In one room at Thornewood Castle in Lakewood, Washington, the light bulbs keep turning up unscrewed just far enough to go dark. Guests report Chester Thorne's wife in her window seat, and a child by the lake who is gone before anyone reaches the water.
Thornewood Castle stands on American Lake in Lakewood, Washington, and in one of its rooms the light bulbs keep going dark. The owner, Deanna Robinson, says she has walked in several times to find a bulb unscrewed just far enough to break the circuit, always in the room that was Chester Thorne's den. A writer from *Weird Washington* was interviewing her there when a fixture went out overhead. "Sure enough, the light bulb was unscrewed just enough to turn it off," he wrote. "I am reasonably certain that it was lit when we walked in."
Thorne founded the National Bank of Tacoma, and his obituary called him the father of the Port of Tacoma. In 1907 he bought a 400-year-old Elizabethan manor in England and had its front door, its oak paneling and its oak staircase pulled out and shipped around Cape Horn on three commissioned vessels. The Tudor Gothic house he put them into was finished around 1911: 17 chimneys, walls 10 inches thick, over 100 pieces of stained glass salvaged from 15th- and 16th-century churches. He died in it in October 1927.
His wife Anna kept the one room in the house that doesn't face the lake. It looks at Mount Rainier instead, and down on the sunken garden she called her secret garden, and it is the Bridal Suite now. Guests report her sitting in its window seat, watching the garden. Her mirror hangs in the room, and brides using it have described a woman's reflection behind them, seated by the window, and some say brushing her hair.
Robinson was reading alone in the great hall one day when a cocktail party started up around her: music, dancing, glasses, at least 100 people talking, someone dropping a drink. She said that even as the owner, she felt like an intruder.
And there is a child at the water. Guests describe a small figure standing by the lake, gone before anyone gets down there. The accounts split on whose child it was, a former owner's drowned grandchild or a Thorne son lost in one of the ornamental ponds, and no record supplies a name, a year, or a drowning.
When *The News Tribune* previewed Stephen King's *Rose Red* in 2002, with Thornewood cast as the haunted mansion, Robinson named her own visitors to the reporter: Chester, Anna, and the child near the water. "I can't say we don't have our own events," she said, "but ours aren't evil."
The house says something different now. It markets itself as the house that love built, the ghosts came off the website, and when author Rosemary Ellen Guiley wrote to ask what had changed, nobody answered. Thornewood's FAQ takes the question head on. Is Thornewood Castle haunted? "Only in the movies!"
Down in the basement, the wishbone-shaped sticks are exactly where they were. The castle's own history says Native American workers cut and hung them from the rafters during construction, to keep evil out. Five owners have left them alone.
