HGB Ep. 615 - Haunted Placerville, California

This Month in History - Chunnel Breakthrough

In the month of December, on the 1st in 1990, the chunnel breakthrough occurred. Soon after 11am on that date, 132 feet below the English Channel, a hole was drilled through sedimentary rock, large enough to drive a vehicle through. This hole was a link between two ends of an underwater railway tunnel. For the first time the Chunnel linked Great Britain with the European mainland. It took nearly four years and 13,000 workers to dig 95 miles, approximately 150 feet below the seafloor. Once the project was to be completed, the Chunnel would consist of 2 rail tracks going in opposite directions, as well as a service tunnel. The Chunnel connected Folkestone, England to Calais, France.  After the connection was made in December of 1990, the completion of the tunnel took an additional four years, first opening for passenger travel on May 6th, 1994. Of the 31 miles that the shuttle train runs, 23 of them are underwater, taking approximately 20 minutes from point to point.  As of 2025, the Chunnel remains the longest undersea railway in the world.  

Haunted Placerville, (Pla like plaster) California

Placerville is one of these California towns that got its start during the Gold Rush. This was a rough and tumble Wild West place also known as Hang Town. The Cary House Hotel was built to accommodate people coming in for the Gold Rush and was the jewel of Placerville. The hotel is believed to be quite haunted and there could be several reasons why. The Odd Fellows were strong in this town and met at the hotel. And there were two deaths there. But it isn't the only haunted location. Several buildings have spirits. Join us for the history and hauntings of Placerville, California.

Gold was found in Sutter's Mill, California in 1848. Placerville would grow up near it after gold was found there as well. The name was Dry Diggin's at first because miners moved cartloads of soil through water to separate out the gold. Like all gold mining towns, this one was rough and tumble. Murders and robberies were common in the camps and strikes were stolen. A year later, it was more commonly known as Hangtown because three men, two Mexicans and a white man, were hanged for robbery without a trial. Placerville would become the new official name in 1854 and was inspired by placer gold deposits. Placerville quickly filled with stores, banks and lodging and was considered a central hub for the Mother Lode region. An early branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad helped with the growth. A wooden hotel was built in the 1840s where the Cary House Hotel would stand and it was called the El Dorado. The hotel also sold supplies and was a Gold Exchange. This burned down in 1849. The town of Placerville would actually burn three times by 1856. They put up a fire bell on a tower in 1878 to help with warning people and this bell still stands today. The builder of the Cary House Hotel was an East Coast businessman named William Cary. This was his first venture into business on the West Coast. Because of the fires, Cary made sure to construct his hotel out of red brick and it was completed in 1857. This was three-stories and done in the Italianate and Second Empire architectural styles and the interior featured 77 rooms, bathrooms on every floor with hot and cold running water and stained-glass artwork in the lobby. But there was no heat. A few wood stoves were all that the hotel had.  In 1911, the Raffeto family purchased the hotel and owned it for 68 years. They decided to add a basement to the hotel and as they were digging, they found a cache of gold dust and gold nuggets. This gave them the opportunity to add a fourth floor and they added steam heat. The hotel was renamed The Raffles Hotel during this time. In 1926, an elevator was added and this is the second oldest running elevator west of the Mississippi. The family sold the hotel in 1979 and the name went back to the Cary House Hotel.

When the rich and famous came to California to visit, they stayed at the Cary Hotel. These people included President Ulyssess S. Grant - who was an Odd Fellow and that may have attracted him to Placerville - John Studebaker, Mark Twain - who used to write for the Mountain Democrat in Placerville - Bette Davis, Elvis Presley, Levi Strauss, Horace Greeley, Brooke Shields and Lou Diamond Phillips. Phillips' film Route 666 from 2001 was filmed at the hotel. Placerville has had quite a few movies filmed there - particularly horror. The Invited was filmed there in 2010. The Cary House Hotel still features its original 1850s woodwork and bricks. The interior was renovated with expansion of rooms and adding of bathrooms, so now there are only 40 rooms available and many of them are suites with kitchenettes. The lobby also has display cases with artifacts from the hotel. This is wine country, so the theming is very much centered on that. But the third floor rooms are named for famous guests like the Studebaker Room and Mark Twain Room. The current owner is Vijay Patel and the hotel is part of the Lexington Collection.

