Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Written by Steven Mynott
CI now occupies the campus that used to be Camarillo State Hospital. When it first opened on Oct. 12, 1936, it was the largest state hospital in the United States. Patients with mental disabilities were treated here until the hospital’s closure in 1997. While always well-intentioned at the time, when we look back on some of the practices today, we recognize that many of the treatments employed here were wildly inhumane by today’s standards. Lobotomies, electric shock, sensory deprivation and diabetic coma therapy were all treatments that were practiced here. After the hospital’s closure in 1997, the campus sat abandoned for five years until 2002 when it was transformed into the University that we know and love today. With its long and checkered past, it is no wonder that rumors of ghosts and hauntings are now commonplace at CI. We sat down with CI students and staff members to hear their stories.
We at The CI View were blown away by the number of responses we got to our request for ghost stories. Due to the high number of responses, we were not able to publish all of them here, so stay tuned for part two!
The unrenovated building adjacent to Marin Hall facing the Napa Hall Courtyard.
Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Christina Lopez, junior Psychology major, was exploring campus one night while it sat empty after the hospital closed. She snapped a photo of a building in the northwest corner of campus that remains abandoned to this day, and was surprised by what she saw. “This is before the school was the school. It was still shut down. You know, after it stopped being a hospital. And, the very back building, um, I was walking by. There was nobody here. You know, everything was locked up, the doors are locked, and there is nothing going on, no noise or anything.
“I just took a picture because I thought, you know, it was a sad little image, just like the dried plants and the abandoned building. I took just a picture just because of the moon, and then, later on, when I looked at the picture, in the bottom right hand side, you can see a face. It’s a bearded face, a man. It just appears in the photo, and that was the only thing. And it was really weird because I didn’t see it. I couldn’t see it with my eyes. I didn’t think there was anything other than just the scenery. And it wasn’t until later on, when I developed it, that I actually did see the face there in the corner.” Unfortunately, this happened a long time ago, and Lopez has not been able to find this photo to share with The CI View.
Reflecting on the experience, Lopez said, “It’s not scary. It’s just a reminder that there’s something more than us, than here. It just kind of gives hope in death. Much like, in my culture there isn’t anything sad about it. It’s a transformation. You’re just changing the body to something different. So it was just a sign to keep hopeful and, you know, to continue.”
Someone else, who wished to tell their story anonymously, also had a ghostly experience in the same area while campus was still abandoned. “We used to call it creative trespassing,” they said. “Um, where you just wandered into stuff that was open. We didn’t break locks. We didn’t trespass in that regard. We just like, there’s a door open. What’s through that door? Let’s go check it out. And we were those students. So we did that in what is now Gateway. So we had early on discovered the beautiful mural paintings if you’ve seen them over there. They have like Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe. But when you go in at night in the ‘90s in the condemned hospital, it’s really creepy and they scared the crap out of you. They weren’t ghosts, but we thought they were briefly. However, when we went into that corner outside of it, we did look up and we saw a silhouette of a woman in white, like a nurse wandering up in those halls, just doing, like, a bed check. But again, that was a place we couldn’t get it to. We just saw them in the window.”
This northwest corner of campus was where the children’s hospital unit was located. Could these have been the spirits of nurses and caretakers for the children who stayed here?
Kristina Do, second year Health Science major, shared an experience she had in Spring of 2025 while she was living in Santa Rosa Village. “So, basically I had just woken up. I had gone out of my room to go to the bathroom. I was walking to the bathroom, and all of a sudden there’s this figure who had long hair, who was wearing a, I would say a nice white dress shirt and a black skirt. She was running very fast towards the exit area, and I was like, ‘that’s kind of weird,’ and I didn’t think much of it. But when I didn’t hear the door open and shut, and I just turned around, there was no one there. So I guess they had, like, a ward to go to, but it didn’t make sense to me since I didn’t hear the door open and shut because the doors to exit Santa Rosa are actually pretty loud, so you can hear when someone is running and opening the door with both hands and letting the door shut. So, it just didn’t make sense to me that I didn’t hear anything in that sort of manner.”
Do said she was not scared by this experience. “I was more confused,” she said. “To be fair, I’m not that scared of ghosts. And such, it’s just, it was more on the confusing side because when I piece those two things together, I was like, ‘was that a ghost?’”
