Moment in Oddity - Nadine Earles Burial (Suggested by: Mindy Hull)
Back in 1933 there was a little girl named Nadine Earles, all she wanted for Christmas was a playhouse and her father worked on making that Christmas wish come true. Sadly, little Nadine had come down with diphtheria and in December 1933, Nadine passed away on the 18th. Her father was so grief stricken that he tore down the playhouse that she would have enjoyed in life and began rebuilding it over her gravesite in Oakwood Cemetery in Alabama. It's a large brick playhouse that looks like a bungalow, boasting a front porch, striped awnings, a mailbox along with flower boxes. On April 3rd, 1934, upon the completion of the graveside playhouse, 25 children gathered and celebrated what would have been Nadine's 5th birthday. They came in their best party clothes, played party games and enjoyed birthday cake and ice cream. The photograph of the celebration was framed and mounted within the playhouse mausoleum. Nadine's father passed in 1976 and her mother in 1981. Although Nadine's passing at such a young age is sad, the thought of creating a playhouse upon a child's grave, certainly is odd.
This Month in History - Final Episode of M*A*S*H*
In the month of February, on the 28th in 1983, the final episode of M*A*S*H* was aired on CBS. This last episode was written by eight collaborators including Alan Alda who played a main character on the show appearing in all 256 episodes as 'Hawkeye'. Alda directed 32 of the MASH episodes as well as the final episode titled, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen". The actors playing characters Radar, Hot-Lips Hollihan, Klinger and Father Mulcahy performed in all eleven seasons. Over the series history many well known actors joined the cast. Laurence Fishburne, Pat Morita, Blythe Danner, Ron Howard and Patrick Swayze were just a few to join the show throughout the years. To this date the shows' finale has been the most watched singular episode of any American broadcast series.
Haunted Wine Country
A region of California north of the San Francisco Bay Area is known as "Wine Country." Two of the counties within this area are Napa Valley and Sonoma Valley. This section of California is known for world-class wine and food and has a beautiful countryside that wine enthusiasts get to enjoy as they drive from tasting to tasting. There are hundreds of wineries between these two counties. One would not put wine and ghosts together necessarily, but several of these wineries reputedly have some paranormal activity. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of Wine Country.
There is a debate as to where wine got its start. Various countries are credited with the invention. Georgia seems to be the one most likely to be the originator of formal production of wine and this started about 8000 years ago. The people of Georgia dug pits and put bundles of grapes in the pits to ferment through the winter and in spring, when the pits were opened up, the grapes had fermented. They eventually moved to using clay vessels to ferment the grapes. Other countries like China, Iran, Greece and Armenia started making their own wine. There are archaelogists who believe that our most ancient ancestors were enjoying some form of neolithic wine long before the Georgians started making wine. The website goodpairdays.com says, "While the hows and whys of neolithic wine is still a bit of a mystery, and has been discovered after finding chemicals present in wine on neolithic tools, it is supposed that cavemen would have watched animals eating rotten, fermenting fruit and fancied a bit of it for themselves. One thing led to another, and before long, fruit was being fermented purposefully for the sole purpose of, well, getting a bit drunk. The wine industry had begun!" The first winery started in Armenia around 4100 BC. They had wine presses, vats, the whole nine yards. This winery was discovered in 2007 and was named Areni-1 winery. Armenia was mostly making red wines. The Egyptians were making white wines. Tutankhamun's tomb had clay vessels filled with white wine. From Egypt, wine spread to the Phoenicians and then to Greece and Italy. And as most of us know, Italy is really known as the land of wines.
California's Wine Country was first inhabited by several indigenous tribes, the Pomo, Coast Miwok, Wappo and Patwin. Mexico was the first to colonize the area with European settlers arriving in the early 1800s. The town of Sonoma is known as the birthplace of American California. George Calvert Yount (Yownt) was born in North Carolina in 1794. His parents moved to Missouri and that is where he grew up. He became a soldier during the War of 1812 and then went into farming. Things didn't go well for him on that front, so he left for Santa Fe in 1826 to try his hand at fur trapping. He continued to migrate west and arrived in California in 1831. He settled in Sonoma and worked as a carpenter until he obtained a land grant in1836 in what would become Napa Valley. He was the first settler there. He built a grist mill and saw mill and continued to buy land, acquiring over 16,000 acres. He started growing grapes on his property as the environment was perfectly suited for that kind of agriculture. One of his granddaughters married Thomas Rutherford in 1864 and Yount gave them 1,000 acres that Rutherford dedicated to winemaking.
