In Brief
At Brookdale Lodge in the redwoods near Santa Cruz, a creek runs right down the middle of the old dining room. For a century, guests have reported the same blonde girl in a white dress beside that water. The lodge calls her Sarah, a child said to have drowned there. No record says she ever did.
The Full Story
At Brookdale Lodge, in the redwoods of the San Lorenzo Valley north of Santa Cruz, guests keep reporting the same little girl. Blonde curls, a white dress — sometimes blue and white — standing near the lobby fireplace or down by the dining room. People who don't know each other describe her the same way, and have for the better part of a century.
Over the years the lodge settled on a name for her: Sarah, the girl from a story that's been told here so long nobody's sure where it started.
The way it's told, Sarah was a relative of James Harvey Logan, the man who turned a lumber mill here into a resort around 1900 — the same Logan who bred the loganberry. A girl of six, some accounts say ten. Sometime in the 1910s, the telling goes, she drowned in the creek.
And here is the strange part: there is a creek. The lodge's dining room, the Brook Room, was built in the early 1920s with a live stream running straight down the center of it — real water, boulders, ferns, moss banks left intact, diners seated on either bank. President Hoover once fished off the dining-room bridge. So when people say a child drowned in the creek, they mean *that* creek, the one indoors.
The story doesn't end with Sarah. A second girl, unnamed, is tied to the swimming pool — wet footprints on the deck, which staff call the most active spot in the building. A 13-year-old is said to have drowned in that pool, in 1972.
A guest services host, Josh Volden, told ABC7 about a boy who ran through the lodge and thought he'd made a friend. "After hugging his new friend," Volden said, "he let go of the hug and the little girl was gone."
And for all the tellings of how Sarah died, the age, the year, the drowning in the Brook Room creek, no record of her death exists anywhere. No name, no date, no proof she was ever here at all. Just a girl everyone keeps seeing, beside a creek that's real.
