A new guide to all things ghostly in the wine country

By SASHA PAULSEN
Register Features Editor

Just in time for the creepy season (no, we mean Halloween, not the presidential election), Jeff Dwyer has published a handy guide to curdling your blood and raising your hair: “Ghost Hunter’s Guide to California’s Wine Country.” (Pelican).

“The word ghost immediately brings to mind visions of ancient European castles, foggy moors, and dark, wind-swept ramparts where brave knights battled enemies or heroines threw themselves to their deaths,” writes Dwyer, who has previously published ghost hunters guides to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New Orleans and the Seattle area. “The fact is, ghosts are everywhere.”

Especially, it seems, in Napa  and Sonoma, whose lively and passionate pasts seem to inspire the dearly departed to linger, for one reason or another.

“... the wine country, with its quaint towns and villages and old wineries has all the ingredients necessary for successful ghost hunting,” he observes. “For nearly 200 years the region has been a magnet to the world, attracting people from a variety of cultures, who experienced tremendous changes in their lives.”

And many of them are still with us, according to Dwyer.

In the Napa Valley, he found reports that the early great winemakers, Jacob and Frederick Beringer are still lingering around their Rhine House, while across the street the ghost of Charles Krug is watching over his winery, the first to be built in the valley. Others report seeing the ghost of the great Andre Tchelistcheff at his beloved Beaulieu Vineyards.

From madams in Calistoga to cuddling couples at the Cinedome, Dwyer has assembled quite an intriguing lists of apparitions, complete with references, including the Napa Valley Register’s former ace reporter Pat Stanley writing about “the ghost of the second west,” at the Doctor’s Company.

“Visitors to the region’s older wineries and historic buildings often feel the touch or tug of a ghost on their arm or shoulder,” he writers. “Spirits of deceased workers, known as cellar rats, winemakers, or grape farmers may be trying to get living souls to notice them, move out of their way or follow them to an important destination.”

Sonoma County gets the same thorough treatment, including “one of the spookiest graveyards in America,” the Rural Cemetery in Santa Rosa, site “of one of the last vigilante hangings in 1920.” The hanging tree is gone, Dwyer writes, but “it is said that under a full moon, a shadow of the tree appears and the foggy shapes of figures are seen hanging from a branch.”

In addition to providing a meticulously researched compendium of places reported — or likely — to be haunted, Dwyer’s book offers in-depth how-to advice to ghost hunters.

“There are no strict rules or guidelines for successful ghost-hunting,” he writes, “except be patient. Professional ghost hunters sometimes wait several days, weeks or months before achieving contact with a ghost. Others have observed full-body apparitions when they least expected it.”

There are, one learns, two methods to ghost hunting. The  Technical Approach can involve “cameras, electro-magnetic field detectors, digital thermometers, computers, data recorders, and other high-tech gadgets.” The Psychic Approach, less encumbered, relies on “intuition, inner vision or emotional connection with a deceased person, object, place or point of time in history. You don’t have to be a trained psychic to use this approach,” he writes. “All of us have some capacity to tap into unseen dimensions.”

He does also provide advice on what to do once you find a ghost, though just why we would want to is, perhaps, a question left unanswered.

On one hand, travelers who have picked up phantom hitchhikers on the Oakville Crossroads, Yountville Road, or Highway 128 in Anderson Valley, have “suffered no ill effects” when their passengers have suddenly vanished. In Sonoma and Geyserville, however, some observers have been “scared out of their wits” when ghosts of Indian chief and shamans have appeared in several locations, including private homes, parks, vineyards and inns.

The best advice: Take your cue from the ghostly guest. “If you sense your ghost wants you to leave, most hunters believe it is best not to push your luck.”

OK.

“Ghost Hunter’s Guide to California’s Wine Country” is published by Pelican, www.pelicanpub.com, (800) 843-1724.

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009