Commercial production of wine had already started in 1858 with John Patchett and in 1861, Charles Krug (Kroog) set up the first commercial winery in Napa Valley. The Inglenook Winery was established in 1879 and made the first Bordeaux style wine. Agoston Haraszthy (Hor os thee) was a forefather of wine production in the Sonoma County area. The man most responsible for making the area strong wine country was H.W. Crabb who planted over 400 varieties of grapes on 130 acres and produced 50,000 gallons of wine a year. By the end of the 19th century, there were 140 wineries and several of those early wineries still exist today, which wasn't easy with a root louse wiping out much of the grapes and Prohibition. By the 1940s, vintners got together and decided to join forces to establish Napa Valley as a wine stronghold. In 1976, the Paris Tasting put Napa Valley on the map for the rest of history as several of their wines won the blind taste testings. Many historic wineries stood the test of time and more importantly, many of them are said to be haunted!
Ghost Block
We're going to start our visits to these haunted wineries with one that was inspired by a ghost story. Ghost Block Estate Wines is located in Napa Valley and was started by Andy Hoxsey in the 1980s. He was sitting in a Yountville Bar drinking a beer when a veteran struck up a conversation with him. When he heard that Andy worked in his grandfather's vineyard, he asked Andy if this was the vineyard next to the Yountville Cemetery. Andy said it was and the veteran proceeded to tell him that he had seen the ghost of George Yount leave the Pioneer Cemetery, walk through the vineyard and hike up the Yountville hillside. The veteran said he had heard others make the same claim and that Yount was climbing the hill to look out over the town he founded. Andy was inspired by the story and trademarked "Ghost Block." The winery and vineyard themselves go back five generations, making this the oldest family-owned winery in Napa. The Ghost Block wines are referred to as cult wines. And what are those? We're going to let Wine Folly define that for us, "Cult wines are the pigeon-blood ruby of the wine world. They are engorged in a sort of mystery and delight that can only be satiated by tasting them. Of course, actually getting to taste a cult wine presents a bit of a quandary because the supply is so low that even some deep-pocketed buyers go destitute. This, in turn, skyrockets the price which increases the wine’s fame and then the price goes up more… you get the idea."
Bartholomew Park Winery
The Bartholomew Estate vineyards were planted as the first private vineyard in Sonoma in 1832 by a man named Viviano. In 1844, a 176-acre land grant was given to Viviano and a man named Domingo Rodrigues and they named it Rancho Lac. This would form the heart of Batholomew Park. A man named Jacob Leese owned adjacent property and he bought Rancho Lac in 1846. That property would change hands several times, but always remain a grape vineyard, winning gold at the California State Fair in 1854. Agoston Haraszthy (Hor os thee), whom we mentioned earlier, bought Rancho Lac in 1857 and he expanded by introducing dry-farmed vineyards, wine caves, building a stone winery, erecting his villa and buying up 6,000 total acres that he named Rancho Buena Vista. He imported a lot of European vines as well. He ran up a bunch of debt though and eventually contributed much of Rancho Buena Vista to the Buena Vista Viticultural Society and this became the first corporate winery in California and the largest winery in the world at the time. Then in came phylloxera (fuh laak sir uh), which devastated the area and the winery went bankrupt.
In comes Robert and Kate Johnson, who were wealthy San Franciscans, and they bought Rancho Buena Vista at auction and turned it into a country estate upon which they built their 40-room Victorian Castle in 1883. Apparently Kate loved Angora cats and one whole floor was dedicated to them. The Johnsons could care less about wine and turned the vineyard into formal lawn and gardens. Robert died and Kate followed and the estate became a working ranch and resort owned by Henry Caullieau who sold it in 1919 to California for the State Industrial Farm for Delinquent Women. This was a place to rehab women who were addicts, alcoholics and working in the sex industry. They were called "wild women" and the country air and hard work was thought to be curative. The Castle was destroyed by fire in 1923 and that was the end of the farm for wild women.
