Big Yellow House

Summerland was founded in the 1880s as a Spiritualist colony, and H.L. Williams built this house as his private residence in the middle of all that séance activity. Decades later it became a restaurant where kids were priced by the pound and staff reported a ghost named Hector in the basement, documented in Rod Lathim's book The Spirit of the Big Yellow House.

For years, kids who ate at the Big Yellow House got weighed on a scale by the front door. Not the food. The kid. Children under ten were priced by the pound, which is the kind of thing that could only survive in a family restaurant with a specific sense of humor, and the Big Yellow House had that from day one.

The building sits on the bluff in Summerland, a tiny coastal town just south of Santa Barbara that used to be a spiritualist colony. That's the part most visitors never knew. Summerland was founded in the 1880s by H.L. Williams as a community for Spiritualists, and séances were a regular feature of town life. Williams built the big yellow house (which wasn't yellow yet) as his private residence around 1884. It's one of the oldest buildings in town.

By the 1970s, John and June Young had bought the place and turned it into a restaurant. June painted it the vivid canary yellow it's known for and topped it with an orange roof. The Big Yellow House became a regional fixture with hearty Sunday dinners, buck-a-pound kids' meals, and the whole Sunset magazine vibe. It closed in the early 2000s and has been through various tenants since. The building is still there, still painted the same ridiculous yellow.

The ghost most associated with the place is Hector. He lives in the basement and sometimes in the upstairs library, according to Rod Lathim, who wrote a book called The Spirit of the Big Yellow House about the Williams family and the ghosts that reportedly stayed behind. Lathim is a Santa Barbara theater director, not a ghost hunter, which is worth noting. He got interested in the place through the building's history, not through an EVP session. Hector's name comes from séances held in the house, though nobody's ever connected him to a specific person in the Williams family's paper trail.

The other reported presences are vaguer. Staff at the restaurant over the decades reported the usual: footsteps in empty rooms, pots and pans moving in the kitchen overnight, the occasional sense of somebody standing behind you when nobody was there. A hidden staircase discovered during renovations in the 1970s added to the legend, because the staircase led to a space nobody in the current Young family had ever been told about. Whether the staircase had anything to do with the séances is an open question.

What makes Summerland interesting is that almost every original building in town comes with a ghost story. The local theory is that the spiritualist founders basically advertised for spirits, held séances weekly, and then never bothered to send any of them home. The Big Yellow House got the reputation because it was the most prominent building and the founder lived there. A century later, it's still the house everyone in town points at.

If you drive up the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Barbara and Ventura, you can't miss it. The yellow is borderline loud. The orange roof is louder. The restaurant signs are faded now, but the scale by the door is apparently still there. So are the stories, though you'll have to ask a Summerland local over a beer if you want them. Nobody's running tours, and Hector hasn't updated his rates.