Last night I bartendered for a venue I’ve worked at a number of times. The winery is off of 101, north of Cloverdale up where the freeway devolves into a curvy highway of rolling hills. Coming into town the road narrows and late at night you’d reasonably expect a story about a phantom hitchhiker — this isn’t that story.
I’m not going to say the name of the winery or the town that it’s just outside of, but suffice it to say it’s a fairly notable destination with not just vineyard and a tasting room but sprawling grounds, restored barns, orchards, and even a demonstration kitchen overlooking a pond on the property. You can understand why it’s sought-after for a destination winery wedding even if it’s outside of the traditional Napa/Sonoma region. The grounds are situated just east of the still-tiny Russian River, not too far from its source and were originally part of the land the Pomo Indians inhabited until the Governor of Alta California, Manuel Micheltorena, granted the huge swath to Fernando Feliz in 1844. The Pomo name for the lush valley meant “sweat lodge” because the area held special significance in their spiritual life. For that reason alone, it’s thought that some of the Pomo never left the Sanel Valley. While the Pomo generally lived too far north of the northern-most Spanish Mission in Sonoma to fall under their capture, err, I mean forced conversion and coerced labor, once Feliz took control of the valley he put an end to the Pomo’s use of their ancestral spirit land.
Once you pull off the main road, the driveway winds through vineyards until you reach the main parking lot. From there, it’s a short walk to the tasting room and main barns on the property. Beyond that, though, are a series of lush gardens and orchards. Paths run through the endangered apple and pear orchards as well as the lavender garden, and skirt the vegetable garden, out to a walnut orchard. Within the gardens is a small bar that wedding planners often use for a post-ceremony cocktail hour before guests saunter through another apple orchard to a Tuscan-style garden with pergola and open lawn that’s perfect for dancing. The orchards and gardens are dense, expertly maintained, and absolutely Edenic… while the sun is up.
After the last call and the DJ plays “Don’t Stop Believing,” or “Sweet Caroline” guests almost always file out to a waiting party bus to take them to either an after party or their hotel accommodations – usually bypassing the dark and now-foreboding gardens. Then it’s cleanup and breakdown and the florist vans, rental furniture trucks, and the catering trucks eventually depart. The last of us to leave would wander through the dark, unlit paths of the garden in pairs, if we’re lucky, or more often in my case, alone.
While convenient around the house, nothing demonstrates the utter inadequacy of iPhone flashlights by utter consuming darkness.
My first time working the venue I was tasked with breaking down the cocktail bar in the heart of the dark orchards while the guests danced in the Tuscan garden only a hundred yards away. They might as well have been on the moon. I positioned my iPhone flashlight to be as useful as possible for packing up the glassware and mixers, the light swallowed up beyond my little area. I heard someone coming up the main path, their gait slow but certain moving on the gravel. Despite the warm night, the cicadas in the immediate vicinity fell silent, their buzz replaced by the distant drone of the DJ, sounding even more remote by the immediate lack of noise – except for the footfalls of the visitor coming up the path. I looked up from the little bar and couldn’t see anything beyond the wan light of my phone. I picked it up and shone it as far as it could illuminate the pathway, succeeding mostly in casting eerie shadows of the low overhanging branches and leaves. Empty. I went so far as to take a few tentative steps out of the bar area to throw the flashlight beam further down the pathway – the lane the footfalls had come from just moments before remained bereft of any visible guest. I retreated to my bar and kept working, but now I could feel someone watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, but the fear of chastisement over an unfinished job overrode my fear of an unseen visitor, so I put it out of my head and doubled my efforts to get out of there. A few minutes later I heard footsteps from the direction of the music and moments later one of my coworkers appeared out of the orchard. “Need some help?” “You have no idea.”
Talking to one of the servers, she recounted a time leaving the garden when she distinctly heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, the footsteps stopped. She shone her phone’s light behind her to reveal no one. But the footsteps continued to follow her just out of sight. She started running, and the footsteps receded… and then gained on her. Tired from working, but terrified she picked up the pace and flat sprinted the distance to the welcome lights of the barns. Another coworker said she ended taking a wrong turn and getting lost for twenty minutes in the garden pathways. Despite leaving quite some time after her, I arrived at the parking lot just as she finally managed to get to her car, visibly shaken.
Just last night the guests all occupied themselves on the dancefloor and I had a moment of peace at my bar. But again, that feeling of someone watching me came over me. I turned around… and someone was there – one of the property managers. I laughingly told her I felt someone behind me, and I mentioned that I’ve often felt that in the gardens after dark. She didn’t laugh at that. She recalled a number of different instances of errant guests in the dark catching glimpses of unexplained shadows, or hearing footsteps from empty pathways like I heard. She went on to explain some reports of white figures being spotted in the gardens occasionally. She explained that she locks up the kitchen by the pond after everyone else has left and then always takes a golf cart back to the barns – “I’ve heard and seen too much walking through that orchard at night. I’d much rather go around in the golf cart and leave whatever is in there alone.”
I welcome the next time I work the venue because, from a practical standpoint, it remains one of the best thought-out locations in terms of flow. Also, I’ve upgraded to bringing a bright LED gooseneck light for cleanup and a high-lumen flashlight for the long lonely walk out. But I know that even if I don’t see anyone, I never walk the dark garden paths completely alone.
