Brookdale Ghost Stories

Let us look at the early history of the Brookdale Lodge, consider the validity of the ghost stories and examine some pretty awful deaths that happened in the waters near the Brookdale Lodge. None of them however, involve a Logan. No Sarah (she is made up) and no Gladys (she died in 2006 in San Diego).

In May 1903, it was reported that the “famous summer home of the L[afayette] F. Grovers, is being enlarged and added to, and will be converted into a boarding house.” Lafayette Grover was the son of lumber baron Stephen Frealon Grover, reputed to be one of the first white men to enter the Yosemite Valley. The Grovers had had a lumber mill just north of Brookdale at the end of what is now Camp Joy Road. In Stephen’s 1907 obituary, it reports that the Minnehaha summer cottage was the first in Brookdale. Enlarged, the cottage, then called the Minnehaha Hotel, could accommodate around forty guests and had a “well lighted wing for a dining room.” 

Its new owner, Judge James Harvey Logan, was to increase the hotel’s accommodations by building cottages on the grounds. The boarding house was to be run by Miss “Gussie” Heubeling. From 1904 to 1905 an advertisement ran in the Oakland tribune touting Brookdale’s virtues. “No business, no trade, no liquors. White sulphur springs; Electric lights; sanitary sewerage; 3 trains a day each way.” Hotel rates were between just $9 and $12 per week and cottage sites were available with building restrictions for “selected people of the better class only.” Actually, the sewer outlet was just a rocky barren spot on the east of the San Lorenzo River a short distance south of the town. Clear Creek was the source of the electric power; water from the creek being drawn by an eight-inch pipeline to a large Pelton water wheel and dynamo.

In 1905, the hotel changed its name to the Brookdale Hotel (later to be the Brookdale Lodge) and in 1911 it was purchased by Judge William Mack Aydelotte, a Santa Cruz lawyer and president of the Santa Cruz Emporium, who leased the hotel to Mrs. D. S. Fairlee. In 1913, Mrs. Fairlee applied for a liquor license – Brookdale was changing!

Judge Logan's wife Catherine had died in 1909. Although they had no children, a niece and nephew, Josie and Herbert Turcot had resided with them. Judge Logan remarried in 1910 to Mary Couson who bore daughter Gladys in 1911. 

In 1921, William and Mary Shier of Stockton bought the Brookdale Hotel. Mary Shier was close friend of Sheehan family, Logan's niece Josie and her husband. The Sheehan's daughter, Alice "Logan Berry Jam" Sheehan as she was affectionately called, owned the parcel across the street from the Brookdale Hotel that would become the site of the Brookdale Inn - more to come on that story in another blog post!

Mary Shier ran the hotel for a couple of years until it was sold in 1923 to Pasadena capitalist Foster K. Camp. Camp would create “A Mountain Lodge with Nature Brought Inside,” – The Brookdale Lodge. The Shiers signed a five year agreement with Camp to stay out of the resort business.

So, by the time Camp had built his famous dining room, Logan's daughter Gladys was 12 years old and they were living in Oakland. 

Image: Brookdale Lodge Collection, San Lorenzo Valley Museum.

Now let us back track to 1912 for a horrific tale with the makings of a ghost story.

Tragedy in Brookdale

It was an exceptionally hot day in July 1912 as two teenage friends, Gladys Hawkett and Lillian McDonald of Oakland, enjoyed their summer vacation in Brookdale. They were staying at "Tekwah," the Brookdale summer cottage, of Joseph and Emma Sills also of Oakland, on Clear Creek, the creek that runs through the Brookdale Lodge. Together "they donned their bathing suits" and along with Gladys' sister, Mrs. May Cripps and her two children, William aged five and Dorothy aged six, they ventured to the public swimming hole. Gladys had written to her mother "that she could swim six good strokes."

The girls could not swim, so after "sporting around" in the water for a while they decided to find a more secluded spot to practice their strokes. The entire party walked down stream. Mrs. Cripps and her children walked along the bank of the San Lorenzo River, while Gladys and Lillian walked along the river bed.

Mrs. May H. Cripps Goes to

Death in the San Lorenzo River,

Oakland Tribune, July 16, 1912.

Then tragedy struck. The girls stepped off a shelf in the river into a pool at least fifteen feet deep. Unable to swim they quickly began to sink. Watching them from the river bank Mrs. Cripps must have been frantic. She could not swim either. "Bidding her children to remain on the bank she plunged into the pool." She too began to sink.

On the river bank Dorothy and William witness this awful scene. First their cousin, her friend, then their mother, consumed by the San Lorenzo River. They screamed and waded into the water. Their cries so loud that rescuers were soon on the scene. But alas too late.

It took over twenty minutes to pull their bodies out of the water, using rakes, and up the slippery bank. Their rescuers were Charley Hall who at the time was working on the Wright property adjacent to the hatchery and the river, and Harry Nehf, the assistant at the Brookdale Hatchery. Hall, Hehf, and Welden Conklin of Santa Cruz carried the bodies up the steep hill to the hatchery where a team of three doctors, Dr. William Caesar of Boulder Creek, Dr. W. O. Smith, and Dr. E. R. Campbell of Oakland, tried valiantly to resuscitate them.

Just a few days earlier a six-year-old girl named Mary Corbett had been rescued by a ten-year-old boy, Leslie Short of Berkeley. Mary had been paddling in the river at Brookdale when a current caught her and started to carry her down stream. If not for Leslie, the young girl too might have become a victim of the river. Her father rewarded Leslie's heroism with a "shining $10 gold piece."

Danger notices to be placed along the river banks between Boulder Creek and Ben Lomond were called for as a "matter of life or death." "Danger! The water here is 15 feet deep."