Eventually the house was sold. The new owners remodeled and
expanded the home. Margaret does not know if the new residents have experienced
any activity.
That house, however, is not the only house to have become
haunted after a Manson murder had occurred. Another much larger house in the
Hollywood Hills was the location of another of the Manson killings. It was in
this house that Sharon Tate’s life was forever ended.
The house, which was a normal happy household before the
incident, soon started to change. Strange incidents began to occur. An evil
presence began to make itself known.
Sarah Webster is a pilot, flight instructor and gardener
from Los Angeles, California. By mere coincidence, Sarah happened to know
somebody who had a connection with the murders. As Sarah says, “A friend of
mine’s grandmother is very good friends with the man who actually owned the
house that the Tate -- La Bianca murders happened in. He was going off to
Europe for a few years or something like that, I don’t know exactly how long.
But when he was leaving, Sharon Tate begged him to let her stay in his house
while he was gone. And with a lot of misgivings, he let her do it. And that’s
where she got killed by the Manson crew, and a whole bunch of other people got
killed by the Manson crew.
“I went there with the granddaughter of the woman who knew
this guy. And we went there in the
evening. We were going to have dinner there.
And we got there. It was a beautiful house built up in the Hollywood
Hills, a gorgeous view. And my friend was saying, ‘You really ought to see the
rest of the house.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’
"It was getting dark and the owner of the house was cooking
dinner, and he said, ‘Go ahead, check it out.’ And we started wandering around
and we would try all of the light switches and nothing would work. One of us
would stand at the light switch and the other one would be at the lamp trying
it in different ways and we couldn’t get any of the lights to turn on at all
through the entire house. And the owner came in, and he would flip the exact
same switches that we had done, and it would work. It was really blowing my
mind particularly after about the third or fourth time he did it. And then we went wandering into the back of
the house.
“And in this back bedroom, actually in the bathroom in the
back bedroom -- that was the first place we could actually turn on the lights,
which was another weird thing. We’re like, ‘Wow, check it out,’ And it was just
crawling with flies. It was just filled
with flies. It felt like something out of a Hitchcock movie. There were
thousand of them. They were everywhere. It was like everywhere you looked. They
were all over the mirrors, all over the counters, all of the ceilings. It was
really disgusting. We screamed and ran. We screamed and ran.
“It just really spooked us after the whole light experience
and knowing about the murders having happened there. We beat a hasty retreat
out of there and pretty much left as soon as we could, feeling very spooked by
the whole thing.”
Both Sarah and her friend ran breathlessly down the stairs
and confronted the owner. They told him everything, about how the lights hadn’t
worked except in the bathroom which was all filled with flies. The owner just
shrugged and casually, “Yeah, I’ve been having problems with that room.”
Sarah didn’t bother to ask him if he had experienced any
other ghostly activity. As she says, “I did not ask him about that. It was kind
of a touchy subject for him. He didn’t really like the fact that a murder had
happened in his house.”
Sarah and her friend ate dinner quickly and politely left as
soon as they could. Since then, they have never been back. The property was
later sold, and the new owners completely tore down the house and built a brand
new home.
Sarah reports that although the experience was somewhat
frightening, she was intrigued by the experience and wishes that other people
could know what it’s like to be in a haunted house. As she says, “Really it was
a stunning house, other than these small problems with the light switches and
the bugs. It was more disturbing than
scary. I definitely felt like there was some type of otherworldly presence of
some kind or another. But I didn’t feel personally threatened. I think it was
kind of neat. I mean, we need to have haunted houses.”
As can be seen, Charles Manson’s crimes definitely left a
strong impression on the homes in which they were perpetrated. Most of the
manifestations are somewhat common. For example, a sense of an evil presence
and lights going on and off by themselves are not unusual manifestations. A
very unusual manifestation is the flies which filled the bathroom. This has
appeared in only a few of the most severe cases of hauntings, and yet, it is a
detail that has been repeated.
Whatever the case, the phenomenon is real, and in the above
cases, seems to be the result not of the spirits of those people who were
killed, but by the violent and evil nature of the acts of murder. In both cases
the hauntings were stopped after the houses were either remodeled or torn down
and rebuilt. In both cases, the houses experienced no activity until the
murders occurred.
This case is interesting not only because of the notoriety
the murders received, but because they clearly illustrate the consequences of
evil acts, such as murder. An evil act can literally cause a house to become
infested by evil spirits. And because the Manson murders were particularly
evil, they left a haunted legacy that lasted for many years.
This
case is one of 26 firsthand cases taken from the book, California Ghosts:
True Accounts of Hauntings in the Golden State by Preston Dennett. The book
is 192 pages and is fully illustrated by award-winning artist, Kesara. It is available from Schiffer Books at 4880
Lower Valley Road, Atglen PA 19310.
phone: 610-593-1777. email: info@schifferbooks.com. www.schifferbooks.com ($14.95 plus $3.95 s/h)