The Cary House Hotel is said to be haunted and it gets so bad with the activity that employees have quit because of it. One year, the hotel had 11 employees quit because they couldn't take the activity anymore. The hotel rooms all have journals for guests to record their experiences. One housekeeper claimed that shortly after she started working there, she was poked really hard from behind when in a room on the second floor and when she turned around, no one was there. Many people have complained about being poked or grabbed by something unseen. The General Manager Josh claimed that he wasn't really a believer in the paranormal, but he had heard enough stories from guests and employees that he became a believer. He said, "These guests came down and told us that they were pulled out of their bed and that's actually been a common occurrence here. People freak out and decide not to stay here. When people get pulled out of bed, it is always the same room on the second floor. That's where most of the haunted activity actually takes place." 

There are several spirits here, but two of them are the most prominent: Stan the bellhop and Irish Dick. Now it seems that Stan was a flirty guy, which could get him in trouble and it actually lead to his death. One day, he flirted with the fiance of a guest and that guest had a knife. He stabbed Stan to death on the stairs and Stan toppled all the way to the bottom, where a pool of blood formed beneath him. 

Irish Dick's real name was Richard Crone and he was a gambler. He liked to gamble at the hotel that stood before the Cary House Hotel and one night, he had a dispute over a monte game. It was about 2am and he stabbed to death the man with whom he had the disagreement. He ran off to a bar where he was captured at 8am. The Mountain Democrat reported, "The news of the murder spread like wildfire in the neighboring canyons, ravines and flats, and by 1 p.m. there were in Hangtown, fully 2,000 angry men, everyone armed with something that would hurt, from a pick-handle to a rifle. The farce of a preliminary examination was allowed to be gone through with before Justice of the Peace Humphreys in the middle of the street. The evidence was brief, and the Judge ordered Dick committed to the custody of the Sheriff (Uncle Billy Rogers) [William Rogers], and Alexander Hunter and John Clark, Constables, to be placed in the county jail at Coloma, the then county seat of El Dorado county. The Judge had scarcely made the order when a lariat was thrown over Dick's head, and he was literally dragged along Main street and up Coloma street to an oak tree. The loose end of the lariat was thrown over a limb of a tree and Dick was pulled up and strangled to death. One of the principal leaders of the move was a large, powerful man, who bore the sobriquet of “Dutch Ben.” 

Stan likes the ladies still in the afterlife and occasionally touches them. One woman claimed that she entered her room and locked the door. Then she decided to go out on the balcony and after she stepped out, she heard the door close and lock from the inside. When she turned, she saw the apparition of a bell hop who waved at her. She was locked out, so had to call down to people on the street for help. There was no employee in the hotel who matched the description of the bell hop. Stan likes to crank the stereo too down at the bar. The stereo will shutoff when the bartender yells for Stan to knock it off. Even though Irish Dick had never been in this actual hotel, he seems to be haunting the ballroom. And a female ghost that smells like lavender has been experienced.

Katrina and Jack visited the hotel and stayed overnight during Season 2 of Portals to Hell. They decided to set up some trigger objects in the ballroom. They put cards on the table and an empty bottle of alcohol. They had a GeoPort and when they asked if Irish Dick wanted a drink, they got a "no." They took the bottle cap half off the whiskey and were hoping that it would get tossed because they had been told by the manager that this had happened once to him. Then they felt something under their feet like a bang coming from under the floor. This would be in the basement, so they went down there. Jack went down and asked if he could join the Odd fellows. Then he felt an extreme cold chill around him. he actually shivered because of it. Katrina and Jack invited Psychic Medium Michelle Belanger to join them and she walked through blindfolded, picking up on a distinguished looking gentleman in what she thought was a ballroom (maybe Irish Dick), rituals in the basement and blood at the bottom of the main stairs. Michelle said that they would have practiced some kind of ritual, they would have been practicing some sort of magic and what they were doing might have gotten out of hand. There might have been some things that happened here that weren't supposed to happen here in regards to the types of rituals they did and if that's the case, what doors did they open?" Katrina asked if she thought there was a portal there and Michelle thought the basement had one. She said, "I can tell you that over time if you were doing things like that, it changes the fabric of the space and makes it more conducive for spirit activity. One of the purposes of running rituals is to thin the veil, which is basically making a portal. 

Romero was a longtime worker at the hotel and he told YouTuber Jack Devan in October of this year, some of his experiences. He said, "One time, I think it was probably like 9:00, 9:30 or 10 the most. I was coming down from the third floor and as soon as I step out of the elevator, I heard this loud scream. It was loud like those horror movies when they're chasing the girl and they're going to stab her...so I looked through the window. No one was there. And then I heard like big steps running from this room right here, all the way towards the front. So followed that sound and there was a lady and her daughter standing there and I asked them, 'What's going on back there?' And the mom goes, 'Did you hear that?' And I go, 'Oh, yeah, of course. I heard it all the way to the front.' They verified that it was really loud. And the daughter was shaking with fear." He told the girl not to be afraid because the ghosts at the hotel weren't bad. Romero said that the ghosts like to turn the lights out on him in the basement. 

