Is Ralphs Market Haunted?

I’ve been hearing ghost stories from former employees of Ralphs Supermarket in La Crescenta. The stories are always from former employees as there seems to be a hesitancy by current employees to talk, worried perhaps by blowback from corporate. With that in mind, I’ll keep the stories anonymous.

A little background first. Ralphs is built directly over the former site of Kimball Sanitarium, an insane asylum that ran from the mid-’20s until about 1960. It was torn down and the shopping center rose in its place. The asylum’s origins range back to around 1925 when the Kimball family purchased a looming old Victorian house on a large parcel at Foothill Boulevard and Raymond Avenue. They purpose-built several cottages for calmer patients but for the violent ones they built a cement block house, featuring padded cells and wall-mounted restraints. Bela Lugosi is said to have received treatment for morphine addiction here and tragic film star Francis Farmer spent nine months here, receiving brutal insulin shock therapy. The main house would have been toward the rear of today’s Ralphs, while the block house would have been about where the store’s bakery is today. I suppose this sets the stage nicely for some hauntings.

And indeed, there are many spooky stories. Former employees – mostly those who work the night shift stocking shelves – claim that they hear someone whispering in their ears as they work. Visual sightings of ghosts have been almost entirely of a lone woman. She is sometimes described as a blonde woman and other times as a woman wearing a long white wedding dress. In two cases, a worker followed the woman. Reportedly she walked down an aisle to the back of the store then ascended a staircase in the backroom. In both reports the woman disappeared when she reached the top. The woman has been seen in the back rooms by others. There is even one longtime female employee who reported that for 10 years she had regular conversations with the ghostly woman. It was not reported what they talked about.

Could this be the ghost of blond actress Francis Farmer? After her movie and stage career spiraled into personal chaos in 1943, she was held at Kimball Sanitarium for nine months of repeated insulin shock therapy before she escaped. From there she was committed to a mental hospital in the State of Washington where, according to her autobiography, she was raped and brutalized. The wedding dress? Farmer was married three times and tragically divorced from her cheating first husband just before her stay in Kimball.

The only sighting of a man was when night workers were sweeping the floor in the floral section. They were backing up as they worked and bumped into someone. When they turned they were confronted by a man with no face. Obviously they fled, and reportedly would never work that area again.

Other paranormal activity in the store includes freezer doors that open and close on their own, and storage room doors that swing open when there is no wind. One night worker reported that, during a power outage, he braved a visit to the restroom in the backroom. While in there he heard a locker door slam loudly. No one else was back there and this particular locker was never used.

My personal favorite story is that workers stocking shelves at night would hear loud scratching and knocking coming from the next aisle where no one was working. Was this the spirit of someone locked in a padded cell, scratching to get out?

These are just stories, of course, and I suppose bored night workers can get creative. But consider this – if Ralphs is haunted by the patients of the sanitarium that was on the site, perhaps other supermarkets have similar tales. Do workers at Vons in Montrose, built over the old Indian Springs swimming pool, find wet footprints on the aisle floors? Are the aisles of the Vons La Crescenta store, built over the site of Verdugo Hills Bowl, plagued with the sound of rolling bowling balls and falling pins?

Happy Halloween! Don’t forget to buy candy at the supermarket!