Preston Castle

Preston Castle is a hulking Romanesque reform school in Ione, California, and the ghost everyone names first is the woman who was murdered in its basement. Her name was Anna Corbin, and on the morning of February 23, 1950, she went down there and didn't come back up.

Corbin was the head housekeeper, in her early fifties, and she didn't live at the school. She had a home in town and walked into the reformatory to work. That morning a coroner later put her death between roughly 9 and 10 a.m. Her body wasn't found until early that afternoon, when another housekeeper and an inmate helper followed a trail of blood from her office. It led to a padlocked basement storeroom. She was inside, beaten beyond recognition, wrapped in blood-stained rugs, with a rope drawn tight around her neck.

A 19-year-old ward named Eugene Monroe was arrested within days. Other wards said they'd seen him near her office around the time she died, and burning clothes in an incinerator afterward. He was tried three times. The first jury hung. The second hung too, by accounts 11 to 1 for conviction. The third trial was moved to Sacramento, and there a jury acquitted him in about two hours.

So no one was ever convicted, and the case is still officially open. Monroe was later sent to prison for a 1951 murder in Tulsa, Oklahoma — but not for what happened in the basement at Preston.

The castle was vacated in 1960 and sat empty for decades before a foundation took it over. It runs tours and overnight investigations now. Visitors describe a woman in a housekeeper's dress standing against a back wall, and sobbing that carries from the storeroom. When a Ghost Hunters team worked the kitchen where she was killed, one woman on the crew said she heard a voice. It said, "help me."