Brookdale Lodge

Six-year-old Sarah Logan drowned in the creek that runs straight through the Brookdale Lodge's Brook Room dining hall in 1916, and for more than a hundred years guests have seen a little girl in a blue-and-white Sunday dress asking for her nanny before vanishing. The lodge itself is the hook: Herbert Hoover fished from the dining room bridge, Marilyn Monroe stayed here, and the 1945 UN delegates came up to relax between sessions.

The Brookdale Lodge built its dining room over a creek on purpose. The Brook Room, added in 1923, has an actual natural stream running right down the middle of it, with trees, rocks, and water moving past your table while you eat. Herbert Hoover used to fish from the dining room bridge and have his catch cooked and brought back. That alone should get this place on a California bucket list. The ghosts are almost a bonus.

Sarah Logan is the one everyone talks about. She was six years old, a relative of original owner James Harvey Logan, and in 1916 she drowned in the creek that runs through the Brook Room. For more than a century, guests and staff have reported seeing a little girl in a blue-and-white Sunday dress walking through the lobby or near the fireplace. Sometimes she asks visitors if they've seen her nanny. When they turn to look, she's gone.

That's the story that gets told on every local news segment about the lodge, and ABC7 ran a feature on it in 2019 after the current owners renovated the place and reopened it. What nobody mentions on television is the Mermaid Room. The lodge had a swimming pool with underwater windows into an adjoining lounge, and in the 1940s and '50s they ran actual mermaid shows there, with swimmers in costume performing while guests watched through the glass with drinks in hand. A young woman reportedly drowned in that pool at some point, and the top deck of the pool area is supposed to be the most active spot in the whole building.

The lodge is older than most California travelers realize. It opened in 1890 in the San Lorenzo Valley, deep in the redwoods about fifteen miles north of Santa Cruz, and it was the kind of place that got a visit from everyone: Marilyn Monroe, Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth, Hoover, and according to local legend, a few mobsters who used the private cabins out back. During the 1945 San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations, world diplomats apparently came up here to unwind between sessions. That's a lot of history for a lodge tucked into the woods.

Psychic Sylvia Browne visited and claimed she could sense more than sixty spirits in the building. Sixty is a lot. Browne's track record on verifiable claims was famously spotty, so take the number with a shaker of salt, but the lodge has been showing up on "most haunted" lists for a long time and every paranormal team in Northern California has filmed there at least once.

The building went through rough decades. It closed in 2009 after the previous owners struggled to keep it open, sat empty and deteriorating for years, and was almost lost before a new ownership group bought it and reopened it in 2018 after a major renovation. The Brook Room is back. The creek still runs through it. Sarah Logan, apparently, is still here.

What makes Brookdale work is that the haunted story doesn't feel grafted on. It's a weird old building in a weird old place with a really tragic backstory, and a six-year-old girl drowned here, which is not the kind of thing that fades cleanly. Whether you see Sarah or not, the lodge is worth a night. Sit at the Brook Room bar, listen to the water move under the floor, and think about the fact that a United States president once caught his own dinner off that bridge.