The most terrifying night of Aubrey Graves’ life began with footsteps on a roof where nobody should have been standing. It was exactly 3am in the winter of 2013, inside the shuttered Brookdale Lodge. The groundskeeper, Hank, had a nightly visitor he called Thumper, and now it was crossing overhead, heavy and deliberate, on angled metal and glass. Graves, her girlfriend and Hank huddled on the bridge in the Brook Room, shaking. She screamed into the dark: “What do you want from us?”
The footsteps stopped. Then they charged, straight at the three of them, and stopped again as suddenly as they had started. Nobody moved. The lodge went silent.
Only later, listening back to the audio she had recorded that night, did Graves hear what none of them had caught in the moment. A bark. She knew it instantly. Arlo, her dog, had died three months earlier. She believes he was there to protect her.
The lodge is open again for guests today, though the historic Brook Room, where the three of them sat that night, is still being restored.
Graves’ new book, Supernatural Santa Cruz: The Ultimate Edition, covers more than 100 places around the county. In 307 pages, she moves from haunted buildings to Bigfoot sightings, Monterey Bay sea monster stories and UFO reports, and readers have been praising the photos and newspaper clippings packed into every chapter.
When we spoke, she greeted me with a warm, sweet laugh, and she told the Brookdale story without trying to make it scarier than it was. I understood the fascination. I grew up exploring closed, supposedly haunted resorts around Palm Springs and hanging at the Magic Castle, a refuge for magicians. You feel energy in those places, and spirits. The most frightening fun I’ve had in this county was climbing to the bottom of Hell Hole, a gnarly cave in Wilder Ranch State Park just off the UC Santa Cruz campus. Rock pressing in on every side. Graves’ Brookdale account brought all of that back, the fear and the curiosity tangled together.
Graves, who describes herself as a psychic empath, says she grew up in a haunted house and has been collecting Santa Cruz ghost stories since 2007. She first published Supernatural Santa Cruz in 2011, expanded it in 2013 and later wrote The Santa Cruz Ghost Directory. This is her 14th book. People kept bringing her stories, and the new edition finally gives them room.
I had just come off a deep sound healing session over the weekend, feeling firsthand how sound waves shift the energy in a room. Talking with Graves, I realized her work operates on that same delicate frequency. Sound carries intention and memory across boundaries we don’t fully understand yet. That holds whether it’s an unexplainable voice on tape or a sudden heavy shift in the air of a quiet room.
You can walk past the places in this book: private homes, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, Cocoanut Grove and the train trestle fans will recognize from The Lost Boys. It heads into the redwoods, out onto Monterey Bay and beyond the county line. I like the idea of reading a story at night and passing the place the next morning. Just don’t plan on bringing the book along. At 8.5 by 11 inches, it belongs on a coffee table, not in a jacket pocket.
Graves has spent years visiting places, interviewing witnesses and checking details. You can read a ghost story in 30 seconds on your phone. Finding someone who lived it takes longer. “A lot of the places I talk about, I got first-hand,” she told me. “I went, I investigated, I interviewed the people.”
For years she kept a website where she posted new accounts between books. Now she puts that energy into the books themselves. She tried an AI editor once, found mistakes and decided to keep writing every word herself. “I just love writing myself,” she said.
She started visiting supposedly haunted places and playing with Ouija boards around age 9. These days she takes some encounters more seriously. “People say that ghosts can’t hurt you, but they totally can,” she told me. In Attachment: A Santa Cruz Ghost Story, she describes experiences she believes can leave people sick, tired, depressed or angry.
I don’t know what made that bark. Graves knew the sound. Hearing her tell it made me think of the pets I’ve loved, and how quickly a familiar noise can bring one back.
Next up is a roughly 300-page California Bigfoot guide, which she hopes to release later this year, and Ghosts of Serial Killers, a project that has already taken her three years.
I climbed down Hell Hole to scare myself. Graves does something harder. She stays, listens and writes it down. Supernatural Santa Cruz: The Ultimate Edition is available in paperback and hardcover at Lulu.com (coming soon to Amazon). More at aubgraves.com.
Graves’ other books include Supernatural Santa Cruz (2011), Ghosts of Santa Clara County (2012), Paranormal Investigations of Santa Cruz County (2012), The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland’s HAUNTED Kingdom (2012), Attachment: A Santa Cruz Ghost Story (2013), Supernatural Santa Cruz: Second Edition (2013), The Haunted Brookdale Lodge (2014), The California Ghost Directory (2014), History of the Brookdale Lodge (2017), Santa Cruz Ghost Directory (2018), Serial Killers of Santa Cruz (2019), Ghosts of the Famous (2020), and BIGFOOT: Newspaper Articles from Around the World (2021).
