MENDOCINO CO., 10/25/26 — On the last night of their stay at the Mendocino Hotel, a man got out of bed for a glass of water and found a woman standing in the room. She was tall, she wore a pale nightgown, and she was facing the bed. Then she was gone. He said he felt “a cold energy rush through him and out through the balcony door.”
The couple told the story to Rob Hawthorn, who leads the Kelley House Museum’s Haunted Mendocino walking tours and writes about the town’s ghosts for the museum. A year after that night, Hawthorn wrote in 2024, they were back at the hotel with motion sensors and infrared cameras. While they were at dinner, the man’s phone flagged movement in their room. The camera showed two pale orbs that floated in, hovered and left by the balcony door. The app labeled them “PERSON.”
Hawthorn had told the man he thought most orbs on video were “moths or dust particles.” He wrote that these didn’t move like either.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether ghosts exist or not. I’m fascinated by the stories,” Hawthorn wrote this fall. He has collected more than 100 of them from across California, he wrote.
The hotel’s other guests
In April 2019, a group called Paranormal Investigations: Team Mendocino ran an overnight ghost hunt at the hotel. Its listing put a woman in “turn of the century clothes” at two tables in the dining room. Upstairs, in a room the listing gave as “Room 16 and 7?” a woman with “Cameo type hair” “enters and leaves through the walls.” The upper hallway had the sounds of a little girl and a dog.
The boy in Room 4
Across the street from the Kelley House, the MacCallum House Inn has a ghost with a name.
“According to Mendocino town lore, Donald MacCallum … has never truly left the second floor of the MacCallum House Inn,” the California Association of Boutique & Breakfast Inns said in a 2012 release on haunted inns. The lore puts him in Room 4, “the bedroom where he slept from the time he was an infant.”
The museum’s records give Donald a different start. He was born in 1880 in the Kelley House, where the young family lived with his grandparents, according to the museum. In 1882 they moved across the street into the house his grandfather built for them. Donald was about 2.
The ship in the blow hole
On Nov. 28, 1855, a heavy swell rolled into Mendocino Bay on a clear, calm day and tore three moored ships loose, according to the Kelley House Museum, which drew on an 1855 newspaper report. Two brigs broke up on the shore. The sea drove the Chilean schooner La Paz across the bay into a sea cave known as the blow hole. It struck the entrance and washed back out twice. The third time it went all the way in, and “nothing of her was ever seen again.”
The captain’s young wife and children were aboard and drowned in the cabin, along with two of the crew. The captain himself had drowned at Big River about three weeks before.
“Many accounts say that one of the survivors was a baby,” the museum wrote. In that telling, the mother tied her child into a chopping bowl and dropped it into the bay, and the bowl washed near shore. The museum opens its account with a question: “Are they true?”
Divers who went into the cave in 1966 found a chamber with a domed ceiling at the far end. “This probably traps the air and causes the interesting, rumbling sounds,” diver Ed Braly said, according to the museum. The museum adds the other view: “Others believe those sounds come from the ghost of the ship’s wooden carcass, scraping against the walls of its rocky tomb.”
The ghost at the top of the stairs
Hawthorn’s collecting started at home. When he moved to Mendocino in 1995, he lived in a two-story Victorian with a water tower, built before 1880. His mother-in-law sensed a “mysterious presence” at the top of the stairwell, so he announced himself at the bottom step every time he went up.
“I didn’t know if there was a ghost in the house, but I saw no harm in making sure I didn’t surprise it,” he wrote.
The household decided the spirit was female and “did not like other women.”
“Multiple visitors tumbled down the steps claiming to have been pushed,” he wrote.
The museum has three more Haunted Mendocino tours this week: Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 5 p.m., and Saturday, Oct. 31, at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tours leave from the museum at 45007 Albion St. in Mendocino. Tickets are $15 to $25 at kelleyhousemuseum.org.
Over the hill
Posts on ghost-listing websites put a woman in a white dress on the third floor of the Thatcher Hotel in Hopland, which William Thatcher established in 1890, according to the hotel. The hotel’s own site doesn’t name a ghost. Its Halloween party, “Spirits & Spirits,” runs from 7 to 11 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31, at 13401 Highway 101: “Come in costume, as we share haunted stories and sip special brews & cocktails.”
The Boonville Hotel’s ghost comes from an anonymous TripAdvisor review posted in 2012 under the title “Haunted Hotel.” The reviewer heard boot heels in the upstairs hallway and the rustle of heavy canvas, and pictured “a cowboy wearing a stiff full-length duster.” The footsteps stopped between Rooms 3 and 5. No key, no luggage, no breathing.
The hotel’s website doesn’t mention him. The reviewer did: “Some regulars know about him, and he doesn’t bother a soul.”
The old hotel was torn down and rebuilt in the 1980’s so why are the ghosts still there?
Where else are they gonna go?