The elevator at Broome Library’s second floor rear entrance
Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Valerie Flores, a third year undecided major, shared a couple of stories with The CI View. The first story began when she was on the ground floor of Broome Library. “I had just gone off of work. I work at the library, and so, this was around, like, 1 p.m., like, somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m. I was going to the second floor of the library to look for a book that I was interested in reading.
“And as I was waiting at the back elevator, I heard what sounded like a voice behind me, and it said, like, ‘Excuse me.’ But then I looked behind me, and there was no one there. There was no one in that section. So I figured maybe I heard it from like, from like a distance in the library and I misinterpreted it. I thought it was closer than it actually was.
“So then I had pushed the button for the elevator, then after a few seconds, the door opened. And as I was walking in, the elevator felt, like, kind of strange. It felt kind of, like, loose, like when I stepped in, it was kind of like I had felt a jolt, like maybe it shook ever so slightly. And I got in, I was like, ‘oh, is the elevator about to break? Like, am I about to break it or?’ And I considered that maybe I should just, like, step out the elevator and relocate to the one in the front of the library. But I’d just gotten off of work, so I was tired, and I said, ‘No, I’m just gonna stay here and risk it.’
“So I let the door close and then I pushed the button for second floor and then nothing happened. The elevator door wasn’t opening. I didn’t feel any movement in the elevator. So I’m like, ‘Did I just get stuck?’ I saw on the elevator wall the buttons, there was one that said door open. So I’m like, okay, I’m just gonna do that. Maybe I can get out the elevator. Maybe, maybe there is something wrong with it, so I push the button. And the elevator doors are opening. But then as soon as it’s opened, like all the way, when the movement stops, it starts moving again, but the door starts closing. So I didn’t have any time to leave the elevator. I could have left if I had stepped out as soon as the door started moving, but I’m kind of afraid of elevators and getting stuck in the doors.
“So I was waiting for it to be still. So then the doors closed, and I was still inside, and then as soon as the doors closed, the elevator started moving on regularly. But then I was kind of feeling how the elevator was moving, and I realized, ‘Wait, am I going down?’ I was on the first floor, so the only place I could have been going was the basement, which was, like, haunted. Like they say that used to be the morgue from the hospital.
“Then I was standing kind of close to the door when this part happened. So then I started backing up, like to the back of the elevator because I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to see what was in the basement at the time. And as I looked up, I looked at that little screen in the elevator that says which floor you’re on, what floor you’re going to. And on the LED lights that show the numbers, either they weren’t on, or they were very faint, or they were dimmer than usual. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing a dim B on that screen, or if I was seeing maybe a combination of the one and the two making it look like a B. But either way, it didn’t look like it was working properly. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’
“So then the elevator stops down at the, I’m guessing it had to have been the basement, and then nothing happens, and the doors, once again, they were not opening. The elevator wasn’t moving. So I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe I have to push the button again. Hopefully then, the elevator will function normally, and be able to go away from the basement.’ So I was walking toward the front of the elevator again, so I could push the ‘door open’ button. But then before I even got to the point where I could push the button, the elevator started moving again. So the door never opened on the basement floor. It just started moving upwards. And then it took me, eventually, up to the second floor. And when I looked on the screen, after leaving the basement, it started working normally again. It was bright again, and it said ‘two.’ So I’m like, ‘Okay, so it’s working normally now.’
So I got out of the elevator, and then I was thinking about this. And I was like, ‘You know, when I first heard that voice before I stepped in, I didn’t think much of it at the time.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, is the elevator about to break?’ But now, with the whole thing about the basement, and how that light on the screen wasn’t working, how the elevator was malfunctioning in general, I was like, ‘Maybe this whole thing was the same spirit that was outside the elevator, then walked in around the same time I walked in, which made the elevator feel weird. Then it went down to the basement, and maybe the spirit left at the basement and so then the LED lights on the number display were working again.’”
Interestingly, Flores was correct when she guessed that the Broome Library basement used to be used as the hospital morgue. Could she have encountered the ghost of a doctor, making his way down to the morgue for a dissection?
Napa Hall 1190
Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
That was not the only paranormal experience that Flores has had on campus. She also shared this story: “So this one happened a lot more recently. This was this year, September 2025. And I have this night class, it’s at Napa Hall. It ends at 9 PM. So, like, halfway through the class, it’s entirely dark outside.
“I was sitting. We were, we were on a break. So, I was having a snack. I had my cheese stick. I was happy. There were people around me. They were in groups, and they were socializing, and I wasn’t. So, I was just sitting there, and I had this bow in my hair. Normally, throughout the day, it kind of slips out, just normally, and I have to adjust it. But normally it does that very slowly.
