Preston Castle:
The Reformatory Ghost Story
California, with its ample sunshine and radiant stars and starlets, may seem like a planet away from the “just folks” vibe of Nashville and other centers of country music culture. But a California town and its music style served as a cradle for several country acts that felt Nashville had become, ironically enough, too glitzy and out of touch.
That town is called Bakersfield. And it’s every bit as hardscrabble and tough as the towns in the East that defined country music, like Nashville. Most, though, would say Bakersfield is tougher. The California town is also just as haunted as its Eastern sister cities—some might say more haunted.
The town teems with ghosts—and some are intrinsically connected to country music’s most famous acts, including Merle Haggard. Haggard, along with other acts like Buck Owens, would go on to create that hard and haunted-sounding style of country music that is now called the Bakersfield sound.
One of Bakersfield’s most famous—or infamous—landmarks is connected with country music and, specifically, with one of the architects of the Bakersfield sound. That musical architect, Merle Haggard, wrote songs about real music and real situations, all punctuated with the infectious, twangy hooks of a Fender Telecaster guitar. It wasn’t the saccharinely polished ditties that Nashville record producers became so enamored with in the 1960s.
But Haggard didn’t care. After all, he lived those real situations—and he wasn’t afraid to talk about, write about, or sing about those hard times. In his rough and tumble youth, Haggard rode the rails and hitchhiked across the country. He even spent some time in San Quentin for robbery. But a tattoo Haggard etched on his left hand revealed what the songwriter considered the integral chapter in his life’s story. The tattoo simply said P.S.I.
In Haggard’s reckless youth, he committed enough minor offenses, such as shoplifting and theft, that he was placed in a number of juvenile detention centers, until he finally ended up in the Preston School of Industry—P.S.I. The school is housed in a formidable, castle-like building in Ione, California. Until 2011, it housed juvenile offenders and young wards of the state. While the center is no longer in operation, some of the wards of this impressive facility have not been released, nor have they been transferred.
The ghosts of Preston Castle, as the school is sometimes called, are still haunting the detention center, according to dozens of witnesses and ghost-hunting groups.
While he never mentioned it, Haggard may have heard a story about the leading suspect for the P.S.I. haunting—Anna Corbin. Anna was the head housekeeper at the institute. She was murdered and her body was discovered—some accounts report she was found in a storeroom—on February 24, 1950. According to police, she was bludgeoned to death, but the murder remains unsolved to this day.
Haggard arrived at the school a bit after the grisly murder.
Since the murder, Anna takes the rap for much of the paranormal activity that’s reported in the reform school. And that rap sheet is quite lengthy. People say they’ve heard doors slam in the building; others claim that they haven’t just heard doors slam, they have watched in awe as doors move on their own, then slam shut in one loud, echoing bang! To compound the mystery, the slamming door seems controlled, like someone is pushing it. It doesn’t seem like the result of a draft or faulty door stop.
It’s not just doors that move on their own. Witnesses have watched objects move along flat surfaces as if some force is pushing them, others have seen objects fly off shelves. Sometimes, people set an item down on a table or a shelf, look away, and when they look back it has disappeared totally.
It gets creepier. Staff members report hearing disembodied voices in the halls; others have heard a woman scream and, oddly, the sound of eggs frying in a skillet. (Hey, even ghosts deserve a good breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.)
While, officially, no one has seen the ghost of Anna—or whoever the spirit is—people have claimed they were touched by a ghost, or say they felt a strange presence. There are even cases of a spirit possessing members of a paranormal research team investigating the haunting.
Ghost hunters have also offered photographic evidence—mainly pictures of orbs—as an attempt to prove that there are paranormal forces at work in the site of the former reform school. Recording devices have picked up some of the voices and the strange sounds mentioned above that researchers consider evidence of the haunting.
While Anna gets most of the attention—or blame—from spirit-
seeking paranormal buffs, she’s only one of the possible suspects for the school’s alleged supernatural problems. The building has been the scene of lots of tragedies, including several deaths. According to some historians, dozens of students died due to sickness and disease. A guard reportedly shot an inmate during an escape attempt. Finally, some former inmates and former students have said beatings and other forms of abuse happened in the castle. The powerful emotions that are released due to the stress and strain could account for some of the paranormal activity that’s been encountered at the site, according to paranormal theorists.
Did Haggard ever have an encounter with the supernatural at the reform school? If he did, he didn’t seem to talk about it much. There’s no mention in the records I’ve come across.
But it’s interesting to consider that an influence on the famous Bakersfield sound was a lonely inmate serving not just a life sentence, but an afterlife one as well.