The Spooky Cabin Across Clear Creek

Ghosts of Halloween Past | The Brookdale Years

An abandoned cabin, a childhood paradise, and a mystery that has stayed with me for more than fifty years.

A Little Paradise in the Redwoods

When I was a little girl in the 1970s, I lived in a place called Brookdale, tucked into the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

It was, quite simply, paradise.

Our little red cabin belonged to a collection of cabins owned by the historic Brookdale Lodge. They were scattered beneath towering redwoods, connected by dirt pathways and little wooden footbridges crossing Clear Creek.

We lived in Cabin 5.

It was a tiny, one-bedroom cabin, probably no more than 500 or 600 square feet, with two little covered patios overlooking the creek.

The ground sloped gently toward the water, and the paths between the cabins were lined with rock boarders. Ferns grew beneath the redwoods, and sunlight filtered through the enormous trees.

I had my own Thinking Rock beside the creek, where I would sit and ponder whatever a little girl finds worth pondering.

There was even a little pathway bordered by stone boarder that led to a small circle, also outlined with rocks. I remember running down that path and spinning around inside the circle, delighted with my discovery.

I didn't know the word enchantment then.

I only knew that every day was a wonderful day to be alive.

We children had the entire forest for our playground.

We climbed rocks, explored trails, wandered down to the San Lorenzo River to swim at our little beach, and played in the creek. We didn't have much money, but we had imagination, freedom, and more adventures than we knew what to do with.

It was a beautiful place to grow up.

Except for one thing.

The Spooky Cabin across the creek.

Directly across Clear Creek from our cabin stood an enormous old cabin.

Unlike the little one-bedroom cabins where most of us lived, this one was huge. It was nearly as large as another enormous cabin nearby that housed a family with several children.

But there was one very important difference.

This one was abandoned...

Not once, during all the time I lived in Brookdale, did anyone live there.

And that was strange.

Every other cabin in our little community had people coming and going. Children played on the porches, parents went about their daily lives, and neighbors crossed the bridges to visit one another.

But this cabin remained empty, dark, with some windows boarded up...

It wasn't falling down. It wasn't some crumbling ruin with a collapsed roof and broken walls.

It was simply neglected.

The few unboarded windows were dirty and difficult to see through. I remember beautiful doors with multiple little panes of glass, possibly French doors. Sometimes we would peek through them, trying to see what was inside.

There were things hanging in there, cobwebs, and the sort of accumulated dust that comes from a place being left alone.

But we never saw much.

The cabin always seemed dark.

And there was something about it that none of us liked.

I don't remember any adult warning us to stay away. Nobody told us a frightening story about the house. Nobody said it was haunted.

We children simply didn't want to go near it.

And that was unusual for us.

We were the sort of children who explored everything. Give us an abandoned building, a mysterious trail, or an old wooden bridge, and ordinarily we'd be daring one another to investigate.

But not this place.

There was something about that cabin that made us kids feel uneasy.

I remember feeling as though a dark cloud hung over it.

And for reasons I still cannot explain, I had the distinct feeling that it was haunted.

It was simply a feeling I had as a child.

But it was a powerful one.

And I never forgot it.

The Ketchup Incident

One of my strangest memories of the cabin began with something completely ordinary.

Ketchup.

Yes, ketchup.

We had just moved to Brookdale when my mother was making dinner and discovered that we were out of ketchup.

So she sent me to borrow some from the neighbors.

She pointed toward the big cabin across the creek.

We did not realize it was abandoned, since we had just moved there.

Off I went.

I crossed the creek and walked up to the back door of that enormous house.

Even as a child, I remember feeling uncomfortable approaching it.

But my mother had sent me on an errand, and I was going to do what she'd asked.

So I knocked.

And waited.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

Still nothing.

But a feeling of dread I felt, as I stood there waiting for someone to answer the door, as the twilight evening approched

There was no sound of footsteps, no voice calling from inside, no indication that anyone was home.

Just silence.

Eventually, I gave up and went back to tell my mother that nobody had answered.

It was shortly later that I learned the cabin was actually abandoned.

Looking back, I find the whole thing rather funny.

Of all the reasons to approach a house that frightened me, I went there looking for ketchup.

But I can still remember standing at that door.

And I can still remember the feeling of dread and how much I wanted to leave.

