Hearst Castle

William Randolph Hearst's 165-room estate on the California coast, built between 1919 and 1947 by architect Julia Morgan, now a State Park. Tour guides and groundskeepers report Hearst himself in his study, Marion Davies near the Neptune Pool, and a ghostly butler in Casa Grande. The lingering Thomas Ince mystery from Hearst's 1924 yacht party gives the story extra weight.

The official story at Hearst Castle is architecture. La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill, built between 1919 and 1947 by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and architect Julia Morgan, perched on a ridge above San Simeon with the Pacific Ocean stretched out below like a set piece. 165 rooms, 127 acres of gardens, two swimming pools (the Neptune is the one you've seen in photographs), a private zoo that once held zebras and giraffes, and an art collection so dense it was later scattered across American museums. It's a California State Park now, and tours run year-round.

What the official tours don't cover, and what the guides will only quietly mention if you ask in the right tone, is the ghost problem. There is, apparently, a ghost problem.

The stories fall into a few clusters. The most common is Hearst himself, usually reported as an elderly man in a suit sitting in his private study or walking the halls of Casa Grande (the main house) late in the day, after the tours have cleared out. Tour guides and groundskeepers have described him. He died in 1951 at 88, at Marion Davies's house in Beverly Hills, after being ordered off the hill by his doctors in 1947 because his heart couldn't handle the altitude anymore. The story goes that he cried as he left, which is documented in Davies's memoir. The ghost story is less documented but it's the one that keeps coming up: Hearst came home.

Marion Davies is the second ghost most often reported here. She was the Ziegfeld girl, the silent film actress, Hearst's longtime companion for 34 years despite his refusal to divorce his legal wife Millicent. She's usually described as a woman in a white or light-colored dress, seen in the gardens or near the Neptune Pool, sometimes laughing. Given how much of her life was spent throwing parties on this hill (the guest list ran from Charlie Chaplin and Charles Lindbergh to Winston Churchill and Calvin Coolidge), her ghost has a straightforward explanation: she loved it here, and she had the run of the place when Hearst's actual wife was 3,000 miles away in New York.

Guides also mention a ghostly child in the gardens and a butler figure moving through Casa Grande's lower hallways. The child has the least attached context. The butler is attached to the routine of the house — Hearst ran San Simeon with a massive staff, and someone who spent forty years waiting tables in the Refectory could plausibly still be doing it.

Then there's the Thomas Ince layer. In November 1924, film producer Thomas Ince boarded Hearst's yacht Oneida for a birthday cruise with Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, and others. Ince fell ill on the boat, was taken off at San Diego, and died four days later at home in Beverly Hills on November 19, 1924. Official cause: heart failure. The rumor that never quite died was that Hearst had shot Ince, either by accident (aiming at Chaplin, whom Hearst suspected of sleeping with Davies) or on purpose. Louella Parsons, Hearst's gossip columnist, was allegedly on the boat and received a lifetime contract from Hearst shortly after. Ince's widow was reportedly paid off. No investigation stuck. The story is the basis of the 2001 film "The Cat's Meow." It's also why the Hearst ghost story has a weight most movie-mogul hauntings don't: because at least one person might have actually died at Hearst's hand, and the hill is where Hearst came home to.

One detail the guides mentioned off the record for years: at some point the State Park's management reportedly asked guides to stop volunteering ghost stories on tour. The story goes that a visitor once claimed a ghost had followed her home from Hearst Castle and asked the estate to pay for her exorcism. True or not, the policy shift is real. The stories are still there. You just have to know what to ask and catch a guide in the right mood.

Go for the house. Book the Grand Rooms tour. Stand in the Assembly Room, where Hearst made guests wait for him before dinner, and look at the imported Italian ceiling and the tapestries and the scale of the thing. That's what makes the ghost story work. Whatever Hearst wanted from this hill, he wanted it badly enough to spend 28 years and an unknown fortune building it. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, this is exactly the kind of place a man like that would not want to leave.