We are All Survivors Now

In 2010, twelve writers and artists joined hostess, Rain Graves and a team of ghost hunters for a weekend at a haunted historical mansion in Northern California. The weekend was so inspiring—and so scary—that most of us jumped at the chance to do it again in September 2012. Some new blood was added to the mix. All of us looked forward to four days together in our haunted house.

I rode with Rain and Sèphera Giron up to the Mansion on Thursday afternoon. Our drive from San Francisco was easy, once Rain managed to fight clear of the Giants’ playoff traffic. Even though the map she had was less than straightforward, we found our way through Marin. After a while, every twist of the road brought a familiar view. It felt, in an odd way, like coming home. Several of the Haunted Mansion survivors talk about that feeling in the pieces that follow.

Once we arrived at the Mansion, Rain put Sèphera and me to work getting the mansion ready for the group. We went up to the second floor to place name tags on beds so that everyone could find their assigned rooms when they arrived. The second floor was comfortably warm. Sunlight flooded in through the windows, highlighting the crisply made beds and cozy rooms. Mount Tam loomed up on the west, lush and green, enrobed in autumn.

During the first Haunted Mansion Retreat, there were too few of us to use the entire second floor. This time, Sèphera and I started with the familiar rooms at the top of the stairs: here was where Scott had been menaced by a female spirit, here was Wes and Yvonne’s sunny corner suite, here was my friendly little blue room. Then we worked around into the unfamiliar rooms that had been closed off on our last visit.

We had just come out of the room that would be Chris Colvin’s. Seph was telling me about the Black Mass that had harassed her and Rain in the corner room in 2010. We stood in the little hallway, sorting out our list and the name cards, when something large moved through the room at our backs.

I looked up, startled, and met Sèphera’s eyes. “Did you hear that?” I gasped. We’d just come out of that little room. We knew it was empty.

“Something is up here with us,” Seph said. And smiled.

~

After we’d finished with the name cards, I should have gone back upstairs to photograph the rooms in their pristine states. Instead, I realized that I didn’t want to be alone up there while Rain, Seph, and the mansion’s staff bustled around safely on the main floor.

So I settled into the sofa on the south side of the parlor, with the heart-shaped lawn at my back and the big empty house in front of me. I signed in to the group blog that we would take turns updating through the weekend. I was still on the sofa, poking around on the internet, when Wes and Von arrived in a large white truck.

The door to my right stood open to the porch. Wes came into the parlor to say hello. As we talked, the door slowly swung closed.

Not a breath of breeze had passed us. Wes looked at me, smiled, and went out to the porch to examine the door. He swung it to and fro. When he left it standing open, it stayed.

Apparently someone had just wanted to say hello.

~

Thursday night passed quietly. I couldn’t sleep, but for all my prowling the hallways in the middle of the night, I didn’t see anything and felt nothing other than a deep, bone-rattling chill. My internal thermostat is broken at the best of times, so it could have just been me. I put on all the clothes I’d brought and huddled under the blankets until dawn.

On Friday morning, I sat in the parlor on the west, with my back to Mount Tam, waiting for the pre-breakfast hiking group to form. Something ran through the foyer, low to the ground. I thought it was a dog, but why would a dog be in the house alone at 8:00 a.m.?

I crossed the parlor and looked out into the entryway. The double doors to the porch were closed. The dining room doors were closed. The back of the house was silent.

If a dog had been there, where had it gone?

~

Friday night, most of us were writing in the first-floor parlor while some of the others joined the GhostGirls investigating upstairs.

Something heavy scraped across the floor above us, on the second floor, in the area where Yvonne, Wes, and I would be sleeping. It sounded like a heavy piece of furniture—for some reason, I thought of a trunk—being dragged across the floor. None of us would do such a thing, conscious as we were of being in someone else’s home. We exchanged glances, but couldn’t explain what we’d heard.

Scott came stomping down from the third floor. “What was that?” he demanded.

“We thought it was you,” Chris Colvin said.

“We were all on the third floor,” he said. “Who’s on the second floor?”

