Hollister
– It wasn’t just a Halloween story. Kathleen Sheridan and Kent
Child truly believe their home was haunted.
”
‘Oh, you bought the haunted house,’
”
Sheridan recalls folks telling her back in 1989 soon after she
and her family moved into the Victorian farm-style home in
Hollister’s quiet Sally Street neighborhood.
Hollister – It wasn’t just a Halloween story. Kathleen Sheridan and Kent Child truly believe their home was haunted.
“‘Oh, you bought the haunted house,'” Sheridan recalls folks telling her back in 1989 soon after she and her family moved into the Victorian farm-style home in Hollister’s quiet Sally Street neighborhood. Sheridan and Child planned to fix up the old house – originally built after 1895 – and turn it into a happy home to raise their three children.
At first, they remained somewhat skeptical about the neighbors’ claims. They were professionals and not prone to superstition. Child worked as an art instructor and as Dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Gavilan Community College. Sheridan worked at the downtown Hollister branch of Great Western Savings. (They’ve recently retired.) The couple had no desire to entertain fantastic stories. But then the mysterious noises began.
“We heard quite a bit when we first moved into the house,” Sheridan said. “We could hear children singing in various parts of the house. We’d go and look and there were no kids around.”
The unexplainable phenomena kept getting stranger. The family heard the footsteps of unseen people walking up the stairs. One daughter found someone had thrown her clothes out of her closet and strewn them throughout her room. House plants were also tossed to the floor. A battery-operated Dustbuster would be turned on and off in the middle of the night.
One chilly night, Sheridan woke to find an extra blanket covering her in bed. She thanked her husband, but Child told her he never put it on her.
“For the most part, it wasn’t scary,” she said. “One time, we heard an (unseen) child crying at the top of the stairs. That was kind of creepy.”
The family lived through the hauntings for more than 10 years, but two years ago, they hired Santa Cruz feng shui expert Pamela Ticoulat to help them create a balance of “chi” energy in their home. Ticoulat strolled through the rooms with a pair of divining rods to check the flow of the dwelling’s energy. She quickly discovered some foundation and support structure problems in the old house. (A home inspector later found this was true, Sheridan said.)
Ticoulat asked the family about the history of the house. Sheridan told her it once belonged to a mid-wife. In the early part of the 20th century, many Hollister residents had been born in it. The family decided the time had come to remove the specters from the house and send them on their way. They asked Ticoulat and her assistant to guide them in a seance to communicate with the ghosts.
Candles and incense were lit. Family members and the feng shui experts joined hands in an “energy circle,” Sheridan said.
As the group chanted and prayed, three spirits made their energy presence known in the room, Sheridan said. She described the experience more as an “awareness” rather than a visual sighting. “They appeared in kind of a shadowy way,” she said.
One of the ghosts was a middle-aged woman of possible Mexican, Native American or Portuguese ancestry. Her name was Martha or Margrete and she had been killed in a horse-related accident, Sheridan said. A child – perhaps a girl named Alice or a boy named Aaron – was the second ghostly presence. The third lost soul was a farmer. Sheridan described him as tall, lanky and quiet.
During the seance, one of the couple’s daughters had her finger pricked by the mischievous ghost child making her jump, Ticoulat remembers.
Ticoulat suggested the family place pictures and flowers around the house and talk gently to the ghosts to let them know it was now time to move on with their after-lives.
After two weeks of compassionate conversation, the events in the home came to a halt, Sheridan said.
Most ghosts are not harmful to humans, she said. They are really “tricksters,” playing mischievous pranks to get our attention.
About 5 percent of her clients seek help removing spirits from their homes, she said.
“All spirits want help,” Ticoulat said. “They want to serve you in some way or to be helped – to move on in that (other) dimension.”
The Child-Sheridan family believe that, with Ticoulat’s help, they assisted three souls to move on from their Sally Street home to find the passage to the after-life.
