Sad History Of An Old Mansion
Stories about the creepy old mansion can’t compare to the strange-but-true eccentricities of the man that built it.
Capitola, California - For all its claims to weirdness, Santa Cruz has nothing that can compare to the creepy strange-but-true eccentricities of Capitola’s Rispin Mansion.
To look at the history of the famous old gone-to-seed eyesore, damaged by fire on Thursday morning, is to walk a gauntlet of bizarre ironies. The rumors that the place is haunted turns out to be the least interesting part of its story.
“The actual history of it is much more intriguing than anything that has been made up about it,” said Capitola historian Carolyn Swift who may know more about the Rispin than anyone alive.
It is, for instance, named for a wealthy real-estate baron who died penniless and is buried in an unmarked “paupers” grave in San Francisco.
It is the former home of a group of hippie squatters and a convent of nuns. The nuns abandoned the place because it was too cold and too much of a curiosity to the locals.
It’s been officially vacant for half a century.
The four-story, 22-room mansion’s sad history is an eerie reflection of the sad history of the man who built it. Henry Allen Rispin, a Canadian by birth who married the daughter of a railroad tycoon, purchased the resort that is today Capitola Village in 1919, and built the ornate mansion two years later.
Rispin’s purpose was not to live there, but to use it as a show palace for those who might be interested in investing in Capitola. But, said Swift, he was a not an attentive landowner.
He neglected the water and sewage systems, and never paid for police or fire protection. Rispin slowly divested of his holdings and, 10 years later, he sold the mansion and was gone.
“He did not make friends with the locals,” said Swift. “Nobody knew anything about him.”
Swift said that many of the more outlandish rumors about Rispin - namely that he was a rum-runner in the days of prohibition and operated his illegal activities out of the mansion - may have been invented by locals irate at the landowner’s behavior.
“He fell quite a ways,” said Swift in reference to Rispin’s fortunes after he first built the Mansion. She said that Rispin was spotted just a few years later - in 1936 - asking acquaintances for money.
The Mansion fell into the hands of another Bay Area speculator, Robert Hays Smith, a former business partner of Rispin. But Smith was an absentee landowner who did nothing with the mansion either. Eventually it was sold to the Catholic order the Oblates of St. Joseph which used it as a convent until 1957.
“The nuns moved out because it was just too cold,” said Swift. “They didn’t wear shoes. They wore open-toed sandals. They had taken a vow of poverty, so they didn’t have a lot of ways to stay warm. Plus, they were upset at the fact that everyone kept looking into their windows.”
Since the convent closed, the Rispin Mansion has been an object of fascination for Capitola residents.
“It’s been a rite of teenage-hood for generations to break into the Rispin Mansion,” said Swift.
The place has been subject to everything from illegal squatting to vandalism to graffiti over the years, and it’s been the setting for many a ghost story.
However, Swift, who manages the Capitola Historical Museum, said that she had never heard a ghost story associated with the mansion until after 2000.
“I think it’s only been in the last few years that people have become increasingly interested in it in terms of the supernatural,” she said. “I’ve talked to people who flat-out insist that there are ghosts in there. Now, there have probably been a lot of bizarre things that have happened there. Who knows what the hippies did in the ‘60s? And the police had a SWAT team there doing drills. But once you open the door to stories of ghosts, then you make up just about anything.”
Images: The Rispin Mansion was built in 1921 by wealthy real-estate baron Henry Allen Rispin, who died penniless and is buried in an unmarked paupers grave in San Francisco
Author: Wallace Baine
Source - http://www.mercurynews.com/
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corey on Friday, May 29, 2009i wouldn’t mind buying the place and fixing it up as a resort or hotel or even a b&b;.
Scott on Wednesday, January 20, 2010Henry Rispin married Annette Blake in 1902, a Conoco Oil heiress rather than the daughter of a railroad tycoon. Nettie and Henry had a son Alan Winfield Rispin in 1901 and he apparently had epilepsy. Alan attended boarding school and did not spend much time in the mansion until he was 17. Nettie did not live in the mansion preferring to stay at a home she had in San Francisco. Annette passed in 1941, Alan passed in 1946, and Henry passed in 1947.
Rispin Mansion is an odd monolith anchored deep within the slope above Soquel Creek. The house was built with odd angles and a maddening array of staircases, hallways, rooms and compartments. As the secrets of the house were picked apart through the years, the hidden room in the sub-level, the secret compartment behind the bookcase to the right of the fireplace, and the cubbies behind the great room’s paneled wall and under the back stairs all became exposed. Looters and vandals removed fixtures and woodwork through the years, and the fire took the last remaining elements that gave the house character such as the huge wooden beams, railings, and herringbone parquet floors. They were all reduced to ash. The house has become its own massive concrete mausoleum of sorts.
Those of us whom have been fortunate to walk through its halls and rooms and photograph the estate through time, have the essence of its history, and our own stories to tell.
If there are spirits roaming about the old place. The house belongs to them now.
And maybe a new library after that. Time will tell.
