A horror movie based on actual events and set in an abandoned correctional facility? At first blush, “Apparition” (currently streaming on Amazon Prime) sounds like quintessential Halloween viewing! Sadly though, the scariest thing about the 2019 flick is actually its reviews, most of which are downright sinister! Centered around an app that serves as a digital conduit between the living and the dead which ultimately leads a group of twentysomethings to a haunted former reform school one dark night, Christy Lemire of NPR’s FilmWeek calls the movie “reprehensible and off-putting,” while UK site Love Horror deems it as “an utterly embarrassing effort” of “lazy filmmaking with dire performances, a dull storyline, poor characterization and no direction whatsoever.” The production hasn’t fared much better with viewers either, earning a paltry 40% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
One thing “Apparition” does have going for it? The looming multi-towered onetime reformatory at its center. Known as Preston Castle, the imposing four-story structure is nothing short of spectacular – not to mention spectacularly spooky!
Located about 40 miles southeast of Sacramento in Ione, a tiny Gold Country town that encompasses a scant 4.7 square miles on the western edge of Amador County, Preston Castle is easily one of the most frighteningly beautiful properties to ever be featured onscreen! Originally established as the Preston School of Industry in 1894, a 2016 Merced Sun-Star article notes the place “fits every stereotype of an eerie haunted castle like it was torn from a Bram Stoker novel.” Indeed, the colossal building, which is said to be one of the most haunted spots in California, boasts a storied history that reads like a horror movie script, has been the site of several mysterious deaths, is fabulously dilapidated and has played host to a plethora of scary film and television shoots throughout its 127-year history.
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Image Credit: Preston Castle Foundation Incredibly, prior to its inception, juvenile offenders in the Northern California area were sent to regular adult-populated prisons such as San Quentin and Folsom. Enter California Senator Edward Myers Preston and the State Board of Prison Directors who set about establishing a reform school for wayward boys in the late 1880s. Preston School of Industry was the result of their efforts.
The towering Romanesque-Revival-style structure now known as Preston Castle was originally constructed as the facility’s administration building. Featuring a sandstone edifice with a dramatic arched entry, multiple drum towers and a monumental turret, the sprawling property was designed by Henry Atherton Schulze, the same architect responsible for San Francisco’s Olympic Club. With its cornerstone laid on December 23, 1890, the building took a whopping four years to complete. It initially stood on a remote plot of land measuring 230 acres, but, as the reformatory expanded, the surrounding property grew to encompass 1,000 acres dotted with more than 50 buildings that could house up to 800 wards.
With a focus on rehabilitation and curbing recidivism, Preston School of Industry offered its young inmates, most of whom were between the ages of 8 and 24, lessons in academics, trades and such life skills as farming, sewing and cooking in the hopes that the boys would one day live on their own and become contributing members of society. A completely self-sufficient property, the wards hunted and farmed for their daily meals, made all of their own clothes and attended school on the premises. Doctors’ offices were also situated on the grounds so that the inmates had very little reason to ever set foot off the property.
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Image Credit: Preston Castle Foundation But by many accounts, life at Preston School of Industry was not entirely copacetic. Upon arrival at the five-story, 47,000-square-foot minimum-security facility, wards were deloused via a swim in a plunge pool doused with chemicals including bleach and lye. A housekeeper was brutally murdered on the premises in 1950, as was an agricultural teacher in 1965. And no less than three boys were shot and killed while attempting to escape from the site. According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a 2003 report on the prison described the facility’s “deplorable” and “dungeon-like” isolation units as “filthy, dank rooms covered with vermin, blood, and feces, where youths were confined for 23-hours a day, with one hour spent shackled in a cage for exercise.”
The entire facility was shuttered in 2011, though the administration building had long been vacated by that time, with the site’s operational offices moved to other more modern structures elsewhere on the grounds in 1960. During the ensuing years, the Castle sat vacant, falling victim to the elements, looting and vandals, the latter of whom even went so far as to strip the place of its slate roof and marble flooring. Initially marked for demolition following its closure, a group of preservationists stepped in to form the Preston Castle Foundation which rescued the building and the 13 acres that surround it by first leasing the site in 2001 and then ultimately purchasing it outright 13 years later.
