Illustration by Dane Koch

Wow, interesting story.

Chico State, CA. is home to a bizarre story that has made some headlines in the past. A murder, body being buried in the local mountains and a ghost haunting some residents, in an apparent cry for help. Sound like a horror movie plot?

Not according to the residents of the Parmac Road apartment complex. There seems to be some collective sightings of paranormal activity in this story. many residents have claimed to feel or see strange things happening in or around their apartment. None as bizarre as Jodi Foster’s story. (No, not the actress)

Read the strange report from Bianca Hernandez from Chico State’s The Orion

By Bianca Hernandez

A terrified mother pulls her daughter out of her apartment and runs out into the darkness. It’s 3 a.m. and the clocks in the house are spinning forward, the lights are flashing and an “Ernie” doll is yelling, “I feel great.” This was no electrical anomaly. It was a haunting.

Jodi Foster, a Chico resident, had learned to live with the odd occurrences in her home, including dreams and ghostly sightings, but this incident was more than she could take.

When Foster and her daughter moved into their apartment on Parmac Road in 2000, she had no knowledge of the previous inhabitants. Odd things started happening as soon as the two moved in. The heat would come on while the air conditioning was running and all the TV’s in the house would turn on.

All of this could have been blamed on wiring problems, but then Foster’s 3-year-old daughter started seeing a woman in the house.

“She’d say to me, ‘Mommy, I like your friend,’” Foster said.

What Foster’s daughter said she was seeing was a woman in white, who would walk around the apartment and sometimes kiss her head before she went to sleep.

“I would say, ‘fancy imagination you have,’” Foster said.

The electrical wiring in the house was checked, but the occurrences continued to happen and Foster started having dreams.

“I was having specific, detailed dreams where I was seeing someone being tortured,” she said. “I dreamed of a mountainous location where a girl was taken and buried.”

When Foster would wake from these dreams the lights would be going on and off, she said. She began to think she was crazy and had friends come stay at the house who would experience the same occurrences.

Foster moved into a different apartment in the same complex in 2000 and tried to forget the incident, until she talked to a man who had lived in the haunted apartment before her. He told Foster about the Marie Elizabeth Spannhake case.

Spannhake, a Chico State student, had lived in the apartment and had gone missing in 1976, Foster said. In 1977, a couple was charged with abducting a woman from Paradise, and keeping her as a sex slave for seven years. The

Mary Spannhake

circumstances were similar to the Spannhake case and the couple was allegedly connected to Spannhake’s disappearance.

Another coincidence involves drawings made by Foster’s daughter. She would draw the woman she saw in the house.

Foster began researching the case and came across articles in the Chico Enterprise-Record. These articles included photographs of the couple and Spannhake, who Foster thought resembled her daughter’s drawings.

Foster has recently been called by management because new tenants are experiencing odd activity, she said.

“The ghost is afraid that if she rests right now justice won’t be served, so she keeps trying to get someone’s attention,” Foster said.

In the four years Jim McLaughlin has been a manager for the complex, he has not witnessed any events, but has heard about them from his tenants.

“I moved this girl in there and never thought nothing about it,” McLaughlin said. “She called me that night, hysterical.”

The people who have reported similar paranormal incidents in the apartment didn’t know each other, McLaughlin said.

“I’m not a believer in ghosts, until now,” McLaughlin said.

Odd occurrences have not been limited to that one apartment, either. Idalmis Herrera lives in the same complex and has experienced paranormal activities, as well.

“I had my place blessed because I couldn’t sleep anymore,” Herrera said. “I would feel like someone was around me.”

Herrera hasn’t seen any of the occurrences in Foster’s apartment, but has heard about it from other tenants.

In 2007, Foster went to the police and was able to provide them with information to the unsolved case.

“They did believe me when I contacted them,” Foster said. “I had way too much information.”

After going to the police with information, Foster decided to write about her experiences. “The Perfect Miracle” was scheduled to come out this Halloween. However, because of the nature of some of the content, it was postponed until the end of January, which will be around the time Spannhake went missing.