Glen Tavern Inn

The story

Santa Paula lies in the Santa Clara River Valley of Ventura County, about twelve miles inland from the Pacific. In the early 1900s it was a boomtown of oil and citrus, the headquarters of Union Oil and, around 1910, among the region's quickest-growing towns. Yet it had lacked a proper hotel since fire destroyed the Petrolia Hotel in 1903. A group of leading local businessmen, among them Charles C. Teague, James Sharp and Carlysle Thorpe, formed the Santa Paula Hotel Company to fill the gap; Wikipedia describes the backers as twenty-five townsmen who each put up one thousand dollars.

Architects Sumner Hunt and Silas R. Burns, partners in a Los Angeles practice, designed the building in 1910 as an "English Inn," and the Los Angeles builders Crookshank and Summers completed it in 1911. It went up across from the railroad depot and a block from Main Street, so that passengers on the four daily trains between San Francisco and Los Angeles could step off and check in. Guests included oil and citrus men, tourists visiting the Sulphur Mountain Hot Springs, and, from the 1910s, the silent film companies, notably from Universal, that used the surrounding hills as a backdrop for Westerns. William Jennings Bryan and the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski stayed there, and later the Western star Randolph Scott.

Demand outgrew the original thirty-odd bedrooms. After the city's backers sold the hotel in 1919, the new owner, Charles Estep, turned the unused attic into a third floor of guest rooms around 1920, and an addition was built on the north side in the 1920s. In June 1943 the federal government leased the property and turned it into a dormitory for women employed at the Port Hueneme naval base; the lease ran until 1946. As the oil money and the film crews moved on and the depot closed in the 1960s, the hotel slid into a long decline, changing hands and uses, with some rooms combined into apartments, until it became little more than a flophouse. Ventura County designated it a landmark on July 6, 1981, and National Register listing followed in 1984.

Between 2005 and 2007 an investment group carried out a major restoration. A fire in April 2006, mid-project, damaged part of the building, but firefighters saved the landmark and the burned section was rebuilt. The Glen Tavern reopened in 2007 as a full-service hotel with a restaurant and lounge, and the restoration earned recognition from the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Congress and the California State Assembly in February 2008.

The legend

The Glen Tavern trades on its ghosts; its slogan is "Where the Past Comes to Life." The most familiar story says that during Prohibition the third floor served as a speakeasy, a brothel and a gambling den, and that a prostitute and a gambler were murdered there and never left. According to Wikipedia, which appears to rely on author Craig Owens's book Haunted by History, these tales were fabricated to promote the hotel's haunted reputation and do not match historical records.

There is a muddle over when the stories began. Wikipedia dates the invention of the brothel tale to 2022, but it also relies on a Ventura County Star piece from 2014 that already tells it, so the tale is clearly older than that, and the 2022 date looks doubtful. What can be dated is the inn's reputation: by July 2007 it was well enough known as a haunted hotel for the Ventura Paranormal Society to hold its annual convention there.

We found no specific, reliably attributed apparitions or phenomena in the sources reached; the reputation rests largely on television. Ghost Adventures first investigated in season 7, in an episode that aired on March 29, 2013, with singer Mimi Page and actress Brit Morgan joining the lockdown; the session included a séance and tarot reading. The Dead Files visited in 2014. Ghost Adventures returned for "Glen Tavern Tragedy" (season 29, episode 2, April 30, 2025), framed as a return to support the staff after a local medium had died; Jonathan Davis of the band Korn and investigator Gary Galka took part.

The honest summary is that the Glen Tavern is a genuinely historic hotel with a marketed haunting, and that its best-known ghost stories have been described as invented.

What remains today

The hotel still has the look its architects intended. The 1983 nomination describes a two-and-a-half-story building with taller sections at each end, a medium-high pitched, side-facing gable roof with front gables at either end, and a long porch on square stone pillars. The two front gables carry the half-timbered stucco of English Tudor style, while the rest of the exterior is clad in dark-stained wood shingles, with a tall corbeled brick chimney at the rear and a porte cochere sheltering the entrance. Inside, the lobby and stair are pure Craftsman: heavy wood columns, each hung with four globe lights on chains, boxed beams, wainscoting, window seats and a massive stone fireplace. In 1983 the nomination judged it the last working hotel in the county to keep the appearance of the grand-hotel era. A two-story stucco building added in 1964 stands at the south end of the property.

Visiting

The Glen Tavern Inn is an operating hotel with a restaurant and lounge, so the simplest way to experience it is to stay the night or have a meal. It is not confirmed whether ghost tours or haunted packages are currently offered, so check with the hotel directly. Respect guests' privacy on the upper floors.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #84001225 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #84001225) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Glen Tavern Inn — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Los Angeles, CA 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Santa Paula, CA 1903 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1903 · Public domain (USGS)
6. List of Ghost Adventures episodes — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
7. Official website
8. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.