Haunted place · California, United States

Woodside Store

Updated November 202610 sources How to visit

Protected heritage
16 archive documents

The 1854 redwood Woodside Store in San Mateo County, California, a pioneer store turned museum, said to be haunted by the ghost of Doc Tripp's giant dog.

The story

The Woodside Store stands at a rural crossroads in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Woodside, in San Mateo County, where two logging trails once met. In the early 1850s this was the heart of the San Francisco Peninsula's redwood country, and the store grew out of the lumber trade.

Its founders were Robert Orville "Doc" Tripp, a dentist who came west with the Gold Rush, and his partner Mathias Alfred Parkhurst (sometimes spelled Parkehurst). Sources disagree on Tripp's origins: Wikipedia calls him a Massachusetts dentist, while the 1985 National Register nomination says he was born in New York in 1816 and that it was Parkhurst who came from Massachusetts. The two men logged the area before there were sawmills, dragging redwood logs to the bay and rafting them to San Francisco, where they became wharf pilings. They began as shingle splitters, a detail echoed in the store's redwood shingle roof.

Exactly how the business started is murky. One account in the nomination has a makeshift store run out of the small shed the partners lived in, a second store across the road by 1851, and the present one built three years later; another record shows an A. H. Powers running a store on the spot in 1852. Recent sources simplify this into a store founded in 1851 and the current building put up in 1854 after a fire, and that is the safest summary. The post office opened inside the new building in April 1854 with Parkhurst as postmaster, and the store's ledgers switched from the place name "Red Woods" to "Woodside" in 1853.

For a time no other general store served travelers on the road from San Francisco to Santa Clara. It sold everything from groceries to building supplies, and over time it also served as bank and safe deposit, saloon, dental office, post office, toll station, winery headquarters and community gathering place; a library association was organized there in 1859. Tripp seems to have done a little of everything: lumber dealer, banker, dentist, postmaster, county officeholder, deputy sheriff, grape grower and vintner. Before San Mateo County split from San Francisco, he sat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for this district.

The partnership dissolved in 1860, Parkhurst died in 1863, and Tripp ran the store alone until his death in March 1909 at the age of 93. His daughter Addie inherited it but sold the stock to a rival Woodside store that November, and the building stood closed for years. After her death in 1926 it passed to the Woodside Congregational Church; San Mateo County bought it in 1940, making it the county's first historical property, and it opened as a museum in 1947. It became California Historical Landmark No. 93 in 1949, according to the county historical association and Wikipedia's text (Wikipedia's infobox gives March 29, 1993), and was listed on the National Register in 1985. The store's account books and the library association's records survive, an unusually complete paper trail for a frontier business.

The legend

The haunting here is modest: a single ghost, and it is a dog. Doc Tripp was known for keeping very large dogs that trailed after him wherever he went, and an old photograph shows him outside the store with them. No source records the dogs' names or breed.

The only first-hand account comes from a former site manager, as told in a 2025 article in The Almanac and the Redwood City Pulse. Closing up at four in the afternoon, sometime in the early 1990s, she spotted a big dog among the exhibits. Moving on to the rear room, she found an enormous dog standing in the middle of the floor, which she said "dissolved" while she watched. Afterward she recognized the animal in the historic photo of Tripp and his dogs. She telephoned Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association, resigned, and never returned.

Other sources, including a San Mateo Daily Journal Halloween piece from 2014 cited by Wikipedia, only pass along the rumor that the animal still roams the building. No human ghost is reported, and Tripp himself is not said to linger. No television program or paranormal group is known to have investigated the building.

The most useful skeptical comment comes from Postel himself, who has said he is not sure whether the manager truly saw a ghost or found a memorable way to quit. With one witness and one sighting, this is best read as a charming local anecdote rather than an established haunting.

What remains today

The 1854 store survives on a parcel of a little over an acre: a story-and-a-half building built entirely of local redwood, with rough-sawn board-and-batten siding, a redwood shingle gable roof and single-story porches facing both roads. Inside, the walls and floors are unpainted redwood and the brick fireplace is plainly finished; the nomination described the interior as "utilitarian and honest." An attached shed and feed barn were added by the 1870s, and a small barn went up at the back around 1900. Other than a small modern restroom building and a few picnic tables, little has been altered. The San Mateo County Historical Association runs it as a museum, and a long restoration that began in the mid-1980s was completed by 1994.

Visiting

The Woodside Store is a county historic site open to the public free of charge, operated by the San Mateo County Historical Association, which also runs school programs there. In 2025 it was open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on weekend afternoons from noon to 4 p.m.; confirm current hours with the association before you go. Each May the site hosts Old Woodside Store Day.

There is no ghost tour: the site is run as a pioneer-store museum, not as a haunted attraction.

The ghosts

Animal

Doc Tripp's ghost dog

Said to be Said to be one of the large dogs of store owner Robert Orville "Doc" Tripp (died 1909)

A site manager closing up saw a huge dog in the back room that dissolved before her eyes, then recognized it in an old photo of Tripp with his dogs. She quit on the spot. The historical association's president is unsure whether she saw a ghost or wanted an excuse to leave.