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Image Credit: Preston Castle Foundation The foundation has been working diligently ever since to raise the funds necessary to completely restore Preston Castle with the hopes of one day turning it into a museum, a boutique hotel, a senior center, a culinary school or office space. In the meantime, the property is open to the public via tours and a slew of regular special events including wine tastings, weddings, a Christmas craft fair, murder mystery dinners and, most popular of all, an annual Halloween Haunt, a nighttime jaunt through what the website notes is “Northern California’s only real haunted house!”
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Image Credit: Preston Castle Foundation Situated atop a lonely hill overlooking virtually all of the town below, Preston Castle certainly acts as a beacon, beckoning out to those who enjoy all things spooky. One look and it’s easy to see how the site wound up onscreen in myriad scary productions.
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Image Credit: Preston Castle Foundation Loosely based upon actual events, Preston Castle plays itself in “Apparition” with its infamous history figuring front and center in the storyline. Taking place in both the past as well as present day, the movie tells a fictionalized account of the murder of the school’s 52-year-old head housekeeper Anna Corbin (Mena Suvari), whose body was found beaten and strangled in a storage room on February 23, 1950. Though “Apparition” recounts her slaying via invented circumstances, in real life a 19-year-old ward named Eugene Monroe was charged with her killing and, though tried on three separate occasions, was ultimately acquitted. He was released from Preston in December 1950 and just a few months later was arrested, charged and eventually sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of pregnant 22-year-old Oklahoma resident Dorothy Waldrop, a crime to which he openly confessed. Anna’s slaying remains unsolved to this day.
“Apparition” also details some of the harrowing punishments the wards are said to have endured at Preston, including escapees being driven around the property at high speeds while strapped to the hood of a car. As outlandish as that scenario may sound, a 2016 Merced Sun-Star article reports that Ione native Richard Cercy recounted “stories of rounding up the Preston School runaways and taking them back to the castle for a $10 reward,” telling the paper, “If they [the guards] caught them, they would put them on the left front fender of the Model T and say, ‘We’re going to drive back to the school now. If at 35, 40 miles per hour you wish to jump off, go right ahead.’”
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Image Credit: TriCoast Studios Preston School of Industry also stands at the center of “A Haunting at Preston Castle,” a 2014 horror film in which three college kids, Liz (Mackenzie Firgens), Danny (Jake White) and Ashley (Heather Tocquigny), decide to spend the night at the former reformatory on a whim. Things, of course, do not end well for the trio.
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Image Credit: Travel Channel Naturally, the site has also played host to several paranormal reality shows including a season two episode of “Ghost Adventures” aptly titled “Preston Castle.” In it, Zak Bagans and his team encounter several strange happenings at the reformatory like Zak’s body supposedly becoming possessed by a former inmate.
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Image Credit: NBC Universal The Atlantic Paranormal Society team from “Ghost Hunters” also investigates eerie goings-on at Preston Castle in the season six episode titled “Haunted Reform School.”
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Image Credit: A&E Actor Rob Lowe and his sons, Matthew and John Owen, spend the night at the site in the pilot of their unsolved mystery series “The Lowe Files.” At the top of the episode, John Owen asks his dad and brother, “So what makes us different from any other idiot who’s taking cameras into haunted mansions and castles and whatever?” Turns out not much. Though the trio brings in a shaman – Shaman Jon – to “try to reach across the void,” their experiences are much the same as that of the “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Adventures” teams before them.
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Image Credit: Margin Films Most recently, the former reform school’s spooky happenings were investigated by the team from the Amazon docuseries “The Haunted Bay” for the episode titled “Preston Castle,” which gives audiences a great glimpse of the current state of the property’s infamous plunge pool.