Giving Up the Ghosts

John Beck’s first hint that his peculiar house has a peculiar history came from a neighbor with a story about the building’s lack of corners. Built in 1940, it has curved walls, the neighbor informed him, so that spirits have no place to hide.

Then there was the former tenant who stopped by with tales about lights coming on untouched, and another neighbor who swore she once visited a woman in the house only to learn later that her hostess had died a few weeks before.

And how to explain the craftsman who came recently to bid on replacing rain gutters but left spooked by uneasy feelings and the gargoyle on the balcony roof?

“I told him--just joking--that it was to keep evil spirits away,” said Beck, who owns Comicmania, a collectibles store in Fullerton. “He was a really superstitious guy and wanted to know why we had evil spirits. The house does freak a lot of people out for some reason.”

Beck has spun the neighborhood lore into O. Henry-style tales of tragic love and death--some embellished and some with whole fictions added--in invitations to the annual Halloween bash he has thrown since he bought the house in 1995. He’s expecting more than 300 guests this year. But friends less enamored with unexplained bumps in the night have told him they won’t come. The stories are just too haunting.

Stories of Beck’s house are part of Orange County’s folklore, tales that help define local histories--and tell where the bodies are.

In South County, some people believe that an apparition walks the old section of San Juan Capistrano. And in Placentia, people hear the ghostly echoes of the Grass Eaters.

“You’d call them a cult by today’s parlance,” said Cecil Rospaw, former editor and publisher of the now-defunct Courier newspaper his family owned in Placentia. “They were vegetarians, and if you think about the turn of the century, that would make them eccentric.”

So did their habit of wandering Placentia in toga-style robes and their house, which, like Beck’s, was built without corners.

The Grass Eaters were farmers who helped propagate fruit and nut trees, but most local people considered them odd and kept their distance, Rospaw said. Once word got out that the Grass Eaters wrapped their dead in white robes and buried them on the property, stories emerged about shrouded ghosts haunting Palm Drive.

“It’s the burying that got to people,” Rospaw said. “People got all excited about that.”

Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at UC Berkeley, said a hallmark of local legends is that they are told as true tales, “which always makes them scarier than other kinds of stories.”

“Ghosts are often returnees from the dead and very often associated with particular places, often near where they lived,” he said.

Such themes permeate popular culture, from movies such as “The Amityville Horror” to William Kennedy’s novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ironweed,” in which ghosts touch the lives of fleshier characters.

“The legends are always localized, and folk tales are not,” Dundes said. “They’re set in a particular place.”

Like Mr. Schumacher.

Dave Politte, who owns Roy’s Photo Service on East Commonwealth Avenue in Fullerton, said that he first ran into the apparition he calls Mr. Schumacher shortly after he bought the business, then on North Harbor Boulevard, in the mid-1970s.

“I would be walking through the warehouse, and we’d have rows of shelves that dead-end in a brick wall, and I’d suddenly feel a breeze going by,” he said. “I’d turn and look, and his appearance was always the same: fairly tall, about 6 foot, in a kind of tan heavy overcoat, wearing a hat, like an old detective kind of look.”

Someone who had researched the building’s history told him that a man identified as Mr. Schumacher had hanged himself on the second floor years before.

“It kind of frightened me the first time,” Politte said. “After a while, I just really got the feeling that there was something real about this.

“Later on, I had torn out the warehouse and built a photo lab in where the warehouse was, and I would find myself turning around and he would be standing there. It was kind of like he was approving or disapproving of what I was doing to his building.”

Politte moved his business about seven years ago when the building was condemned and had to be retrofitted to meet earthquake standards. During the construction, he said, Mr. Schumacher would visit his new location.

“I got chills just now,” Politte said. “He’s still with me.”

To Dundes, such legends grow from fear and imagination, the wellsprings of invention.

“We’re all afraid of things,” Dundes said. “We’re afraid of the dark. You put a jacket over a chair before you go to bed, and you wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure. You hear a board squeak, and you think someone’s in the house.”

With news reports telling of true horrors--tragic accidents, stalkings and bone-chilling murders--it’s understandable that human imagination sometimes changes the real into the surreal.

“There are a lot of weirdos out there,” Dundes said. “It’s like the hypochondriac’s epitaph, ‘I told you I was sick.’ There really are people out there out to get you.”