Objectively, if you know I’m writing about ghosts then just the ironic use of the name “Sunnyvale” sounds like it should be especially creepy. Alas, unless you have an aversion to suburbs, egregious real estate pricing, or tech startups, the city of Sunnyvale, California isn’t particularly terrifying. But there are a few true ghost stories that I can tell which take place in this unassuming burb.

If you’re familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area, and the South Bay in particular then you may already be familiar with the history of Sunnyvale. Before it was “Silicon Valley,” the Santa Clara valley was regarded through most of the 20^th century as “The Valley of Hearts Delight” owing to its expansive orchards of apricots, cherries, plums, and just about anything else you can think of. Only a few reminders of its agricultural past remain today – Gilroy still clings to its garlic dominance, and a few heritage orchards remain in Los Altos and Sunnyvale. For the most part, though, the trees and fields were paved over in the name of progress.

But some things don’t disappear quite that easily.

One notably haunted destination in Sunnyvale was the Toys “R” Us on El Camino Real and Sunnyvale-Saratoga Road. Paranormal researchers throughout the 70’s and 80’s descended on the toy store seeking to prove the existence of ghosts or increase ratings or whatever. Through the joy of YouTube there’s a few wonderful 80’s-tastic gems to sort through like this Leonard Nimoy narrated clip from “Real Ghosts” or this segment from “That’s Incredible!” The recreations alone are worth the price of admission. Psychic Sylvia Browne performs a number of seances in the stores over the years with varying levels of terrible haircuts and the tale she recited back sounds ridiculous enough that I’m not going to put it here – you can read it for yourself here, or here at Snopes. Or, seriously, watch the “Real Ghosts” recreation. OMG, I’m not overselling this – it’s hilarious. All of this is to say this Toys “R” Us developed a bit of ghostly notoriety.

And I worked there.

Okay, not for a long period of time, but in my short tenure I experienced a terror that makes the undead seem like a Sunday picnic in the park: Alvin and the Chipmunks “The Chipmunks Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” played on repeat, every day. Yeah, it was Christmas and I needed to make some money while on college break. Oh, and if Alvin repeatedly decrying his unrequited desire for a hula hoop wasn’t terrifying enough, the must-have gift of this particular Christmas was the talking Barney the Purple Dinosaur. Tell me that hell doesn’t sound more appealing than that and I will tell you that you have no soul.

Taken during a seance in the Toys “R” Us. The figure in back by light wasn’t actually in the room when this picture was taken. He was looking for Barney Dolls.

Going into it, I had heard the lore. I’d heard that every morning the opening shift started their day by picking up the stuffed animals the ghost had played with during the night. I’d seen the séance picture with the supposed ghost leaning invisibly against a wall and realized that was right about where I sat while I filled out my application.  Still, the job seemed tolerable and maybe I’d get some good ghost stories to tell.

I was wrong. Well, about the tolerable part, at least. I can say without hesitation it was the worst place I’ve ever worked. The customers were… well, harried Christmas-shopping parents, but the real drain was my fellow co-workers, all of which had a sob story about how terrible their lives were and just didn’t give a crap. Theirs was a collective psychic morass I felt pulling me down into while the chipmunks sang about planes that loop and that aforementioned goddamned hula hoop.

So about the ghost, I’d been told that there was a section of the storeroom that felt cold and you felt like someone was watching you. I wasn’t told where it was, though. Let me digress a moment and tell you what passed for customer service: I was instructed by my manager that when a customer asked if we had stock on a certain toy in the back our procedure was to tell the customer I’d go check on that. Once I passed through the swinging black doors into the storeroom I was to just stand around for a few minutes before coming back out and telling the customer I was sorry but we were all out. Procedure. This happened a lot. Particularly for Barney dolls. After the fourth or fifth time I decided to use my time productively and actually wandered around the darkened storeroom looking for said toy (imagine that!). I never found Barney, but I found the haunted section pretty damn quickly. It was on the second floor of the storeroom where the Barbie Dolls were kept. The temperature indeed dropped noticeably in this area and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. The storeroom during this time was relatively deserted – just a few other employees standing idly near the doors “looking” for stock. But up there in the unnaturally cold area you knew you weren’t alone.

I didn’t stay there long – by which I mean both that haunted area and Toys “R” Us in general – I lasted two weeks (hey, on my third day my manager had me training a new(er) employee, so I was clearly on the fast track!). I felt kind of ripped off that I never got to experience faucets turning on by themselves in the bathroom, but it was a small price to pay to escape Alvin and the Chipmunks with some sanity intact. The store went through a massive remodeling recently, and I don’t know whether the ghost is still at it, though I’d read somewhere that the Petco in the same shopping center had been experiencing some unexplained phenomena. I can only hope that the Toys “R” Us ghost finally found peace and left that terrible, terrible soundtrack.

