At the historic Rancho Buena Vista Adobe, visitors can see a treasure trove of historical artifacts, photographs, artwork and classic rancho architecture. But it’s what they can’t see that makes the Adobe a popular destination this Halloween night.
Over the past eight years, paranormal researchers and tour groups have reported dozens of ghostly encounters and unexplained sounds and voices at the 166-year-old city-owned home.
These experiences have included disembodied voices, ethereal apparitions of spectral women in period dress floating past doorways and through walls, the rustle of petticoats, the sounds of children’s voices, women singing, galloping horse hooves, strange smells, unexplained cold spots in rooms and the sensation of an invisible hand touching the head, hair or shoulder of passers-by.
Many of these spooky goings-on have occurred during the “Spirits of the Adobe” tours, which take place at the adobe once a month. This month’s tours are at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Oct. 31. The cost is $25, which benefit the adobe’s maintenance fund.
The tours are conducted by the San Diego Paranormal Research Society, which was co-founded in 2009 by Tierrasanta resident Nicole Strickland and Fallbrook resident Ali Schreiber.
Over the years, the longtime friends have volunteered their services conducting numerous paranormal investigations aboard the Queen Mary cruise ship in Long Beach, at Vista’s Avo Playhouse, the Escondido Public Library and several private homes.
But no property they’ve ever researched has yielded more spiritual energy than the adobe. Strickland said she believes the historic rancho — an 1836 Spanish land grant that passed through a dozen hands before the city bought it in 1989 — could be a portal connecting the living and spirit worlds.
Yet while spirit portals in horror movies usually admit murderous demons, Strickland said that if any portal exists at the adobe, it has only welcomed happy ghosts.
“With our research and intuition we would say there’s energy here that’s very peaceful and very contented,” Strickland said. “If there are earthbound energies here, this was a place they loved.”
Strickland is accustomed to skeptics and says she’s skeptical too until she can assemble the facts and recordings to back up her theories. Still, she prefaces most of her statements with phrases like “there’s no proof, but ….”
She had her first spiritual encounter at age 5 when she had a visit from an old man dressed in Gold Rush-era attire. When she was 21, she had a more profound and extended interaction with the ghost of her grandmother that eventually led her to shelve a career in counseling to focus on paranormal research and writing.
“I was born into the field with an innate passion for ghosts, hauntings and the spiritual realm,” she said. “I was always intuitive and an empath.”
In September, Strickland published “Spirits of Rancho Buena Vista Adobe.” Available in the adobe’s gift shop, it’s the seventh book she’s written for Haunted America about paranormal activities in Southern California.
In the 124-page book, she describes the many experiences she, Schreiber and others have had in virtually every room of the L-shaped adobe structure.
Frank Rojano, a longtime city employee who has frequently worked on the adobe property, describes several spooky experiences in the book. In the early 2000s, he heard mysteriously slamming doors, saw a television turn itself on twice, and saw a painting inexplicably fly across a room and smash into a door.
Strickland believes some of the adobe’s ghosts may be the spirits of women and men who lived and worked on the property in the late 1800s.
The adobe’s most famous owner was Cave Johnson Couts, the Mexican War veteran who acquired the property in 1866 for ranching, but lived with his family three miles away at the Rancho Guajome Adobe.
Strickland said Couts’ widow, Ysidora “Dona” Bandini de Couts, and five of her children may be among the spirits inhabiting the Rancho Buena Vista Adobe property.
There have also been communications with a man named Juan (possibly Gonzalez) who worked for the Couts family in the 1800s. It’s possible he was held prisoner in the adobe’s now-walled-off root cellar and might have been killed on the property. There’s a legend that an electrician installing electrical wiring in the adobe’s “majordomo” room in the 1920s discovered a skeleton hanging from a noose inside a wall that could have been that of Juan.
Many of Strickland and Schreiber’s theories came from archival research, sightings and conversations recorded with the help of the equipment they use both in their private investigations and during the monthly tours.
Disembodied voices, known as “electronic voice phenomena” or EVP, are captured via audio recorders, video cameras, a “spirit box” (which rapidly scans AM/FM radio signals for talking spirits) and the Ovilus X, a synthesizer that supposedly converts spiritual energy into recognizable words. They also use dowsing rods (L-shaped copper wires) to detect spiritual energy.
Strickland said she knows many people doubt the scientific veracity of these devices, but most of the people who sign up for the two-hour tours are not among them.
“They arrive here open to the possibilities,” she said.
For information on paranormal tours coming up on Oct. 31, Nov. 9 and Dec. 21, call (760) 643-5275 or visit cityofvista.com/residents/rancho-buena-vista-adobe/spirits-of-the-adobe. Tours are limited to 10 people, ages 18 and up only.
