Since Halloween is approaching, here’s a story I don’t mind repeating. At all.

Alice Agueda–buried in the Arroyo Grande Cemetery–was brutally murdered in December 1926 by a farmworker on the Agueda place along Huasna Road. She was twelve years old.

The accused allegedly died after attempting suicide. He shot himself. Five times. Ahem.

The Agueda home is still with us–it’s the old Conrad Adobe, partly hidden behind a stand of cactus just before a sharp left bend in Huasna Road, about a half-mile beyond the new Branch School. (The term “new” Branch School indicates my advanced age, of course. Guilty as charged.)

The home, the subject of many newspaper articles over the years, is notoriously haunted. My friend David Cherry lived in it when we were AGHS students, and the adobe bricks are visible, down to their straws, in the basement, where Dave and I shot pool. The Cherry family several times heard soft footsteps on the basement staircase and then the door to the kitchen atop the staircase would slowly open.

Many years after, there were new owners who heard the same sounds the Cherrys had heard. There’s a driveway big enough for an RV and these folks had friends visit from San Diego and, of course, since they were friends, the new owners told them ghost stories about Alice.

After their visit, the friends drove the RV home to San Diego. After they got home, they went to bed. That’s when they heard the RV’s doors open and then the sound of soft footsteps. They risked a look in the dark and found nothing. But when they investigated again the next morning, everything inside the RV had been moved around.

The friends, husband and wife, looked at each other with the same thought. It was Alice. She liked them. She liked them so much that she’d followed them home.

So they drove all the way back, from San Diego to Arroyo Grande, pulled up into the big driveway that fronts the Conrad Adobe, and had a talk with Alice. We like you, too, they explained, but this is Arroyo Grande. This is your home. You need to be home, Alice.

When they drove back to San Diego, they turned off the engine and except for the clicks a cooling engine emits when it’s turned off, they never heard another sound from the empty RV again.

The story’s stuck with me.

And there’s an added element: After I’d posted this on Facebook a few years ago, a woman named Ciaran Knight shared the childhood experience of a friend of hers who’d lived in the old house. He had an imaginary playmate he called “Alice.”