TALES OF THE CRYPTIC : Halloween Is Business as Usual for Three Businesses With Their Own Part-Time Ghosts

Many restaurants have a problem with disappearing silverware. But not the McCharles House, at least in its early months.

In fact, the opposite was true. Ornate antique teaspoons--in patterns never before seen by the owners--kept turning up mysteriously in the dishwasher and in silverware trays at the restaurant, which is set in a century-old home on a shady side street in Tustin.

There were other odd silverware-related incidents at the McCharles House, one of several Orange County restaurants and businesses where the traditional observance of Halloween takes on a slightly different dimension, for those who know the stories.

The McCharles House was built in 1885 by D. L. McCharles, a carpenter who later became the city’s township justice. It stayed in the family for many years, but it passed through several other hands before it was bought by the Heredia family. It was used briefly as a consignment antique and gift shop before mother and daughter Audrey and Vivian Heredia decided to open a restaurant and bake shop specializing in serving in authentic Victorian-style tea.

Audrey and Vivian say they sought to “create a place where we would want to go,” and they filled the restaurant with antique furnishings and traditional Victorian-style decor. Both say they are not superstitious but that they began to notice a few strange occurrences soon after opening in 1985.

Sometimes, when they would do their final walk-through of the restaurant before opening for the day, they would find knives, forks and spoons in disarray on the tables. The restaurant staff would swear they had straightened the settings, so it became a running joke that a “ghost” was causing the disturbances.

Then one day, a man and woman were lunching together in one of the upstairs rooms. A woman at another table left to use the restroom and returned to find her silverware gone. She asked a waitress, who said she had not removed the setting--and the man at the next table reported that “a woman in a long dress came and took the silver.” No one on the staff was wearing a long dress that day.

Still, Vivian Heredia remained the skeptic, until one day when she was upstairs with a waitress straightening the tables before opening. Both had turned to descend the stairs when they heard a clatter behind them--and they turned to see the just-straightened silverware in disarray again. “I don’t think I’ve ever come down the staircase so fast,” Vivian recalls.

“The people who resisted (believing in ghosts) the most,” Audrey says, “had the most tricks played on them.”

Vivian’s upstairs incident was one of the last. Since early 1986, the forces that played with the McCharles House table settings have been quiet. The only acknowledgment of the spirit world comes around Halloween, and in a somewhat more traditional manner: fall decorations, pumpkin cake and pie, pumpkin-shaped scones with tea, and some of the biggest, most decadent caramel apples imaginable.

But, Vivian says of the resident McCharles House spirit, “you missed it after a while.” And, she says, the spirit--or whatever it was--was never a negative presence. “This house always had a good feeling,” Vivian says.

Another old house that is now the site of a restaurant is the Hacienda Restaurant in Santa Ana. It began inauspiciously in 1910 as a garage and small apartment, built by the Strange family. The subsequent owners, the Briscos, enlarged it into the sprawling manor that survives today, calling it “Casa Contenta” (Spanish for “Happy House”).

Since 1979, the building has housed a restaurant serving Southwestern cuisine, and it is a popular spot for weddings. But owner June Neptune says there is something eerie about one door at the bottom of a set of stairs--a heavy door that is always latched.

“It happens every once in a while,” Neptune says. “This door will just open for no reason at all, and everyone just freaks when this happens.”

The door has a habit of opening when the restaurant is closed, and when one of the managers is on duty alone. “It’s usually around 4 o’clock (in the afternoon), and when everything is real quiet here,” Neptune says. “When that door opens you can hear it, because it has a creak to it.”

Neptune has no explanation for the creaking door, but she notes that, according to local legend, a baby died in one of the upstairs rooms of what is now the restaurant.

Mysterious happenings aren’t confined to old buildings. The tenants of Franciscan Plaza in San Juan Capistrano--a city full of ghost stories--claim they found themselves with a particularly active poltergeist even before the first phase of the shopping complex opened in late 1989.

Although the shopping plaza, which includes a cinema complex, is new, it was built over some Mission-era ruins (although rumors that it was built over an Indian burial ground appear to be without foundation). The complex was delayed by several months of archeological exploration on the site, and local preservationists protested the construction.

The strange goings-on started in a bookstore--a murder mystery bookstore, no less. Owner Dick Hart says he had some problems as he was trying to get the Greendoor Mystery Bookstore ready for opening.

“Books kept falling to the floor,” says Hart, who claims that it happened some 15 times while he was in the store alone. He would be working in one part of the store, then return to another only to find that books that had been packed tightly onto the middle of shelves had somehow popped out.

At first he thought it might be construction next door, but he found there had been no work going on during the occurrences. He thought vibrations from the nearby train tracks might be the culprit, but he had to discount that possibility too.

Finally, he decided that the shelves, which had been custom-made for the store, were sagging and somehow squeezing out the books in the middle--although he could not detect a sag. He called out the shelf-maker, who reinforced all the shelves in the store with oak supports.

Still, books kept dropping out. “It still continued, and nobody believed me,” Hart says. Then, one day after the shop had opened, a book fell onto the head of a customer, with Hart and another of the plaza’s merchants as witnesses.

Things started dropping off the shelves of other businesses in the plaza too, including two restaurants and a candy shop. One was Fritzell’s, which specializes in authentic Austrian bratwurst.

“We had some things happen in here that aren’t really explainable,” says Pam Farnham, owner of Fritzell’s. For one, the water in the sink has been known to turn itself on. But the most common event has to do with a single bottle of nonalcoholic beer that somehow falls from a glass shelf six feet high onto the hard tile floor--without breaking.

“My back is always to the shelves when this happens,” says Farnham, who adds that she hears the bottle land. “We can’t figure out why the bottle doesn’t break.”

Both Farnham and Hart say they do not normally take much of an interest in supernatural matters. “I’m not a superstitious person, but it really caught my interest,” Farnham says. “I never have stuff like that happen to me.”

Both say also that the strange occurrences stopped a few months after the plaza opened.

A postscript: Last Halloween, a Saddleback College student who’d caught wind of the happenings at the mystery bookstore came down to tape a video there for a class project, including a re-enactment of the book dropping on the customer’s head.

The student did his work, left, and later that night someone broke into his car. According to Hart, the only thing taken was the unmarked videotape--the valuable video equipment was untouched.

Editor’s note: Know any good ghost stories? OC Live! is already collecting tales for next year’s Halloween edition. Please write to: OC Live! Ghost Stories, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa 92626.