At Sacramento’s haunted Stanford Mansion, skeletons are fake but the haunting is real

At most times of the year, the Victorian mansion at the corner of 8th and N streets serves as a California State Park and hosts dignitaries visiting Sacramento. But for Halloween season, it’s transformed into a lightly haunted house featuring seven fake skeletons and a genuine history of patriarchal oppression, devastating disease and hubris about the earth’s climate.

The Leland Stanford Mansion was the ornate Victorian home of the railroad magnate who made his fortune in large part by bilking American taxpayers and was also, from 1862 through 1863, the eighth governor of California. This month, the mansion isdecked out in spider webs and pumpkins and has a petite hay bale maze, complete with a fog machine. The decorations inside have been toned down from last year after a few complaints from scared small children, and it’s now “just a little Victorian spooky,” as California State Parks guide Rochelle Fraizer put it Sunday.

Fraizer and the site’s other guides have prepared Halloween-inspired interpretations of history for park visitors. What the haunted house lacks in jump scares, it makes up for in chilling reflections on the past.

The tour begins in the shadow of a megaflood. The mansion, Fraizer tells a group — which includes a pair dressed as Linda and Bob Belcher of “Bob’s Burgers” — was raised 12 feet after the flood of 1861-1862. During that flood, the Central Valley became an inland sea and Stanford had to row through downtown to give his inaugural speech as governor. Much of the city was raised to be safer from future floods.

“You should not build a city at the confluence of two major rivers when you’re in a floodplain with mountains on both sides,” she said, but what’s done is done. The flooding led to dirty water full of drowned animals and sewage everywhere in the Central Valley and multiple deadly disease outbreaks.

Fraizer led the group through giant fake spiderwebs and up the grand stairs leading to the once-first-story-now-second-story of the mansion. She told everyone not to touch anything inside because “many of the items in there — except for the Halloween decorations” are original.

History is the ghost story

Inside, she introduced another scary concept: patriarchal oppression.

Two skeletons in hats and dresses sat at a small table enjoying tea as Fraizer started talking about poison. “Poisons became fashionable for a while in the 1800s, and ladies were the ones that poisoned people as a way of empowering themselves,” she said. “They weren’t allowed to own property; they had no voice. Sometimes, their husbands, if they didn’t like their opinions, put them in the insane asylum.”

In fact, she said, the first owner of the Stanford Mansion, Sheldon Fogus, had his wife institutionalized in Stockton because “he didn’t like her attitude.” Some women poisoned their husbands, Fraizer said, as a way to gain some control in their lives.

In the elegant dining room where four skeletons in suits seemed to be enjoying a cobweb-covered feast, the tour turned to funerals. Even with their husbands dead, Fraizer said, Victorian women were expected to observe long periods of mourning — a year of deep mourning with no outings except for church and no clothing that wasn’t black, followed by more less-deep mourning. Men whose wives died, by contrast, were expected to find another wife “immediately.”

In mourning herself, Leland’s wife, Jane Stanford, tried to summon ghosts. Leland and his wife lost their only child, Leland Jr., who died of typhoid at 15 in 1884. Fraizer explained that Jane hired spiritualists to try to speak with her son. She and Leland also founded the Leland Stanford Junior University — or Stanford University — in their son’s memory.

The haunted house tour covers other potentially creepy topics: Victorian “death masks,” tying bells to the fingers of ostensibly dead people in case they were actually alive, early-20th-century Catholic orphanages.

Stanford’s life involved many more horrors not raised. He used his money to influence elections and kill unfavorable legislation, and he bribed investigators so that he didn’t have to pay back the vast sums given ostensibly on loan from American taxpayers for the transcontinental railroad. And he and his partners made their money by subjecting Chinese immigrant laborers to low wages and dangerous working conditions. He was governor of California while the state was actively perpetrating a genocide on the Native people. When he was inaugurated, it was legal for white people to kidnap Native children from their families and force them into servitude.

Even so, the tour proves again that nothing is scarier than the truth.