‘Sometimes, I wake up and the woman is standing right next to my bed.’

Jim McWhorter, 70, is a Ramona real estate agent who certainly knows his territory. He’s lived there almost 40 years, and he and his wife, Margaret, live in a turn-of-the-century ranch house, which has been occupied at various times by six kids, three cats and two ghosts, and is now home to three thriving businesses. Peacocks and guinea hens roam the yard, and a tour of the property includes a visit to a few ancient graves and the site where an Indian grinding stone and other native artifacts have been discovered. Times staff writer Leslie Wolf interviewed McWhorter at his home, and Dave Gatley photographed him.

I went to four different high schools before I finally graduated in 1937--it was during the Depression, and in the Depression you had to keep moving, you had to go wherever you could make a buck. In 1935, my father and I lived in a “jungle” with a bunch of other men. We moved into some abandoned shack--I guess we were squatters. Whoever was the first guy up in the morning had to fish the dead rabbits out of the well that was our water supply.

I met my wife in high school--she was the girlfriend of a friend of mine. We never had a date before we were married, but we wrote to each other during the war. When I came home from the war, she met me at the depot. For five years, I had dreamed of taking this girl in my arms and kissing her. We were laughing, smiling, our teeth were showing--I swept her into my arms and we bashed our teeth together so hard it almost knocked us out. I’ll always remember the man standing next to us--he was laughing so hard I thought he’d fall over.

After the war, I went back to college and graduated from San Diego State. My first job out of college was working with the elderly as a state social worker. I eventually got tired of being a social worker--I wasn’t cut out for it. So I quit my job and we moved to Lancaster, where my wife’s parents had a turkey ranch. Well, I thought I’d help her folks out with the turkeys, but we just didn’t get along. So we looked around for months for a place to live, all up and down the state. We finally picked Ramona.

I’d known Ramona as a child. I used to visit an aunt in La Jolla, and we’d take the Model T up through the pass for a Sunday drive, and have dinner at a very famous old inn called Kennilworth Inn. The inn burned down while I was overseas, and a very ugly Bank of America sits on the site today.

We’ve been here since 1952. The population when we came here was around 1,200--now it’s about 28,000. We’re the fastest-growing unincorporated area in the county. Ramona really is a beautiful area, and it has a great future. They’re going to expand the airport, which should create a lot of jobs. We have a community plan, which will keep it a nice place to live. I think it will become a very dynamic community.

This house was a defunct chicken ranch when we got here. The house is haunted by two ghosts. The man I’ve never seen, but one of my daughters has, and she’s the most level-headed one in the family. She saw him in the back bedroom.

Years later, a young woman came to the door and asked to look around the house, said she used to live here. After she looked around, she sat on the bed in that room and burst into tears. She told me that, when she was a teen-ager, she had a violent argument with her father one night. He didn’t want her to go out on a date, but she went anyway. When she came back, she found out he had had a heart attack and died.

There’s also the figure of a woman, who’s roughly 5 feet tall and of very slight build. I’ve seen her repeatedly, my wife’s seen her, many people have seen her. A judge who used to live here and had the same experience told us the woman was supposed to have been murdered here, and it was apparently quite a bloody mess.

Sometimes, I wake up and the woman is standing right next to my bed. A friend recently gave me a book called “The Haunted,” and it was absurd. But this doesn’t seem absurd--it’s very natural.

There’s nothing about this house that is frightening. I don’t believe anyone ever dies, really. I believe, whether it’s energy or whatever, nothing is really ever gone completely, and maybe these spirits are earthbound for some reason.