There are other haunted hotels in the area. Just three miles south of the Cary House Hotel stands the Diamond Springs Hotel. The hotel is named for the small town where it is located and this was built up around some clear water springs. This was a stop on the Carson Emigrant Trail and a Pony Express stop. The hotel was built in 1916 by Anton Meyer and is the only hotel and boarding house to still survive. In 2004, Moon and Amy Shim bought the hotel from Dan Dammett and it runs as a restaurant now. The list of ghosts here include a little girl in a yellow dress, a dog that likes Table 19 in the restaurant, the first owner of the hotel - Anton Meyer and a woman named Rosa. Many people have heard the sound of children running around upstairs. Customers in the restaurant have claimed to smell cigar smoke and watched as chairs have moved at nearby tables. A cheap perfume has also been smelled when it's early morning and staff is starting to set-up. Celebrity Psychic Nancy Bradley claimed that a corner of the dining room had a vortex for spirits. Kevin Schultz had been a chef at the hotel since 1997 and he had his share of experiences. He told the Mountain Democrat in 2010, "They’re around. This [referring to investigations] will probably stir them up again and they’ll be back in the dining room." Another longtime cook at the hotel named Leonard Landers told the paper, "I took the garbage out to the dumpster one night and locked the gate closed when I came out. The next morning, Dan was yelling because I had left the gate open." Landers maintained he had locked the gate, so the men checked the security cameras and sure enough, Leonard had locked the gate. They then watched it slowly open on its own at 3am. Both cooks had seen an apparition in a bone-colored shirt going around a corner in the kitchen. The article also shares about the owners at the time, "Amy didn’t believe in ghosts anyway — until things started to happen that couldn’t be explained away. First it was the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs when she and Moon were alone in the hotel upstairs doing paperwork. Another time, after picking up her two sons from summer camp, Amy brought them back to the hotel. As her boys walked ahead into the hotel, Amy stopped to greet a couple of regular customers, sitting on the patio having lunch. During the course of the conversation, the wife in the couple referred to Amy’s three children. Amy corrected her by holding up two fingers and saying, “Only two, not three.” The woman stared at Amy and then said, “But you just brought them home, your little boy, a little girl and a bigger boy.” The woman had seen three children walking together from the parking lot into the hotel with Amy, one of them being a little girl with long hair wearing a yellow sundress — a little girl whose presence has also been seen and heard by paranormal investigators."

El Dorado Chamber of Commerce is located at 542 Main Street in Placerville. And this place is haunted because, well, you know how Placerville was called Hang Town? Well, this is where the hangman’s site was. The first building here was the Kossuth House, which was built in 1852 by Phillip L. Platt. This was a log building that catered to miners as a hotel. Dr. Platt died in 1853 and his widow sold the property to Anna W. Clark for $200 in 1856. She owned it for a couple decades. 

When the building was bought by the County of El Dorado in 1923, Marcus P. Bennett was the owner. He was a highly respected Superior Court Judge. The county demolished the hotel and built in its place a building to serve as the American Legion Hall for Post No.119. The El Dorado County Chamber of Commerce occupied this building beginning in 1972 after the Legion had moved to Veterans Memorial Hall. The reports of hauntings include feeling cold spots and pictures falling off the wall. Toilets flush on their own and EVPs have recorded voices speaking French, Russian, and English with a Scottish accent. There are sightings of a full-bodied apparition believed to be named Darrel, who is a bearded man dressed in black. He likes to peer over the staircase and stares down the street at night. A spirit wearing green overalls has also been seen.

The Sequoia Wedgewood Mansion is also known as the Bee-Bennett House and is located at 643 Bee Street in Placerville. The Sequoia Mansion sits atop a wooded knoll and is a glorious Victorian mansion built in 1853 by entrepreneur Colonel Frederick Bee. The house features a multi-gabled roof and wraparound porch. Bee was a protector of the immigrant Chinese workers and he built a tunnel from his house to Placerville's Chinatown to help protect them. 

