The Whaley House: A Gallows and Four Named Ghosts

Before Thomas Whaley built his house on this lot in Old Town, this ground had another purpose. In eighteen fifty-two, a man named Yankee Jim Robinson was hanged here, from San Diego's first public gallows, for the crime of grand larceny. He was a large man, and the drop was short, and witnesses reported that he strangled slowly rather than dying instantly, which was not uncommon in an era before the science of execution had been refined. Robinson's death was, by any account, a bad one.

Five years later, in eighteen fifty-seven, Thomas Whaley built a Greek Revival brick house on the exact same ground. He reported, shortly after moving in with his family, that he could hear heavy footsteps crossing the upstairs floor at night. He identified them as the ghost of Yankee Jim Robinson. Whaley was a practical man, not prone to mysticism, and the reported matter-of-factness with which he made this identification has lodged itself in the historical record.

The Whaley House served multiple purposes over the following decades: county courthouse, theater, general store. The family continued to live in it. In eighteen eighty-five, Whaley's daughter Violet, twenty-two years old and recently estranged from her husband after a brief marriage, died by suicide in the house. The building had, by the end of the century, accumulated a full catalog of named presences: Yankee Jim, Thomas Whaley himself, Anna Whaley, and Violet.

A popular legend holds that a federal agency once officially designated the Whaley House the most haunted house in America, but no confirmed government record supports that claim. The designation traces instead to television programs, including the Travel Channel, that have called it one of the most haunted houses in the country. The house is a California Historical Landmark, a listed property on the National Register of Historic Places, and still draws visitors who come specifically for the ghosts. The original inhabitants, the people who actually died here, have been absorbed entirely into the entertainment.