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Is Shinn House Haunted?

The Haunting of Shinn House?

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All old houses need a good ghost story. Early on when I got involved with Shinn House, that was one of my first questions: is there a ghost?

Circled: Attic window of Shinn House



In an article published in the Tri-City Voice in 2003, Eva Ricciarelli, founder of the Friends of Heirloom Flowers and long-time Shinn House docent, reportedly dismissed the rumors about the ghosts. However, some guests have reported seeing the figure of a girl in one of the attic windows on the third floor. I haven't been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the spirit (yet), but I was curious to see if I could find the origin of the story and maybe identify possible contenders for who the ghost was in life.

The earliest mention in print of a possible ghost that I could find was this article by Takako Endo in the September 29, 1974 issue of Brightside, a Sunday news insert in The Argus (Fremont, CA). Per Dr. Robert Fisher, the founder and then-President of the Mission Peak Heritage Foundation (MPHF), "There used to be a rumor that ghosts were [in the attic]. I, of course, didn't believe it. One night when I stayed on late to finish a job, I began to hear strange noises from the attic, as if someone were shuffling about and then stopping and then continuing again. I never questioned the theory about ghosts after that. But a strange thing happened. When the fire sprinklers were installed in the attic, the noises stopped." [The skeptic in me hears this and thinks "rodents," but I'll suspend my disbelief.]

Article about Shinn House's restoration: "A muse of rural history," Endo, 1974

I can't help but picture the Grady twins
from The Shining (Stephen King Wiki)
The next mention I found was an article from the May 21, 1984 San Jose Mercury News, which provided more potential details about a sighting. In the article, Phil Ockerman, then president of MPHF, tells the story of the alleged ghost "Alice." According to Ockerman, she was "[intellectually disabled] and they hid them in those days." No word on how she died, but after the MPHF took up stewardship of the Shinn House in 1972, people started reporting strange activity. Perhaps the increase of activity in the house once restoration started in earnest stirred up some otherworldly energy. Ockerman described an experience reported by two park rangers. As the park rangers were leaving the house after a routine check, they heard tapping on glass, looked up, and "saw this girl in a blue dress knocking on the window." Thinking they had locked someone inside, they went back in to investigate.

But there was no one there.

Ockerman repeats the same story Dr. Fisher told in the 1974 article: once the fire sprinklers were installed, all activity stopped. The article concludes that "Alice doesn't live there anymore."

San Jose Mercury News, 5/21/1984
The only other version of the ghost story that I've found (so far) was handwritten by a child—perhaps by a 6-year-old named Debbie? or was the ghost a 6-year-old named Debbie? It was found in one of the many file drawers of the Shinn House archive. There was no context associated with this paper, so we have no hints as to when it was written and why. The details provided are similar to those in the San Jose Mercury News article. According to this version, the ghost was one of Lucy's children, perhaps one born in 1856. [Interestingly, that was the birth year of one of Lucy’s children, Annie, who died at 21 years old—but we’ll get to Annie in a moment.] Apparently, the child was disabled, and as "they didn't want disabled to be in public," she was kept upstairs and out of sight while the family hosted a party. She was curious, so she "snuck into the atick [sic]" to watch the party, but she fell out the attic window.

These stories didn't sit well with me: From everything I've read about the Shinn family, they were generally kind, accepting people. James Shinn was a devout Quaker, and his family appeared to follow in his footsteps. In fact, Lucy Shinn wrote to her daughter Millie about her support of the wife of a man who had a mental illness, Mrs. Lynch. In a letter dated June 13, 1879, Lucy wrote that Mr. Lynch was not doing well and that as if that weren't enough, Mrs. Lynch was getting visits from "some of Job's comforters": one to vent her anger about something Mr. Lynch had said about the woman's husband, two others to criticize Mrs. Lynch's children. She stopped by the Shinns' one day after these visits, "evidently ... because she felt bad and did not know what to do with herself." Lucy ended up reading Mrs. Lynch excerpts of some of Millie's letters from the East Coast; by the time she left, Mrs. Lynch was "quite cheerful." Lucy also often served as caregiver and even "doctor" to her family members and other members of her community. One of the Chinese workers at the nursery, Ah Ly, had a bad cough, and Lucy "prescribed [him] some medicine." A few days later when Lucy asked how he was feeling, he declared, “Oh bully,” and Lucy quipped, "So I don’t see but my patients are likely to do me credit." Knowing all this, I take issue with the insinuation that the Shinn family would hide a family member from the community due to perceived stigma.

