The Davis-Horton House Museum isn’t just haunted. It’s said to be home to the ghost of a German spy. Other spirits linger in the oldest remaining building in downtown San Diego, including a ghost cat. But before we get to the hauntings, let’s take a quick look at the home’s history and how you can help keep this museum open.
From 1913 to 1915, hunters and railroad men near Fish Creek, about 40 miles west of Missoula, Montana, reported eerie encounters with the spirit of a weeping woman. She became known as the Fish Creek Ghost and may be one of the earliest spirits ever captured on camera in the United States.
On January 26, 1882, a small article appeared on page three of the Reno Gazette-Journal. The headline read, “A Haunted Car.” It described eerie encounters that Wells, Fargo & Co. messengers had with a haunted Wells Fargo train car. That car, Express Car No. 5, regularly ran between San Francisco and Ogden. Express cars carried gold, silver, and other valuables. Armed messengers guarded them, much like today’s armored trucks. But this one had a problem.
October 8th, 1976, started like any other normal day for the Skoog family, who lived near the small town of Otterbein, Indiana. Norman Skoog and his family ran a farm, tending to acres of corn ready for harvest. While his 16-year-old son, Curtis, mowed the grass, Norman was out in the fields with his combine. Around 5:30 p.m., he spotted a cardboard box lying in the corn, about nine rows deep. At first, he assumed one of his kids had left it there, but when he tried to move it, he realized it was too heavy to lift. That box held a mystery that would haunt Benton County for decades—the case of Benton County Jane Doe.
Not all hauntings are human. Some arrive with a spectral purr. Throughout history, people have viewed cats as omens and protectors. Ghostly cats appear in haunted lore, wandering through historic inns and eerie lighthouses. These cats continue to roam long after their nine lives end.
As a weird kid growing up in the ’80s, Unsolved Mysteries gave me completely unrealistic expectations about the frequency of amnesia and spontaneous human combustion. Every book on strange and unusual deaths featured the same haunting images. Burned bodies with only a single leg remaining. Two names appeared the most: Dr. John Irving Bentley and Helen Conway. Before their deaths, a woman named Mary Hardy Reeser met a similar fate. She died in July 1951, leaving behind a mystery that captured national attention. Unlike Bentley and Conway, newspapers covered her case in remarkable detail.