“No one. We’re all right here.”

Scott raced upstairs to explore.

Things seemed to settle down. An hour passed quietly. Then Sèphera shouted from the third floor, “Rain, we need a priestess. We have poltergeist activity up here.”

Half the writers thundered up the stairs to see what was happening. The rest of us cowered in the parlor, listening as Dan was brought downstairs and something truly terrifying was chased outside. You’ll read more about that in the nonfiction that follows.

~

After midnight, when I finally got brave enough to go upstairs to change for bed, I tried shoving the furniture around my room to see if I could replicate the noise we’d heard earlier.

The bed was on casters. It glided silently across the bare, unmarked floorboards. Nothing in my room could have made the heavy scraping we all heard.

I chose to sleep on a sofa downstairs in the parlor with Stacey and Dan.

~

After Rain called on her lion goddess ghost-ass-kicking power, the house seemed quiet on Saturday. Chastened, almost. I didn’t think anything more supernatural would happen to me, so I napped in my room before sunset. Even though Eunice told me that she really didn’t like the short dark hallway that connected my room to the front of the house, I felt calm enough to go up to bed when everyone else did after midnight. The night passed peacefully. I felt pretty calm about the whole experience, until Yvonne teased me about sleeping with my light on.

I’d woken up in a puddle of moonlight, so I knew I’d shut the light off before I went to sleep. My room had been locked from the inside. No one had been in there touching the lights, but me.

Or so I thought.

Perhaps I’ll sleep in another room next time.

~

Some of my favorite memories of the most recent retreat had nothing to do with K-II meters or thermo-sensitive paper or doors closing by themselves. Instead, I think of Saturday night, sitting on the mansion’s front porch in the dark, watching the local family of deer browse on the lawn. I was deep in discussion of philosophies of editing with E.S. Magill, editor of The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, in whose footsteps I am honored to follow. Another time, I sat on the second floor balcony with Angel Leigh McCoy, the mastermind behind Wily Writers, and quizzed her about recording podcasts. One afternoon, I eavesdropped on S.G. Browne and Weston Ochse as they dished New York publishers. I sat on the third floor with Yvonne Navarro as she painted. I wrote at the Sacrificial Altar between the redwood trees, in the Meditation Garden beside the statue that seems a portal to the afterlife, and down by the Haunted Pool. For me, it was a spectacularly productive four days.

The Haunted Mansion weekends always pass in a blur, even though I never get much sleep. There’s magic to spending time with other writers, comparing battle scars, sharing triumphs, but most of all, telling each other stories.

Not all of us came to the Mansion with ghost stories in our pasts—and not everyone experienced the paranormal at either of these retreats. All of us, though, were inspired and recharged by our time together. I speak for us all when I say thank you to Rain Graves for doing the heavy lifting to arrange these retreats for us. We can’t thank you enough.

Thanks are also due to Chris Colvin and E.S. Magill, for their help proofreading this book, as well as to Kim Richards and Damnation Books for publishing it.

We aren’t allowed to identify the Mansion, which remains available for retreats and weddings. If you’d like to investigate it for yourself, we invite you to follow the Haunted Mansion Writers Retreat blog (http://hauntedmansionwriters.blogspot.com/). That’s where Rain will announce the 2014 retreat. Event attendance is capped at an intimate 30: all the better to scare you.

So…every other year, a small group of writers and artists meet at a haunted mansion in Northern California. What we find there excites us, terrifies us, and inspires us even after we leave. The book that follows is our documentation of the four intense days we spent together in the house in September 2012.

The contents range from the official site report prepared by the GhostGirls to some of the survivors’ subjective accounts of their experiences to stories and poetry inspired by the house’s atmosphere, the events that occurred there, and the company we kept.

It’s been a thrill to read these stories before anyone else. May you find here—as I did—something that invades your dreams, keeps you up at night, and makes you look twice at shadows.

The Haunted Mansion is part of all of us now. It’s only a matter of time before it calls us home.

—Loren Rhoads

San Francisco, California

May 2013