I don’t drink wine, but living in Northern California I still end up visiting wineries in Napa and Sonoma with friends and visitors. Next time we’re headed on a wine tasting trip, I’m going to suggest we hit the spooky spots described in this Mysterious Universe guide to haunted California wineries, starting with this one:
Sitting within the wine country of Sonoma, California is a winery called Bartholomew Park Winery, and it is imbued with quite a colorful past that perhaps makes it unsurprising that it should be haunted. In its days before putting out fine wines, Bartholomew Park Winery underwent several metamorphoses, being used at one time or another as a women’s prison, a hospital, and a morgue, before becoming a vineyard and winery in the 1830s, after which it was acquired by European immigrant Agoston Haraszthy, who also happens to have been the owner of the equally haunted Buena Vista Winery, which we’ll get to later. It then became the Hacienda Cellars winery, with the wine cellars being right there in the old hospital, going on to become the Sonoma Valley Wine Museum and then the Bartholomew Park Winery in 1992…
This rather grim past came back to haunt the winery in the 1970s, perhaps literally, when the body of a former prisoner at the old prison was supposedly found buried within one of the walls of the establishment, and the main building and its basement are situated right atop what was once the morgue. Since the beginnings of the winery there have been tales of employees hearing disembodied voices singing or whispering, as well as moving objects, roving cold spots, footsteps when no one else is around, and the eerie sound of a piano playing. Most of the paranormal phenomena is concentrated within the area that was once used as the morgue and within its dank basement.
“A Tour of Haunted California Wineries” (Mysterious Universe)
photo: “Spirits of Cognac” by Pesco