“So I was sitting there when all of a sudden I felt, what felt like someone had tugged on my hairbow. It was a light tug, but it was not something I’d felt before when I was wearing that bow. I also kind of felt like the hair around the hairbow, like it was kind of shifting a little bit. And it felt like someone was touching my hair and was pulling on the hairbow. And it was so realistic. My hand, it shot back to the back of my head to try and stop the person who was doing that. Then I looked behind me and there was no one around me. And I don’t think anyone else saw it because everyone else, like I said, they were socializing. They were all doing their own thing.”
Back when campus was still Camarillo State Hospital, the beauty shop was located in what is now Napa Hall. Was a ghost from the shop jealous of her hairbow?
Over the years, Jodi Kautz, Disability and Support Services counselor, has collected lots of ghost stories from her students. She was gracious enough to share some of them with The CI View. The first one occurred in the Santa Cruz dorm building: “After the Woolsey Fire, remember, the campus was evacuated because it was a really bad fire. But they let the RAs back in early to go tidy up the villages, and keep check before all the students were welcome back. One of those past RAs shared the story of when they were there. It was like four people, but they suddenly heard a wailing woman, like very much, not like in pain, but more like the sadness that comes from being, like, enclosed and trying to get attention. And it was really creepy and she got a voice recording of it, which was really cool that I got shared with me.” The student who shared this story with Kautz requested to remain anonymous, and we do not have access to the voice recording.
Kautz shared that numerous students have reported hearing mysterious music on campus: “I know people have sometimes heard, we had the jazz musician here. I think it was the President’s Courtyard over by the Broome Library. Someone heard jazz music being played when no one was there. And so they don’t, like, just a guitar and someone, like, singing. There’s no evidence, but it was one of the stories I heard over there.”
One of the particularly unsettling occurrences Kautz shared happened in the dorms. “I know I’ve had students report in the dorms. They hung up religious iconography, like a cross, and it got turned upside down.”
The front of Arroyo Hall from Parking Lot A5
Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Kautz said that she and her colleagues at DASS have had numerous unexplained phenomena occur in their offices: “I know in our DASS office here at Arroyal Hall, lights go on and off all the time and people are like, oh, it’s just the sensors. And I’m like, there’s no one there to trigger the sensor. Why is it going on and off? We have doors that won’t lock or magically open on their own. We have that, especially towards the evening where they just, I’m sure I closed it. I’m sure I latched it, but the next morning, it’s open like two inches.”
I asked Kautz if she felt like the spirits at CI ever wished harm on the living. “No,” she answered. “Not at all, and that’s going back to that history of how we were designed. So, the hospital originally was designed with 54 different courtyards. We’ve changed a bunch of them in the different green spaces, but it was built with a holistic healing practice in mind. The idea that the outside world is too busy, too crazy, too overwhelming. And if people have mental illness, they need to go somewhere holistic to calm down, chill, well, not chill, but you know, like relax, get back to nature. Um, do a lot of um, self-healing through gardening, through interactions, in like controlled environments. That was how it was built originally. That’s why it’s such a beautiful campus. That’s why it’s super positive for our neurodivergent students. They love it here. They’re like, it’s not a crazy school. There’s a lot of alcoves where they can go decompress and then come back to school.”
While ghost stories are fun, Kautz emphasized that a big part of the reason she enjoys collecting and sharing these stories is to honor Camarillo State Hospital and the history of disability treatment. “I work with the disabilities program,” she said. “So students who have these disabilities who might have been patients here, in a different life, in a different time, like in the ‘20s or ‘30s, might have been sent here. Even though they’re brilliant. They’re honor students, they’re doing great here. It’s like they might have been sent here back in the day because we just didn’t understand mental health and we didn’t understand disability and that was what it was historically. So they still tell me they feel, like, a very calming sense here on campus. Like, as I said, they use all the courtyards. We’re building more sensory locations like over at the entrance off Potrero Road where the soccer courts are. There is now that Trinity Garden, which has got a swing for sensory, and you can swing and just be in the trees. And then over behind the dorms by pickleball court, I think is where the labyrinth walking garden is. And those were things that were on this campus when we were a hospital, and you know, again, bringing those same senses and tools to our students even today that still work. So, that’s why I wanted to share all those things.”