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My initial theory was that the ghost was the spirit of a particular child of James and Lucy Shinn who died in childhood—Lucy "Lulu" Ellen Shinn (1863-1873). However, after reading through issue after issue of the Alameda County Advocate (ACA) on microfilm (see my previous post for more info about that), I was able to locate Lulu's death notice in the December 27, 1873 ACA issue, which stated that she didn't die of a fall, but rather heart disease [I also suspect tuberculosis was involved, though we'll get to that in a bit].

ACA, 12/27/1873

Moreover, in reading through the Alameda County Independent (ACI), I realized that it couldn't be Lulu when I found an article about the Shinns' "Big House" being built—in 1876. Lulu died in 1873, so she couldn't have fallen out of the attic window, as it didn't exist!

ACI, 9/2/1876

I suppose it's possible she could have fallen out of the loft window of Sim Cottage, where the children slept before the Big House was completed, but it seems unlikely the distance would be enough to kill someone in a fall. Or perhaps she fell out of a window of the unfinished house? According to MPHF, the house was built over the course of about 10 years, between 1865-1876 (which I find hard to believe; houses didn't take 10 years to build, I guess unless they could only work on it when they had the money for supplies/labor). But this is all a moot point because, again, she died of an illness, not a fall.

Circled: Loft window of Sim Cottage
So the story about a little girl falling out of the attic window wasn't about Lulu. 

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The next generation of Shinns to inhabit the Big House was Joseph "Joe" C. Shinn, his wife, Florence "Tot" M. (Mayhew) Shinn, and their children. [I love Florence's nickname and wish I knew its backstory.] They also lost a daughter at a tragically young age: Martha aka "Patty" died suddenly in 1922 when she was only 10 years old. Per the obituary, she became gravely ill several days after swimming and playing in the bay. Just three days later she passed away from "the worst [double] pneumonia case that had ever entered the hospital" and spinal meningitis.

But again, not a death from a fall. I have not found a Shinn family member named Alice, either. Millie, however, did have another sister named Annie. I'm a bit of a parapsychology nerd, so the more I learned about the family, the more convinced I became that the legend was a twisted version of the truth. Annie spent the last few years of her life with gradually declining health, eventually passing away in the Big House in January 1878. From reading the Lucy Letters (as we call the letters Lucy wrote to her daughter Millie while she was away at college, 1874-1880), it sounds like Annie may have had tuberculosis. Of course, I'm not a doctor, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But Lucy described Annie coughing more in damp weather, being feverish, and losing strength and energy over a several year period.            
In an undated letter (possibly written in the Fall of 1877), Lucy expressed her anxiety about Annie's health to Millie:        
"Do you write cheerful letters to Annie? She did not look happy after your last letter, but don’t tell her I said so for it will give her an uncomfortable feeling of being watched. I have no doubt you feel anything but cheerful when you sit down to write to her, thinking of her state of health. It is all I can do to keep myself fit to be where she is, but for her sake we must not give up. She has seemed I thought a good deal depressed since she came home, stays in her own room a great deal of the time and seems utterly without an object. She seems to me to have less energy and strength than she had and I know it is very bad for her to be so much alone, but I don’t know what to do."
From Worthpoint

My guess of tuberculosis wasn't just a shot in the dark: By the late 1800s, “70 to 90% of the urban populations of Europe and North America were infected with the tuberculosis bacillus, and about 80% of those individuals who developed active tuberculosis died of it.” I suspect that Lulu Shinn may have also died of complications of tuberculosis, as it was not uncommon for the disease to spread among family members and kill them one by one over decades and generations.