When I got home, I told my mother that the house gave me a bad feeling, and thank God nobody had answered.

Because I was convinced that if someone had opened that door, they would have given us blood instead of ketchup!

Such was my imagination as a child.

The Ouija Board on the Bridge

Now, you might think that a group of children who were frightened of an abandoned cabin would have the good sense not to encourage anything supernatural.

You would be wrong.

We were children, after all.

And we had imaginations.

One afternoon, a girlfriend and I decided that we wanted to play with a Ouija board, since it was nearing Halloween.

There was only one problem.

We didn't have one.

And we certainly didn't have the money to go out and buy one.

So we made our own.

Near the abandoned cabin was one of the wooden footbridges crossing Clear Creek. It was the bridge closer to Highway 9, near my Thinking Rock.

There was a flat wooden surface on the bridge, and I took a rock and began scratching letters into the wood.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G...

The entire alphabet.

Then we added YES and NO.

For our planchette—the little pointer that supposedly moves around a Ouija board—we improvised with sticks.

And there we were.

Two little girls in the middle of the redwoods, crouched over a homemade Ouija board carved into a bridge, trying to contact spirits.

At some point, we became convinced it was working.

"Oh my God! It's working! It's working!"

I honestly don't remember whether the sticks moved or exactly what happened.

I only remember that we managed to scare ourselves silly.

And naturally, our thoughts turned to the abandoned cabin.

Maybe something really was haunting that old place!

Of course, we had no idea whether anything supernatural was happening.

We were just two imaginative little girls having an adventure.

But I have to laugh when I think about it now.

We couldn't afford a real Ouija board, so we carved one into a bridge with a rock.

That's what childhood was like for us.

If we wanted something badly enough, we figured out how to make it ourselves.

Even if what we made ended up frightening us half to death.

Fifty Years Later — The Mystery Remains

I lived in Brookdale during some of the happiest years of my childhood.

I remember the little country store, the post office where we collected our mail, the redwood trees, the creek, the bridges, and the beautiful cabins tucked into the forest.

I remember my friends, the adventures we invented, and the freedom of spending entire days outdoors.

I remember the enormous cabin filled with children that had a wraparound porch where we played Red Light, Green Light, and the rope swing that carried us high above the creek.

There was so much life in that little community.

And yet, right in the middle of it all, stood that one enormous, empty cabin.

Over the years, I occasionally wondered what had become of it.

Had someone finally moved in? Had it been renovated like the other cabins? Or had it disappeared altogether?

Recently, while researching my childhood home in Brookdale, I decided to look for the cabin on Google Maps.

And what I discovered astonished me.

More than fifty years later, the cabin is still standing abandonded.

And from the photographs, it looks remarkably similar to the way I remember it as a child.

The windows still appear boarded up. The building still looks neglected. And although I don't know what may have happened there during the intervening decades, it certainly looks as abandoned today as it did when I was a little girl.

I find that extraordinary.

Here is this enormous old building in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains, surrounded by redwoods, in an area where even a tiny cottage can rent for nearly $2,000 a month. What could possibly keep someone from renovating it and renting it for a small fortune???

And yet, there it stands.

Looking much as it did more than fifty years ago.

I couldn't help remembering how the feeling of dread that cabin that house felt to me as a child.

The dark windows.

The silence.

That peculiar feeling that something about the place was not quite right.

That we were being watched by some dark energy.

And not one of us kids would even dare the others to find a way in to the abandoned cabin and explore it

And now, after all these years, I find myself asking the same questions I wondered about as a little girl.

Who lived there before?

Why did they leave?

What happened there that left that dark energy that hung over the spooky cabin?

Why did the cabin remain abandoned when the others around it were lived in?

And why did we children, who were afraid of almost nothing in those woods, and yet, instinctively avoid that one place?

I still don't know.

I don't know whether the cabin was haunted.

I don't know whether anything terrible ever happened there.

And I don't know why, more than fifty years later, it still appears to be sitting there, untouched by time.

But I know what I remember.

A little red cabin beside Clear Creek.

A childhood filled with wonder.

A forest that felt like paradise.

And directly across the water, one enormous, silent house that never seemed to belong to the world around it.

Everything around that cabin felt alive.

The cabin didn't.

The Brookdale Years | Ghosts of Halloween Past

Some childhood memories fade. Others remain, waiting beneath the redwoods.