The state built another building on the property that was used as a hospital for the treatment of epilepsy until the 1930s. The hospital and property was sold at auction to Frank “Bart” Bartholomew and his wife Antonia in 1943. This was a birthday present for Antonia. When the couple found out about the wine history of the property, they decided to return to those roots and started planting vineyards. The restoration would run from 1944 to 1968 and the Buena Vista brand and reputation grew bigger than the couple had imagined it would. They sold the brand and 12 acres to another company. With what they retained, they opened their own winery in 1973 called Hacienda Wine Cellars. The couple sold a majority of their interest later that decade and the Bronco Wine Company acquired the brand in 1992. The Bartholomews had established a foundation before their deaths and this continues to run and protect the property. Antonia built a replica of Count Haraszthy's white villa in 1985 after Bart died. This was opened as a museum and event center in 1991 when Antonia died. The Vineburg Corporation leased Bartholomew Park and released wine under the Bartholomew Park Winery label from 1992 to 2018 and then in 2019 winemaker Kevin Holt partnered with the Bartholomew Foundation to open Bartholomew Estate Vineyards and Winery.
So the basement of the wineries main building was once a morgue. There are thought to be three resident ghosts here, one of which may belong to a woman whose remains were found in the basement walls during a 1970s earthquake retrofit. This woman was named Madeline. She tried to escape many times and the story went that she finally did one day and was never seen again. People think she didn't escape, but was murdered. Employees have claimed to hear disembodied singing coming from the cellar and that is probably because the incarcerated women liked to run choir practice in the morgue. The singing is primarily of hymns. Employees claim that doors lock on their own and once a fire extinguisher pulled off the wall and went flying across a room.
Five psychics held a seance in the winery in 2006 and were so overwhelmed by spiritual activity that they had to stop and leave. Paranormal investigator Jeff Dwyer investigated at the winery a handful of times in 2008. He told ABC7 News, "I found quite a lot going on in there. During part of the investigation down in the morgue, there was a time when the room suddenly turned ice cold. It was just freezing to the point where I couldn't sit there any longer and had to go upstairs to warm up." He also captured EVPs featuring the sound of Indian flutes and drums and heard the sound of a piano in the morgue. This didn't make sense until he heard that the incarcerated women would hold choir practice in the morgue.
Buena Vista Winery
We covered much of this winery already. This was established by Count Agoston Haraszthy (Hor os thee) in 1857. Something we hadn't mentioned is that while Haraszthy was credited with being the "Father of California Viticulture," he also helped bring about its ruin. He employed layering as a planting technique and this exposed the plants to soil diseases. That is why the first infestation of phylloxera was able to take hold. He relocated to Nicaragua where he started a sugar plantation with the goal of making rum. In 1869, he was out on a river and he disappeared and the story goes that he was killed by an alligator. His spirit is said to have returned to his former winery. Other possible reasons for this winery to be haunted revolve around a legend that 20 Chinese migrant workers were buried when a deep mine cave was caved-in after a minor earthquake in 1862. Wine host Brandon Andrews said that people have seen apparitions roaming the upper level and they carry flickering lanterns. The wine cellars sometimes have loud, unexplained noises in them.
Chateau St. Jean
Kenwood is a town on the northern end of Sonoma Valley. The Chateau St. Jean was built by Ernest and Maude Goff in 1920. They had moved to California from Saginaw, Michigan with their four sons and one daughter. The house was beautiful, and still is, with solid oak banisters, a large oak fireplace and oak-paneled hallways. The family grew white wine grapes, walnuts and prunes. Two brothers, Bob and Ed Merzoian and their brother-in-law Ken Sheffield set out to start a new winery in 1973 and they bought 250 acres of the Goff estate, including the house and opened Chateau St. Jean, named after Jean Sheffield Merzoian who was the sister, sister-in-law and wife of the three men. The winery was completed in 1980 and in 2000 a new visitor center was open. In 2022, the winery was rebuilt, the gardens upgraded and new presses were installed. They celebrated 50 years in production last year. The Goff's daughter's name was Camilla. She died when she was a teenager and employees of the winery claim that her spirit haunts the place. She is said to be protective and benevolent.
