Stow House

The story

The Stow House stands on land that was once part of Rancho La Goleta, in what is now Goleta. In 1871 William Whitney Stow, a San Francisco lawyer who worked as legal counsel for the Southern Pacific Railroad, bought 1,043 acres there for $28,677 as a property for his son, Sherman P. Stow. The ranch was named La Patera. Sherman built a Carpenter Gothic farmhouse on it and moved in in 1873 with his new wife, Ida G. Hollister.

The house grew along with the family. There were two major remodelings, one in the 1880s and one in the 1910s. According to the National Register nomination, the Italianate second-story addition on the west wing dates to around 1885. Three generations of Stows lived in the house. When it was listed on the National Register in 2000, historian Monte G. Kim of the Goleta Valley Historical Society did not base the case on the architecture. He based it on the house's association with Edgar Whitney Stow, under the heading of agriculture, with a period of significance running from 1915 to 1949, the years Edgar made the house his main home. The nomination lists no architect or builder; both are recorded as unknown.

The nomination draws its boundary to leave out any building put up or moved onto the parcel after 1949, the last year the house was associated with Edgar Stow. Since 1967 the Goleta Valley Historical Society has looked after the house, and in 2000 the property was recorded as owned by the Santa Barbara County Parks Department.

The legend

The Stow House is a good example of how thin a haunted reputation can be. Its ghost story comes almost entirely from a single television episode. Ghost Adventures aired "Stow House Haunting" on June 28, 2023, as Season 26, Episode 4 under the numbering used by Wikipedia and TVmaze. TheTVDB lists it under Season 23. In the hour-long episode, Zak Bagans and his crew investigated the house and interviewed people who said they had seen or heard something unexplained there. Episode listings say the caretakers were frightened, and they speak of a "dark energy" hanging over the property and of a ranch "steeped in tragedy." None of the summaries name any victim or explain what that tragedy was supposed to be.

The details are sparse. A German-language summary on TheTVDB is the only source to mention a woman in black said to roam the house, and it says nothing about who she might be. The same listings mention odd noises picked up during the investigation and a dollhouse that "raises questions," but give no further explanation. In English, TheTVDB opens with "Echoes of a past investigation come into focus," which could point to an earlier visit, but none has been confirmed.

No ghost report from before 2023, no named spirit and no dated sighting have been found. The Goleta Valley Historical Society, which runs the house, does not mention ghosts on its website or in its events. That does not prove no one has ever had a strange experience there, but readers should know that the haunting is a recent media story and not a long local tradition. The house's documented history, a Victorian ranch home lived in by one family for three generations, is far better supported than any of the claims made about it on television.

What remains today

The nomination describes the house as a one-and-a-half-story Gothic-style cottage in excellent condition, little changed since Edgar Stow's time. It has a wooden balloon frame on a sandstone foundation overlaid with concrete, vertical board-and-batten walls and a steep cross-gabled roof covered in wood shingles. The front has a central gable with decorated vergeboards, two dormers, a brick chimney and two porches. One has flattened Gothic arches, and the other has a flat roof that doubles as a second-floor balcony. A small wine cellar is attached to the west side. In 2000 the setting was still mostly rural, with a lemon grove to the west, a small lake to the east, and some of the original trees and plantings still on the lot.

The house is now a historic house museum and the headquarters of the Goleta Valley Historical Society, which uses it to interpret the history of the Goleta Valley at what it calls Rancho La Patera.

Visiting

This is a public museum, and visiting is simple and legal. The Historical Society offers house tours every weekend, with 2 pm and 3 pm start times listed on its website, starting from the visitor center. Check the schedule before you go. The grounds also host community events such as Fiesta Ranchera and an old-time fiddlers' festival, none of them ghost-related. The Society's website lists no ghost tours. If you are going because of Ghost Adventures, be respectful: this is a museum about local farming and family history, not a haunted attraction.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #00001166 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #00001166) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Stow House — 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 Goleta, CA 1942 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1942 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "Ghost Adventures 26x04 – Stow House Haunting" — TVmaze. — TVmaze.
7. "Ghost Adventures – Stow House Haunting" — TheTVDB. — TheTVDB.
8. Goleta Valley Historical Society — official site (Stow House & Rancho La Patera). — official site (Stow House & Rancho La Patera).
9. 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.