The Whaley House

In 1852, in the dusty Mexican-era town that would become Old Town San Diego, a sailor named James Robinson was hanged for stealing a rowboat.

He was a big, rough drifter, known around town as Yankee Jim. He and some companions had been caught trying to make off with a pilot boat in the harbor. It was the kind of offense that today might earn a few months in jail. But this was frontier California, two years after statehood, and justice was swift. Robinson was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

The gallows were set up on a small rise of land near the plaza. According to accounts of the execution, the cart he stood on was pulled away, and Robinson — a tall man — was left swinging so close to the ground that his feet nearly touched. He did not die quickly. Witnesses later described how long he struggled.

One of the people in the crowd that day was a New York-born merchant named Thomas Whaley.

Five years later, Thomas Whaley bought that same piece of land, gallows site and all, and built a house on it for his family.

The House

The Whaley House was finished in 1857: a handsome two-story Greek Revival home of fired brick, the first brick building of its kind in Southern California. Thomas Whaley built it for his wife, Anna, and their growing family. It was grand for its time and place. It had a granary, a general store on the ground floor, and later a theater upstairs.

For a few years in the late 1860s and early 1870s, part of the house even served as the San Diego County Courthouse, holding county records and court sessions. That ended one night in 1871, when officials from the new part of San Diego, a few miles away, came with wagons and carted off the records, moving the county seat downtown. Thomas Whaley, who had been renting the space to the county, was furious. He never got the records back.

The Whaleys’ Sorrows

If the house was built on the site of one death, it went on to see many more.

In 1858, the Whaleys’ little son, Thomas Jr., died in the house of scarlet fever. He was about seventeen months old.

The Whaleys left for a time, moving to San Francisco after a fire destroyed Thomas’s store, then returned. Over the decades, their children grew up in the house, married, and moved in and out. Their daughter Violet married a man named George Bertolacci in 1882. He turned out to be a fraud who abandoned her within weeks of their wedding. She returned home in disgrace and lived in deep despair. In 1885, she took her own life. She was twenty-two.

Thomas Whaley died in 1890. Anna died in 1913. Their daughter Lillian, the last of the family to live there, stayed in the house until 1953, when she died at the age of eighty-nine.

The Footsteps

The first strange report about the house, according to the family’s own accounts, came from Thomas Whaley himself.

Not long after they moved in, the family began hearing heavy footsteps moving through the house — especially upstairs, and especially on the spot near the arch between the music room and the parlor, which is said to be about where the gallows once stood. Thomas reportedly said that he believed the footsteps belonged to Yankee Jim Robinson, the man he had watched die.

Over the following century, the stories grew.

After the house was saved from demolition and opened as a museum in 1960, docents and visitors began reporting experiences of their own. The sound of heavy boots pacing the upstairs floor. The smell of cigars, said to be Thomas Whaley’s favorite, in the master bedroom. The scent of perfume. A woman in a long dress seen in the kitchen or the garden, believed to be Anna. A small figure who seems to be a child darting through rooms. A little dog that runs across the floor and vanishes — said to be the family’s terrier, Dolly Varden.

People report that the windows of the upstairs bedrooms open on their own, setting off the museum’s burglar alarms in the middle of the night. Visitors say they feel a tightening around the throat when they stand beneath the arch — the place where Yankee Jim is supposed to have died.

The Television Host

In 1964, a young television personality named Regis Philbin — long before he became one of the most famous hosts in America — was working on a local show in San Diego. He decided to spend a night in the Whaley House.

Sitting in the dark with a friend, he later said, he saw a figure appear near the study — a woman in a long white dress. He turned on his flashlight. The figure vanished. Philbin talked about that night for the rest of his life. He said he had never been able to explain it.

That story, and many others, made the Whaley House one of the most famous haunted homes in the country. It has been called “America’s most haunted house” on television more than once.

Courtroom and Gallows

There is something about the Whaley House that I find particularly striking. It is not only a family home. It was, for a time, a courthouse — a place where judgments were passed. And it stands on the spot where a man was hanged for a petty crime by a rough frontier court.

Yankee Jim Robinson’s execution was later remembered by San Diegans as a terrible miscarriage of justice: a man put to death for a theft that, even in its time, did not seem to justify the rope. Thomas Whaley watched it happen. Then he built his house on the very ground.

I don’t know whether you believe the heavy footsteps upstairs belong to a sailor who died on that ground. But I think it’s fitting, in a way, that if any ghost were to walk in a former courthouse, it would be the ghost of a man the law treated so badly.