Bee lost his two-year-old son to the croup in 1855. The Conklin and Duncan families lived in the house next. Judge Marcus Bennett and his wife Mary would be the next owners and they expanded the house in 1889to have 16 rooms and they added a tin ceiling to the verandah. Two of the Bennetts' children died in the house. Marie was only a few months old when she passed and Marcus Jr. passed when he was three. He tumbled down the stairs apparently. The Elks Club owned the house from the 1970s to the 1980s. Today, this is a wedding venue with the Nello Olivo Winery tasting room in the basemen. Here Comes the Guide writes of the location, "The upstairs Get-Ready Room, decorated with gilded mirrors and rich red velvet, affords a peek out the window to watch as guests arrive. A graceful dual staircase descends to the main floor, to a choice of three ceremony sites. The first is a glass-enclosed, light-filled stone Veranda, a cozy space that recalls a bygone era and overlooks a charming garden lawn. Next is the sprawling lawn itself, which enjoys a backdrop of the mansion's quaint façade and the snow-dusted mountains in the distance. Lastly, there's a lush forest retreat around the corner, where towering sequoias, pines, and a lily pond seem right out of a fairy tale." Sightings of the apparitions of Mary Bennett and her children have been reported, as were cold spots. A cook who worked at the Elks Club arrived one afternoon to prepare the meal for an event that evening. When she got to the porch, she saw a man and woman sitting on the porch swing. Then she noticed they were in Victorian era clothing. But then she thought that perhaps they were dressed to go with the house for the event. She passed them and said, "Hello." The couple nodded cordially to her. The cook made her way to the kitchen at the back of the house and as she started to get out equipment, it hit her that the porch didn't have a swing on it. And then she thought more about the clothes the couple were wearing. She suddenly became afraid remembering stories that others had told her about weird stuff at the house. The cook ran out to the porch, saw no swing, and kept going until she got to her car. She got in it and never returned to the Elks Club.

Mary was also called Molly and her favorite place to haunt is the second floor and the room she particularly likes has been called Molly's Parlor. Brides getting ready in this room have claimed to see the spirit of a women in period dress who is smaller in stature. Linda J. Boojer writes in her 2014 book "Gold Rush Ghost of Placerville, Coloma and Georgetown" of Molly, "She materializes regularly to staff members of Camino Flower Shop, whose floral designs regularly grace weddings. In 2014, Molly, dead for over sixty years, was seen on the sweeping staircase by the shop's owner, Dottie Cole McKenzie, and a mother of a bride. A few weeks earlier, her entity appeared in the form of a fast-moving mist to McKenzie's daughter, Matti." 

Seasons Bed and Breakfast is located at 2934 Bedford Avenue in Placerville. This site originally held a gold stamp mill before 1859. A merchant, undertaker, and sexton named Abraham Vedder built a home on the property in the Gothic Revival style, using tombstones for the foundation. Apparently, they had engraving mistakes. He sold this to Henry Ollis in 1862 for $100. Ollis once employed John “Wheelbarrow Johnny” Studebaker - yep, the guy who invented the Studebaker. In 1874, Ollis sold the home to a Canadian named Francis Plumado for $600 in gold. The Plumado family would keep it for 75 years. A chicken coop on the property was refurbished into a home for Miss Jo, a local seamstress. Ann Gladwill owned the property and named the establishment after a series of paintings she did featuring life in El Dorado County at different times of the year. Robyn Rawers is the current owner. Staff and guests have claimed to see an apparition named Martha who likes to rearrange the furniture.

Cuppa Coffee and More is located at 442 Main Street. The brick structure that houses it was built in 1855 in the Gothic Revival style by Caspar Hart. This was their private residence for five years and then they sold it. The building went through a variety of owners and tenants. There was the Piedmont Cafe and a pool hall before being the printing shop, "The Line & Letter Shop." Cuppa Coffee and More opened in 2010 under Jill Barnes and chef Melissa Arcona. 

They were the first ones to talk about the ghosts. Apparently there are two, named Tom and Amy. Tom is around twenty years of age and a prankster. Amy is a ten-year-old. People have claimed to see a vapor hovering near the ceiling and some believe that this is from a gun that was used to shoot Tom on the street in front of the shop. Amy likes to play with the radio and kitchen equipment. She also likes to pinch people. Paper towels in the bathroom have also gone flying and completely unrolling in piles. Haunted Hangtown Ghost Tours said of the place in 2018, "I can substantiate that when we were in here that Tom can be smelled. He likes to move the chairs. We've had our REM pods going off and we caught an EVP when we were leaving telling us to come back.

Linda J. Boojer writes in "Gold Rush Ghost of Placerville, Coloma and Georgetown," 

 

Placerville has some interesting Gold Rush history and very old buildings. Is it possible that ghosts from that earlier era are here? Is Placerville haunted? That is for you to decide!