Preston Castle

Preston Castle in Ione was marketed as the country's best reform school when it opened in 1894, but its Romanesque Revival sandstone walls hid a brutal interior where wards died of tuberculosis, beatings, and worse. On February 23, 1950, head housekeeper Anna Corbin was beaten to death in a basement storage room and wrapped in a rug. Her murder was never solved. Anna is still the castle's most famous ghost.

Anna Corbin was found in a storeroom in the basement, wrapped in a rug, beaten so badly her face was unrecognizable, with a rope around her neck. The date was February 23, 1950. Anna was the head housekeeper at the Preston School of Industry, a woman in her sixties who had worked the castle for years. All 657 wards currently living at the school were questioned. So was the staff. Three separate trials were held. Nobody was ever convicted. A 19-year-old ward named Eugene Monroe was the prime suspect and was tried twice without a guilty verdict. Anna Corbin's murder remains officially unsolved 76 years later, and she remains the most frequently reported ghost in the castle.

Preston Castle rises out of the oak-covered hillside above the small town of Ione, in the foothills east of Sacramento, a massive red and sandstone Romanesque Revival fortress that was meant to look civilized when it was anything but. Construction started in 1890 and finished in 1894. It was pitched nationally as the finest juvenile reform school in America, designed to rehabilitate wayward boys through fresh air, hard work, and moral instruction. It is 46,000 square feet, four full floors plus a basement, with a three-story annex and 13 surrounding acres. It held 657 boys at its peak.

The reality was less civilized. Wards, some as young as ten, faced beatings, long solitary confinements, tuberculosis that swept the dormitories, and the kind of everyday brutality that institutional-era youth facilities specialized in. Some boys died of disease. Some were killed by guards and the deaths were recorded as accidents. Records from the early 20th century are thin in the places you would most want them to be thick. Preston is one of the most documented examples of what the Progressive-era reform school movement actually produced when nobody was watching.

The castle closed as a juvenile facility in 1960. The Preston Youth Correctional Facility operated on the grounds nearby until 2011, but the original castle itself sat abandoned and decaying for decades. Paranormal investigators started coming through in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ghost Adventures filmed an episode at Preston Castle. Ghost Hunters investigated it. The Othersiders and My Ghost Story both featured it. Anna Corbin is the name that comes up again and again in every investigation.

The storeroom where Anna was found is still in the basement. Visitors have reported the sound of a woman sobbing there, a sudden drop in temperature at the doorway, and on several occasions, a figure of a woman in a housekeeper's dress standing against the back wall. Investigators have captured what they interpret as Anna's voice on EVP recordings, sometimes saying her own name. The basement is where the tours linger longest and where tour guides warn visitors who don't do well in confined spaces to sit the section out.

Anna is not the only ghost. Wards who died at the castle reportedly still move through the dormitory floors. Footsteps follow tour groups up the main staircase. A boy in early 20th-century clothes has been seen standing at the second-floor railing looking down. The attic has its own reputation, with staff reporting the feeling of being watched in rooms they have the keys to. The whole castle, according to investigators who have spent nights inside, seems to rearrange itself around the people inside it.

The Preston Castle Foundation now runs the building as a historic site, offering guided history tours, paranormal investigations, and seasonal haunt events. The exterior has been stabilized. The interior is intentionally rough. You can book an overnight stay with a group and spend the night in the basement where Anna Corbin was killed, if you are the kind of person who wants to do that. Plenty of people are. Anna, by all accounts, is still there waiting to see who shows up.