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At the corner of 22nd and H streets, in an old neighborhood of the city called Boulevard Park, there lies The Hart Mansion; an imposing Edwardian-era home. An intricately carved lion rests on guard above the entrance, looking like nothing so much as a giant maw, waiting for a fool to come close.
And far above him, mounted on the highest gable, his lioness — watching over all.
Opinion
It looks old, scary and abandoned. A spiked, green metal gate encloses the dead lawn, and crunchy autumn leaves dot the property. A black cat named Stella prowls the sidewalk outside. Around the base of the home, half-moon windows with curved iron bars imply a dungeon — or perhaps a torture chamber?
They say the man who built the mansion on H Street was a doctor. One day, he went mad, killed his entire family and their pets too, before fleeing. They say Charles Manson once kept bodies on racks in the basement and that Old Man Martinez buried bodies in the backyard. Or maybe it was the front yard?
They say it’s haunted.
Sacramento’s (Not-So) Haunted Mansion
“It’s not haunted,” said Boulevard Park resident Bryan Washington with exasperation and a roll of his eyes.
Washington has lived across the street from the Hart Mansion with his family for the past six or seven years, he said.
“I have a 14-year-old who would never sleep” — he points upward toward a window that faces the imposing mansion — “if something was going on.”
Directly next door on H Street, a friendly neighbor named Andre Rehkopf said the biggest problem for his family isn’t tormented spirits wailing at odd hours but rather the copious murder mystery tours that stop to ask them questions about the house while they’re doing yard work.
Another neighbor, Jay Roach, said he doesn’t believe the home is haunted, but it is notorious in the neighborhood. Sometimes he sees small groups of high schoolers huddled outside the gates, daring each other to go in. (Please don’t do that, by the way. It’s private property.)
One creepy thing outside the home did happen to him a few years ago though, Roach admitted: A woman stopped him near his car and asked about the mansion, so Roach politely shared a bit of history about the Harts.
That’s when the woman looked at him, “dead-eyed,” and said: “The Devil lives here.”
Urban legends surround home
If the Hart Mansion is haunted by anything, it’s by urban legend.
There have been spooky stories attached to the house for decades, said Peter Amoruso, who owns part of the house in a trust with his sisters since their mother died (not in the house) about five years ago.
He thinks the rumors started a long time ago just because the house is old and was slightly dilapidated until quite recently, when the Amorusos did some restoration work on the outside, mostly to deter the increasing number of trespassers.
The Hart Mansion has never even been on the market, Amoruso said. His grandmother bought it for about $8,000 in 1942, directly from the family who built it.
Aden C. Hart was a founding member of Sutter Hospital and his wife, Alice, came from a family on the East Coast with money. She is the documented owner of the two plots the home would eventually be built on, bought for about $3,000 in the early 1900s, back when Boulevard Park was a horse racing track. (That’s why there are long, grassy medians on 22nd Street, the neighbor, Rehkopf, told me — an old remnant of the racetrack.)
As far as Amoruso knows, no one in the Hart family ever died in the home. Though he thinks they must have had four children. Why?
Along with the prominent lion and lioness carvings, four small lion cubs are carved into the porch’s iconic columns.
The Amoruso family lived in the home for about three decades before an electrical fire took out part of the garage and they closed it up. Then Peter Amoruso lived there for several years in the late ’80s and early ’90s before eventually moving to Amador County, where he now mainly resides. Nothing paranormal has ever happened to him in the home, he confirmed.
But trespassers have been a problem for decades, thanks to the urban legends surrounding the home.
“When I lived there full time in the ’80s, I had to keep everything locked down,” Amoruso said. ”I’d be sitting in the living room and then all of a sudden, there’d be people standing on the porch staring at me.”
Scary stories reflect society
Halloween seems like the right time of the year to admit this publicly: I believe in ghosts.
Nor am I alone; a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults found that 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them, according to the University of South Carolina. The New York Times reported that during the pandemic, reports of paranormal activity spiked. Perhaps because more people were home to experience unexplained activities, or perhaps because during times of great societal upheaval, reliance on religion and belief in the supernatural tend to go up.
Some psychologists believe it’s a way for people to make sense of the world; for others, it may be the hope that a loved one is still watching.
Urban legends reflect a community’s anxieties and fears, and are actually an important part of our culture. Humans delight in disgust — consider the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or the modern fascination with true crime podcasts.
We humans love a scary story, and all the better if it’s true: The Dorothea Puente home, near 14th and F streets is also a regular stop on Sacramento’s murder mystery tours. It was the site of several murders in the 1980s; the landlady would kill her tenants to continue collecting their social security checks, then bury them in the backyard. In that case, the current owners of the property have really leaned into the history of the home, and have… decorated accordingly.
The truth of the Hart Mansion
So what about all those legends attached to the Hart Mansion? Are any of them true?
Pure hogwash. Dr. Hart never killed anyone — at least, that we know of — and no one named Martinez has ever lived in the home, and that rumor in particular seems to be conflated with the finer details of the Puente story.
And what about Charles Manson?
“There are no racks in the basement,” Amoruso laughed; though it’s true that Manson family members Sandra Good and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme once lived in a home at 17th and P in midtown before Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford on the steps of the state capitol in 1975. (No word on whether or not either location is haunted.)
Nor is the Hart Mansion entirely empty, as even the neighbors seem to think. Amoruso said he keeps a room there and is in town a few days every month. “It’s no one’s business when I come and go,” he said — not a little mischievously.
Maybe the flickering lights of Amoruso moving from room to room has created some mystique?
“I guess it feeds into (the rumors) a little bit,” he said.
You know what might also feed into the rumors a little bit? The foam head with a wig on it that Amoruso admitted he occasionally moves from window to window — just for funsies. I’m sure, somewhere in Sacramento, a terrified teen is sure they saw the “ghost” move.
The legend of the Hart Mansion lives on.