Franco-Swiss Winery
The Franco-Swiss Winery was built in 1876 by the Millet family and by the 1880s, was producing 100,000 gallons of wine every year. When Prohibition started, the winery went out of business and was abandoned to the weeds and elements. Thus it became the epitome of a ghost winery. This is what they call the wineries that were abandoned after Prohibition and went to ruin. Richard and Leslie Mansfield bought the property and worked for over a decade to restore it. They never did manage to finish that feat. They did run the Mansfield Winery for a number of years, but we saw that it is now permanently closed. Jules Millet was a member of the Millet family and in 1882 he was murdered by Johan Murbach right outside the winery's walls. The Mansfields had just purchased the winery and they invited some friends to join them on a night tour of the place after having dinner. They were wandering around with flashlights when one of the guests yelled, "If you're here, Jules Millet, knock three times!" Everybody laughed after nothing happened. But the next night, things got interesting. The Mansfields lived across the street from the winery and that evening there were six loud explosions — pop, pop, pop, boom, boom, boom" in the Mansfield home. Richard wasn't home and so Leslie hid in the closet, she was so scared. The next day, Leslie discovered what caused the noises. She told Time Magazine back in 2010, "Every flashlight that [the men had] taken across the street — and only those flashlights — had exploded into a million pieces. The ones that had not been taken across the street were just fine."One of the flashlights could go down to 300 feet as a dive lamp and another flashlight had a C battery bent in half. Apparently, Jules responded to the request.
Stags' Leap Winery
The gothic castle-like styled Manor House at Stags' Leap Winery was built in 1888 in Napa Valley. The interior featured a spacious ground-floor great hall. A beautifully carved mahogany Chippendale staircase lead up to bedrooms on the second floor. The land where the winery stands was owned for decades under various owners with Mexican land grants, The Grigsby family bought 700-acres and planted grapes on the land in 1872. In 1885, they sold to W.W. Thompson and H.H. Harris who passed his interest to Thompson’s nephew, Horace Blanchard Chase. At that time the 700 acres was split into two and Chase took the northwestern portion. Horace and his wife Minnie built the manor and also made a wine cave. They lost the property after bad investments in Mexican silver mines and the property went to Clarence and Frances Grande in 1913 and they transformed the property into a working ranch and resort and used the manor as their personal residence. Wine was still produced until Prohibition. The vineyards remained and were sold to other wineries and then production began again in 1971 under the guidance of Carl Doumani. For a little more than a decade, the house sat abandoned and may have been used by squatters. He restored the property and sold to Beringer Wine Estates in 1997. Treasury Wine Estates is the current owner of the winery.
Winemaker Robert Brittan had been at Stags' Leap since 1988. He told the San Francisco Gate in 2004 about an experience he had, "It was in the late autumn or early winter of 1986, the very first time I spent the night in the manor. Some noise woke me up around 2 or 3 in the morning and I got out of bed to investigate. As I walked into the hallway and toward the bedroom at the front of the house, where I thought the noise came from, I saw a young woman facing me. She was there in the hallway, near the landing at the top of the stairs. I had the impression I could look through parts of her -- she wasn't all dressed in white, there seemed to be colors, too. I spoke to her, because I was startled to see someone there at that hour -- I said something like, 'Oh, excuse me.' Pretty soon it dawned on me that this wasn't a person. Then she spoke to me. I can't tell you what she said. She asked me -- no, rather, told me -- to do something I couldn't do that night. I turned around and went back to my bedroom and crawled into bed. I thought to myself, this can't be happening to me. I was scared. There's no logical explanation for a ghost to ask me to do something." He wouldn't tell the reporter what the ghost told him to do.
Dry Creek Vineyard
David S. Stare was a brainiac who had earned an MBA in Civil Engineering. He moved to Germany shortly after completing his degree because he had always wanted to live overseas. While in Germany, he was bitten by the wine bug and when he returned stateside, he attended some wine classes. Then it was off to France to study their wines. Then he grabbed his family and moved them to California in a mint green station wagon and set out to start a winery. Dry Creek Vineyards was the culmination of that dream. Dry Creek Valley is located in Sonoma County and Dave's vineyards that he planted were the first in the area since Prohibition. These vineyards were mainly Sauvignon Blanc, which he had been told would never work here, but the experts were wrong. Dave's daughter, Kim Wallace, grew up learning the wine business but chose fashion for awhile. She eventually joined the winery with her husband and they run operations today. This is one of the last truly family-owned wineries in the region and they pride themselves on their slower process and small operation. There is a building on the property called Bullock House and it was used to house overnight guests like trade visitors until the unexplained activity going on there became unbearable. Legend claims that a Native American haunts the property and was probably from the Pomo tribe that had a reservation here at one time. Bill Smart, who had been Dry Creeks Vineyard's director of marketing and communications said, “Several of those guests reported hearing creaking, footsteps and door-slamming at night. I haven’t experienced it, but enough people have that I believe there is paranormal activity there.”
