Haunted California Castle holds weekend guest captive

Ken Nelson, of Nelson's Lock & Key in Pacifica, got an unusual call Sunday, April 29. Could he come over to the 1908-built Sam's Castle in Pacifica and unlock the door that had kept a young man trapped in the old castle's downstairs water closet for the past hour and a half? The problem was while the door was definitely sealed shut, there was no lever or latch to physically lock the door.

This was the weekend that the Pacifica Historical Society (PHS) was hosting one of its extremely popular castle tours. These castle tours — where members of PHS dress up as some of the well known locals that have walked and/or lived within the interior of the castle, folks like Henry Harrison McCloskey and his wife Emily (who were the builders of this new world Scottish castle), infamous abortionist Dr. Galen Richard Hickok who became a San Quentin resident and the castle's "Madam" who ran a speakeasy during the Roaring Twenties — are fundraisers in support of the Little Brown Church Pacifica Museum Center (http://pacificahistory.org/little-brown-church/).

The 90-minute tours brought patrons through the castle from 9:45 a.m. until 3:45 p.m.


"Unbeknownst to any of us, one of our guests had apparently been locked in the bathroom for quite some time," said Pacifica Historical Society President Kathleen Manning, who immediately got on the phone to the locksmith once the situation was revealed. "There is no window in the room so there was no way to get him a tool to take the door off its hinges. And the lock itself, which did not have a latch, was an old-fashioned lock which requires a skeleton key. Thankfully our captive remained in good spirits." Locksmith and long-time Pacifican Ken Nelson said the situation was unusual. (Nelson took over Cliff Cottrell's Lock & Key in January of 2011. "My dad and Cliff were buddies when they were kids," Nelson said.) "I would have liked to have spent more time looking at that lock, because there has got to be a logical reason why it did what it did," Nelson said.

For a while there was some thought of cutting the moulding back on the antique door to release the room's captive. But in the end, Nelson was able to slip a credit card under the door and the castle's prisoner was able to get out.

"And all the while there were a few freelance ghost hunters roaming the castle with portable ectoplasm detectors which apparently were firing up like crazy near the bathroom," Manning said.

As it turns out, the man locked in the room without the lock was Camden Swita, Editor of Pacifica Patch. The fact that a journalist was locked in a lockless castle room was of particular interest to me, as I have experienced a number of "locked" camera reactions when visiting the castle for Pacifica Tribune write-ups. The first time this happened was during an official Ghost Explorers (www.ghostexplorers.org) investigation on July 3, 2010. My trusty Olympus mostly didn't work, then went right back to normal the moment the castle was in the distance — this has become typical of castle reporting.

"Our locksmith told us the lock mechanism was good for another 100 years," Manning said adding that further paranormal investigation might be warranted.

As to Swita's take on the incident, the Pacifica Patch Editor said, "There's no other explanation besides a haunting."

The next Pacifica Historical Society castle tours will be offered Friday and Saturday, Aug. 3-4.

[Mercury News]