Everyone has dreamed at one point or another of building or living in a castle as royalty of bygone eras did. But one man, who had dedicated himself to making this dream home a reality died during its building. And since then, Bill Beatty has reportedly been staying and overlooking his famous castle.
Bill Beatty died of the flu in 1930, just as his mansion was getting finished. With the final preparations already in place, the construction fell to Sarah who had the house completed five years afterward. But as she found herself living in the lonely corridors of a massive palace without her beloved Bill, she vowed to never remarry. Instead she raised her four children on her own. When Sarah moved out of the house in 1941, the old house was converted into a boy’s school. No signs of the paranormal arose for several decades until 1972 when the house came under the care of two new owners – Don and Carol Burlingame. As they began making alterations to the structure of the house, something very peculiar began to happen.
Amid the remodeling during hours when no one was working on the house the sounds of construction could still be heard. Don and Carol would wake up in the middle of the night to hear deafening but regular beating on the walls like someone was trying to smash it with a hammer. As an experiment the two owners attempted to see just how dedicated this spirit was to protecting the house. They both said loudly as they were leaving that it was supposed to rain. Instead of closing the windows, however, they said they were going to leave them open. And they did just that. When they returned the windows were all closed and latched. They could only be closed and latched from the inside.
As the days went on, the couple living there eventually would come to witness a number of paranormal phenomena. Objects would fly from shelves in the kitchen, people would suddenly feel a presence in the room that couldn’t be there, the couple heard sounds all throughout their presence in the old house, and everything else normally associated with ghosts seemed ripe to happen at any moment. Eventually the couple came to learn to live with the paranormal presence of Bill Beatty, and even came to consider him a part of the family.
It’s always sad when someone dies just before their dream is realized. But as Bill Beatty showed us all in this account, even the end of a dream cannot always be determined simply by life and death. And some people will prove more resilient than others when it comes to living out those dreams. For Bill and the couple involved in this account, we hope your dream never dies.
