If you spend a lifetime around history, you can’t help but experience something paranormal along the way, even if you’re a pragmatist like me. I am not one to see ghosts. I will get an inkling of something once in a while, like the time I was on a ghost hunt with a friend and his group. As I walked down a hallway in an old house supposedly haunted, I felt someone touch the back of my neck with cold fingers…even though there was no one there. I can feel cold spots and get a sense of things being off, but I just don’t have whatever it is that allows a person to actually see ghosts. I’ve spent lots of time in haunted places begging for something to happen and it never did. When I went to England last year to explore the abandoned American air bases from World War II for my book, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, I was told it was inevitable I’d see ghosts because so many men died in crashes at those spots—I saw nothing. At Tibenham, where Stewart was based with 4,000 other guys of the 445th Bomb Group, I was on very spooky ground and I felt the frantic energy of this now quiet and desolate spot, but saw no ghosts. Thirty years ago the old control tower was still standing and supposedly very haunted, but it had been long-ago torn down by the time I got there. Years and years before my visit to England, on the only occasion when I did see a ghost, I wasn’t thinking anything about ghosts at the critical moment, and it took years to figure out what had happened.
Thirty-one years after last setting foot there, Jimmy Stewart returned to Tibenham in 1976 and here leans against the operations building with the control tower behind him. It even looks haunted. By the time I got here, these buildings were long gone, although if you know where to look, spooky old Army structures dot the Tibenham landscape and remain to be explored.
If you’ve read Errol Flynn Slept Here you know the story of the day I saw a ghost while visiting Flynn’s Mulholland Farm. I was so sure I was imagining things that I didn’t talk about the experience, and it was only 15 years later that I learned of Tracy Nelson’s close encounters with Flynn’s ghost in the house. Even then, that’s only two people seeing things, and when Mike Mazzone and I embarked on the writing of EFSH, we thought it would make an interesting one-column sidebar to talk about the legend of the Flynn ghost, as in ha ha ha isn’t this funny?
Then we started to interview inhabitants of the house, including the entire Hamblen family who lived there from 1959 to 1979. These are devout Christians, nationally known, who had a gospel radio show and were close friends of Billy Graham. Suzy Hamblen, matriarch of the Hamblen family and famous wife of Stuart Hamblen, was 100 when Mike and I spoke with her. Her story still gives me goosebumps: The night Flynn died in Vancouver, BC, she and Stuart were in the house he built, a quiet evening, and all of a sudden the pipes in the house started to moan and vibrate. It was as if the very bones of the place were rattling. At least a half-dozen members of this cold-sober family told us about seeing the ghost close up.
The last inhabitants of Mulholland Farm were Rick Nelson and his children, Tracy, Gunnar, and Matthew (the latter two were leaders of the 1980s rock group Nelson). I interviewed both guys and Gunnar told me of crazy experiences in his bedroom that shook him up and still bother him, like the ghost sitting on his bed at some points and slamming doors at others. Interestingly, Matthew didn’t experience these things—and they’re twins! The boys and their band practiced in Flynn’s bedroom, so you can imagine how racket like that would shake up an already restless spirit.
Mulholland Farm from the vantage point where I saw the ghost. If you look at the set of three second-story windows on the right side of the photo, the ghost appeared in the window on the left. I would learn later that this was Errol Flynn’s bedroom.
Here is my story for the record one more time. I was alone at Mulholland Farm high in the Hollywood Hills in 1987, standing outside by the pool one hot afternoon trying to drink in this setting. Before me stood a rambling ranch house, once elegant and now neglected more than a year after the sudden death of Rick Nelson in a plane crash. As I stood there looking, a face appeared in a second-story window and peered out at me. A face and a not-quite-solid form–that of a man. The hairs on my neck stood up, and we stared at each other for a while, and then the face and form were gone. On that occasion the house was locked up tight so it’s not like a resident was checking me out. Not a living resident anyway. Since my rational mind told me I couldn’t have seen what I saw, I kept it to myself all those years until others came forward to say they too saw the face and form…at the top of the stairs, in a bathroom mirror, just everywhere in the house over the years. Was it the ghost of Errol Flynn? Well, I can only answer that by saying that in life, his was one of the more troubled souls on earth, so in death why would it be any different?
The place was torn down the next year, and I have always wondered what happens to a restless spirit when the home he’s so comfortable with, the space he himself designed, is removed. Is its energy left behind so that he keeps seeing the same floor and walls and ceilings? Or does he move into the new house built on the footprint of the old? Next time you run into Justin Timberlake, ask him and let me know, because it’s Timberlake who built his fortified compound at 7700 Mulholland Drive on the spot where once sat the home of the dearly departed Errol Flynn.
Learn more about Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe and Errol Flynn Slept Here at the GoodKnight Books website. And I would love to hear about your close encounters with ghosts; I’m sure you will make me envious.
A 1944 magazine article detailed Flynn’s mountaintop home. In the shot above he sits under the windows where I saw the ghost.
Robert Matzen 