Big Yellow House

The Big Yellow House sits on a bluff above Highway 101 in Summerland, California, and locals say a ghost named Hector lives in its basement. Nobody can tell you who Hector was. The name didn't come from a death record. It came out of a séance.

That fits the town. Summerland was founded in the late 1880s by H.L. Williams as a colony for Spiritualists — people who believed the dead could be reached and held séances as a routine part of community life. Williams built this house in 1884 as his own home, and it became the colony's headquarters, where those séances were held. The local explanation for why the place is haunted is almost a joke: the founders advertised for spirits, summoned them weekly, and never sent any of them home.

For decades the house was a loud canary yellow with a bright orange roof, painted that way in the 1970s against the whole town's wishes by an owner named June Young. The Youngs ran a restaurant out of it that priced children's meals by the pound — kids were weighed on a scale by the door to set the price.

The ghost stories run alongside all of it. Hector is said to keep to the basement wine cellar and the upstairs library. A woman in 19th-century dress turns up in the first-floor women's restroom. Staff working there in the late 1970s told of setting tables at night, leaving the room, and coming back to find them disturbed; no one wanted to be left alone at lock-up.

A teenager named Rod Lathim ran the gift shop inside the house starting in 1973. Four years of working there turned him from skeptic to believer, and he wrote a book about it. "It changed my life forever," he said.

Not everyone bought it. An artist named John Wullbrandt had a flatter answer for the footsteps under the dining room floor. The house, he said, was rigged — a balanced wood beam that, when something set it off, knocked like a man walking. He claimed he found it.

No one has ever proven Hector. No one has produced the beam, either.