A few years later I started dating a woman whose parents lived just a half mile away. I don’t know whether or not their property was originally part of the Murphy farm that spawned the Toys “R” Us ghost, but if it wasn’t this former orchard-land certainly was a close neighbor. The woman I was dating at the time, Anna, and I would eventually marry and divorce, but that’s a different story (filled with ghosts, I should add!). In those early days of our relationship we were sleeping in her room at the back of the house. Her parents and brother were away on vacation, and we were sleeping in one Saturday. On the other side of the wall where her bed was positioned was the spigot and hose used to water the garden – and there was a lot to water. Her parents filled the backyard with a dozen or so rose bushes, dahlias, sweet peas, and several citrus trees. When everything was in bloom you’d be hard pressed to find a more Edenic place. Anna had been given extensive instructions for how to water the yard, and she was starting to move to climb out of bed to do just that when we heard the spigot separated by just the wall turn on with a deliberate creak. The sound of water rushing through the hose could be heard as well as the splashing of water out the diffuser nozzle. And then the sound of the water streaming from the nozzle began to move. We listened carefully, frozen with fear as the nozzle watered each rose bush in turn, then moved around the yard to each potted plant and tree. After a few minutes, when everything had been sufficiently watered the nozzle returned to where it had started and the spigot creaked closed again.

Hardly believing what we had just heard, we both rushed through the house, first checking the front door – locked still. Then out into the backyard. As we expected, every bush and tree had been perfectly watered, and the hose coiled neatly by the spigot. We checked the gates leading to the backyard to see if anyone had come in unexpectedly from those points. Both 8-foot tall gates were padlocked closed from the inside – someone on the driveway couldn’t even have reached the lock even if they had a key. No, we were alone and we had one less chore to do that day.

There’s one other story I have that takes place in Sunnyvale, but for that one I need to gather some testimony. That particular building is no longer there along the railroad tracks and I only hope its former ghosts aren’t currently haunting the condos that replaced the old building. No, actually I hope the ghosts are still there just to piss off the homeowners association.

I’m starting 31 Ghosts with a true story.

I’ve always been interested in the paranormal and especially in ghosts. My sister Jill and I had both experienced unexplained steps up and down the stairway in the middle of the night in the old house on a hill we lived in years before. Then there were the ghosts that violently slammed the doors in the building along the railroad tracks our dad had run his business from. All of this was before October 1, 1991.

October 1st has become a bittersweet day for me because while it marks the start of my beloved October, it also marks the anniversary of the day my dad died. That morning I started the day in school and after saying goodbye to his body at El Camino hospital I returned to school to get my books. I remember teachers saying, “Take the time you need,” and I remember saying “Oh, I’m fine, I’ll probably be back in a day or so…”

I was out at least a week.

The days passed in a blur of grief, coping, and lots of crying. There were a few moments that still stand out from that blur and this is one of them. It was early afternoon a few days later. Jill and I came out of the kitchen into the foyer by the front door of our house. To our left, our black cat Annie was starting down the hallway from my parents’ bedroom. Directly ahead, Mariah, our long-haired Himalayan cat, lazed on top of the stereo cabinet in the family room.

Annie caught our attention as he (yes, Annie was a “he” – that’s another story) tensed, turned slowly and arched his back, hair standing on end staring down the empty hallway in the direction of my parents’ door. Aside from Annie, the hallway was empty. Annie didn’t hiss, but still at full alert, backed slowly down the hallway towards us. He was tracking something.

Jill looked at me and said, “Are you seeing this?”

“Yes,” was all I could say. This wasn’t footsteps in the night, or a door slamming on the other side of a deserted building – this was right in front of us, and it was moving our way.

Annie had backed into the foyer by this point and the object of his attention moved into the family room in front of us. Mariah now saw the same object and immediately arched her back and her hair, too, stood on end (and if you’ve never seen a long-haired cat’s hair on end, it’s pretty funny in and of itself). Both cats were triangulating the same empty spot in space. Both cats attention remained focused on the spot as it moved deeper into the family room. It crossed the room to the spot on the couch where my dad used to sit (all dad’s have their “spot,” don’t they?). When it reached that spot, the cats both cautiously relaxed, their hair settling down.

“Dad’s here,” Jill said.

I nodded.

He didn’t manifest like that again for us. I don’t presume to know what happens to us after we die, but I found out later that we all had had similar dreams on about the same night a few weeks later involving my dad. In mine I came out of my room and poured myself a bowl of cereal before school. Mom was in the kitchen, and Jill was already at the breakfast table. My dad came out of his room, kissed my mom, and said goodbye to my sister and I – it wasn’t anything unusual, just a regular weekday morning farewell. But he was healthy. He stood in full health, not hobbled by surgeries or wracked by chemo. He smiled and we smiled back. And then he opened the front door and he left.

PS.
Writing this reminded me of one a particularly kind gesture. My dear friend Sarah’s mom, Pat, was the one who picked Jill and me up from school that October 1 after my dad had died. She dropped us off at the hospital and then went to our house where she removed all the reminders of the years-long struggle against cancer. When we got home later that afternoon all the pills, the bandages, the IV tree, the hospital bed that had dominated the family room for long weeks, they were gone. The house felt… normal. And because of that extraordinary gesture we were able to start moving forward instead of focusing on reminders of the immediate struggle. I had no reference at the time, and it’s only through the lens of the intervening years I’ve grown to understand how unbelievably kind and magnanimous that act was. I’m so thankful to Pat for that.