WIDLOCK MANOR
Location: Widlock Manor rests on private property twelve miles outside Napa, California, forty miles north of San Francisco off rural Route 58. The original access road to the property is nearly accessible, but it is on private property. The new owner does not encourage trespassers.
Description of Place: Widlock Manor is a two-story Dutch Colonial with four tall front pillars resembling the Southern Antebellum homes of Mississippi. Possessed of eight bedrooms, two chimneys, four fireplace, and a large parlor with a grand entrance way, the edifice is largely empty, somewhat cavernous in size, but for items of note, such as a few pieces of furniture and forgotten bric-a-brac in the house. It rests on a plot of formerly manicured land including ruined gardens and misshapen topiaries, damaged fountains, clogged ponds and a dilapidated greenhouse surrounded by restored vineyards now kept by new owners. Despite the forgotten state of the house, it is not completely deserted, instead used as storage building and housing for employees.
Ghostly Manifestations: In the rolling hills around Napa, California, things happen. The area is filled with a few legends and ghost stories. People have heard the shrieks of something like a woman screaming. The sound could be from peacocks that live on one of the properties. Others have seen the bright figure of a presence wandering and glowing in the trees at night. The image could be a figment of the mind, but how does one explain several witnesses describing the exact same disturbing image? The problem with most solutions produced by skeptics is that the explanations predispose ever witness in the world to be of substandard intelligence. A normal person can tell the difference between a bird's shriek and a sound of possibly paranormal origin. The winery employees know the land around them much better than the scientists who spend less than a week here, and they know the difference between a figment of light and the shade of a woman who has been dead since the Fifties. The surrounding community knows weird things occur around the deserted Widlock mansion and grounds, and yet, the scientists and so-called experts who try to expose those happenings with strange and confusing solutions have yet to come up with a reason that adequately rationalizes what the witnesses are seeing.
The ghost stories and hauntings were first reported by Jennifer "Jenny" Widlock, the last person to live there. She was the second wife of Eric Widlock, a lawyer and wine raconteur, whose family owned the land and vineyards. As he was away doing business and supervising the quality of wine he was producing, she was often left at the mansion to wait for her husband's return, but try as she did to keep busy, she could not escape the fact that she never really felt alone. The huge house had a presence, and at night, it was a hard place to be in alone. As shadows crept over the walls, darkness pervaded the interior and the peacocks that had the first wife's only company made noises like a woman screaming. Jenny Widlock believed that Eric's first wife, Marion Widlock, had not left the house.
What began as possible delusions of a newlywed woman left alone for long periods of time eventually turned into indications that the house just may be haunted. Jenny would light candles to see at night, and sudden breezes would blow them out. Lights became temperamental; they would work when Eric was home and fail when Jenny was alone. Jennie would confess to Reverend Ed Snow and his wife that she felt that Marion did not want her married to Eric, but they dismissed the idea. In life, Marion Widlock was a loving woman, a pillar of society of loved her husband. There was no sign that she had a jealous bone in her body. If she was alive, she would have welcomed any woman into her home, even another wife of her husband. The idea that Marion was reaching harshly from the grave was ludicrous.
Nevertheless, Jenny started reporting pounding noises when she was alone. First it started from the front door, but no one was ever there. It later got inside the house. The pounding would come from the top floor and from the back door. Eric never heard it, but Jenny was developing into a nervous wreck. She would think that Eric was trying to get into the house, but he would never appear until much later.
Jenny's sanity was also starting to deteriorate. When she stared exploring the house, she came across a large armoire that had belonged to Marion, but when she opened it, she was taken aback by a skull-like face looking at here. Eric would search the house for her, but he never found it. The face, yet, returned several times. Jenny said she saw a skull in Marion's portrait. She saw the skull resting at the top of the stairs, and it would return to the armoire. To exorcise the ghost, Eric burned the portrait, but it soon reappeared. As it turns out, Marion so loved her portrait when it was created that she had photo-copied duplicates of it made to give to friends and family. Where the copy came from was not revealed.
Part of Jenny's mental breakdown may have been at the fault of gardener Michael "Mickey" Moran, who had helped Marion on the gardens. Mickey believed that Marion had come back, and claimed he had seen her wandering the gardens. On one occasion, Jenny came screaming from the path to the gardens into Eric's arms that she had seen Marion coming down the garden toward her. Eric reamed Mickey for scaring Jenny, believing he was trying to drive her off the estate, but Jenny had had enough. For her piece of mind, she went to stay with the Snows for to placate her nerves.
When they drove her back to the house the next day, the door to the mansion was standing wide open and the interior appeared in disarray. A cursory survey of the grounds found Eric at the bottom of the pond. Soon, the ghost story pasted from a possible delusion to an unconfirmed haunting; locals claimed that Marion returned and had forced Eric into the pond as revenge for her death.
History: The full history of Widlock House is unrevealed, but it is believed to have been built around 1850 when several of the area vineyards first began appearing. It stayed through consecutive generations of the Widlock family until the death of Eric Widlock, the last known surviving family member. His widow held on to the property until 1990 when it was acquired by Nicholas Parker who absorbed the property into his own.
Identity of Ghosts: Rumor has it the ghost is that of Marion Widlock, the first wife of Eric Widlock, who slipped and drowned into the pond in 1957. Although later rumors suggested something sinister about her death, no evidence came out to prove conclusively that she may have been murdered..
Source/Comments: The Screaming Skull (1958), Phenomenon loosely based upon Cragfont in Castalian Springs, Tennessee, Heilbron House in Plum Rose, Pennsylvania and the Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee.
Nicholas Parker from The Parent Trap (1998)