At the time, there was no treatment for tuberculosis (and there wouldn't be one until the 1940s!), so desperate patients and their families often turned to unregulated patent medicine. Lucy sent Millie a bottle of one such patent medication, Oxygenaqua, to give to the chemistry professor at UC Berkeley at the time, Prof. Willard B Rising. Annie refused to take the medication until it was analyzed—which is pretty smart, knowing what sorts of ingredients went into patent medicine [but that's a whole post on its own]. Annie also spent time in at least two health resorts, in hopes of improving her condition: the hot spring baths in St. Helena and the warm sea baths in Santa Cruz. Sadly, these treatments were to no avail, and Annie passed away on January 12, 1878.

The family was deeply affected by her loss. Millie had been very close with her sister; she later took some time off from her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and accompanied her aunt, Jane Wells (Fessenden) Clark, on a trip around the East Coast.

Let's suspend our disbelief for a few moments and pretend ghosts exist. Knowing that Annie likely spent much of the last few years of her life sequestered at home, it would make sense that some of her energy is stuck there—unfinished business and all that, right? Annie had been enrolled at UC Berkeley, but had to stop after one year due to her health. Could Annie's ghost inhabit the Shinn House? Perhaps she continues to read and work towards earning her undergraduate degree? 

We may never know. Of note, a group of paranormal investigators spent the night at Shinn House some time last year, and no spirits made themselves known. So maybe Shinn House isn't haunted...

Or is it? See if you can spot the "ghost" in this 360º photo of Millie's bedroom at Shinn House! [This was created in the "spirit" of Victorian spirit photography.]

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References

Antique Oxygenaqua Starkey & Palen Pharmacy Medicine Tonic Bottle Box Original | #1855577024, n.d. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-oxygenaqua-starkey-palen-1855577024.


Dear Millie.... Shinn-anigans (blog). July 29, 2022. https://shinn-house-history.blogspot.com/2022/07/dear-millie.html.

Diaz, Dorsi. “A Ghost Story: Is Shinn Park in Fremont, Ca. Haunted?” HubPages, May 19, 2013. 
                https://discover.hubpages.com/art/The-Ghosts-of-Shinn-Park-in-Fremont-California.

Died of heart disease... Alameda County Advocate. December 27, 1873. Fremont Main Library.

Endo, Takako. “A Muse of Rural History.” The Argus’ Brightside, September 29, 1974.



Harvard Library. “Tuberculosis in Europe and North America, 1800-1922.” Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and
                Epidemics, n.d. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/feature/tuberculosis-in-europe-and-north-america-
                1800-1922.

Improvements about here. Alameda County Independent, September 2, 1876. UC Berkeley Library.

Martha F. Shinn passed away Mon. Unknown, 1922. Shinn House Museum.

Mission Peak Heritage Foundation, n.d. http://www.missionpeakreporter.org/.

Murray, John F., Dean E. Schraufnagel, and Philip C. Hopewell. “Treatment of Tuberculosis. A Historical Perspective.”
                Annals of the American Thoracic Society 12, no. 12 (December 2015): 1749–59. 
                https://doi.org/10.1513/AnnalsATS.201509-632PS.

Rockstroh, Dennis. “Shinn House Ghost Draws Crowd.” San Jose Mercury News, May 21, 1984. Shinn House Museum.

Roos, Dave. “When a 19th-Century ‘Spirit Photographer’ Claimed to Capture Ghosts through His Lens.” History, October 28,
                2019. https://www.history.com/news/spirit-photography-civil-war-william-mumler.

Shinn Historical Park and Arboretum, n.d. http://www.missionpeakreporter.org/shinn-estate.php.

Shinn, Lucy Clark. “Dear Millie, Your Letter Received Yesterday...,” c 1877. 
                http://archive.org/details/cafrmph_000056.

Shinn-Dig: My Adventures in Microfilm. Shinn-anigans (blog), August 12, 2022. 

Takako Endo (Tsuchiya). Japanese American Nurseries, n.d. 

UC Berkeley College of Chemistry. “Berkeley Chemistry: 1868 to the Present.” Berkeley College of 
                Chemistry: History, n.d. https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/berkeley-chemistry-1868-to-present.

Whaley, Derek. “Curiosities: The Beach before the Boardwalk.” Santa Cruz Trains (blog), December 10, 2020. 

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Location: Fremont, CA, USA

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