Trefethen Family Vineyards & Winery
The Trefethen Family Vineyards & Winery was originally built by the Goodman Brothers in 1886 and they called it Eshcol. This is in the heart of the Oak Knoll District of Napa Valley and sits on 400 acres featuring twenty different soil types. The main building was a wooden three-story gravity flow winery that was right across the street from the Oak Knoll train station. The winery was designed and built by Captain Harnden McIntyre who designed many of the wineries in Napa and he used redwood for siding and Douglas fir for the posts. Gravity flow wineries work with grapes being crushed on the third floor, then the liquid is fermented on the second floor and aged on the first floor. A writer said of the second floor that it was so solid it "could have supported the weight of a small locomotive." The Eschol wines won over half of the awards at the 1889 Paris Exhibition. The old Eshcol facility slipped into serious disrepair and then along came Janet and John Trefethen. Janet thought the facility would make a good stable for her horse, but John felt they could restore the winery and they did. In 1973, they reopened to commercial harvests. The 2014 South Napa Quake did significant damage to the building and Hailey Trefethen took charge of the restoration and they saved the building, including its historic character.
Many wineries went out of business during Prohibition or they switched to making sacramental wine, but the Goodman Brothers set up bootleg operations. One night, a young man snuck into the winery to steal some hooch and he was caught and the bootleggers hanged him from the ceiling beams of the winery. Staff have claimed to see a shadow figure hanging and swinging from the ceiling. Some have felt an eerie sensation when inside the building and others claim to see a replay of the hanging event in a residual haunting.
Beringer Winery
We are ending at the Beringer Winery in Napa Valley because it is said to be the most haunted winery in Wine Country. This is a gorgeous winery with many "firsts" under its belt. This was one of the first wineries here, being founded in 1876 by the Beringer Brothers, Jacob and Frederick. They emigrated from Germany to found a winery and distillery in Napa. They reused their spirit barrels to age wine. That tradition is carried on today. Frederick built the Rhine House for his family in 1884 with the help of architect Albert Schroepfer. This was in the Queen Anne Victorian style and the exterior featured beautiful stonework with gables and turrets and the interior featured seventeen rooms, stained-glass windows and interior wood paneling. The name comes from the fact that Frederick was copying his former home in Germany that was at Mainz-on-the-Rhine. The Rhine House is the centerpiece of the Beringer property. There is also a house on the property called the Hudson House that was built in 1875 and was already on the property when the Beringers bought it.
Jacob was the winemaker and Frederick was the promoter and business guy. Beringer Winery was the first to use cellars and caves for storing and aging wine. The caves were dug into the hillside of Spring Mountain by Chinese immigrant workers and after a decade of work, they had hand-chiseled 1,200 linear feet of tunnel. The temperatures in the cave stay between 58-60 degrees. The winery was built against the hillside and they used the gravity flow method for making their wine. Draft horses would bring in the wagons full of grapes and these would be transported to the third floor for crushing. The Beringers used a state-of-the-art steam-powered crusher. Jacob remained as the winemaker until 1911 and then his son took over. In its history, Beringer has only had nine winemakers. But it hasn't remained in the Beringer family. It was sold to Nestle in 1971, which was later sold to Texas Pacific Group. The Foster's Group owned it next and today it is owned by Treasury Wine Estates.
The staff keep a log book of haunting activity on the property. Frederick is one of the main spirits. He haunts the Rhine House. Furniture is shoved around, disembodied footsteps are heard and his full-bodied apparition has been seen. After closing time one evening, two employees were cleaning up when they heard a large crash. It had come from upstairs and they figured out that it had been Frederick's former bedroom from which the noise eminated. He died in the room in 1901. The employees found a heavy silver tray on the floor. It was across the room from where it usually sat. On top of that, there was a bunch of broken stemware. At other times, objects go missing. Fred clearly doesn't like his private area being a public place. His room is now a tasting room. The cleaning crew has experienced some truly frightening experiences at night. Several times they have watched Fredericks ghost walk right through the walls. One worker ran out of the house and never returned.
Well, who wouldn't like a little wine with their ghosts? You know we dig it. Are these wineries in Wine Country haunted? That is for you to decide!
