Vineyard House ----------------- The Vineyard House is an old Victorian mansion that stands on a hill overlooking the town of Coloma, California. It was built some time in the 1800s and is famous for being haunted. It was owned by Robert and Louisa Chalmers and they had a very well-known vineyard. Some of the best-tasting wine in California was produced there. The Chalmers family had a lot of luck with their vineyard at first and they were very happy together. However, it wasn’t long until their luck began to run out. The grapes in their vineyard were affected by a blight and it ruined their entire crop. They could no longer make any money selling wine. Then, several of their young children died, one after the other. The husband, Robert, developed an incurable disease that destroyed his brain. It made him go blind and he began to lose his mind. One day, a man was digging a grave in the cemetery across the street. Robert came running over, told the man to get out of the way and then lay down in the grave himself and asked to be buried. Eventually, he was declared insane, so his wife chained him to a wall in the windowless basement. Alone in the dark, he writhed and moaned, crying out and banging his head against the walls which held him captive. By this time, he was a raving maniac and he became very paranoid, believing Louisa was trying to poison him. He refused to eat anything and finally died of starvation. After his death, the wife needed to make money or she would lose the house, so she turned the upstairs part of the house into an inn where weary travelers could stop and rest before returning to their journeys. Those who stayed in the Vineyard House complained of hearing mysterious voices and sounds of ghostly footsteps stomping down the corridors. One guest packed his things and fled in the middle of the night, so frightened that he refused to say what he’d seen. After Louisa died in 1901, the house was owned by many different people who fixed it up and turned it into a restaurant and an inn. Many of the owners experienced very strange things. Guests complained of hearing the rustling of skirts, metallic clangs and heavy breathing. One couple said they were awakened in the middle of the night by a group of noisy people coming up the stairs. Planning to complain, the husband opened their door to ask them to quiet down. What he saw there were three men in Victorian clothing who vanished before his eyes. One night, an employee was working in the bar down in the basement where the husband had died. He was cleaning up after closing time and just as he was wiping down the counter, a single glass suddenly came sliding down the bar to where he was. It had moved completely on its own. Not long ago, a young couple from Sacramento checked into the Vineyard House. Around midnight, they were awakened by horrible screams coming from the next room. They fled to Placerville and told the sheriff it sounded as if someone was being murdered in the next room. The sheriff went to the inn to check it out and entered the room. Inside, he found the owners, sound asleep in their beds. They hadn’t heard a thing. Louisa Chalmers and her husband and children were buried in the old graveyard directly across the street from the house. Some people who have eaten at the restaurant reported seeing a strange woman in old-fashioned clothes wandering around the graveyard. She has been seen by quite a few people, but no one has been able to identify her. She appears to people to be very sad, almost as if she is mourning.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 14:11:14 +0000
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