Buyer be scared: Patrick Stewart sold haunted Los Angeles home without revealing ghosts
Then the noises began: the sound of voices coming from a room that was empty; the sound of footsteps on the stairs when nobody was using them.
Zoiks! Be ready for ghost stories from Patrick Stewart in "Making It So: A Memoir," his USA TODAY bestseller released this month from Simon & Schuster. Yes, the British actor who played 24th-century explorer Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek" series "The Next Generation" and "Picard" shares his paranormal experiences, including recurring spirited moments that freaked him out of his Los Angeles home.
"I have been witnessing stuff since I was 12 years old," Stewart, 83, tells USA TODAY. "And it has stayed with me throughout my life. I have sometimes quite intense feelings and nighttime experiences and occasionally I witness things. It happens to me and I'm not inventing it. Why would I invent it? Because I always feel slightly foolish when I talk about this."
In the spirit of Halloween, here are Stewart's ghost encounters.
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Patrick Stewart first paranormal experience was as a kid in England
The spooky experiences started during his youth in Yorkshire, England, when Stewart would stay at the home of his influential first drama teacher, Ruth Wynn Owen (to whom his memoir is dedicated). Two striking paintings featuring 17th-century women in the home appeared to young Stewart to be covered in an "unexplainable mist," he writes, especially the guest room painting, which put off a "spooky glow" in the dark hours.
"This scared me, fundamentally," Stewart writes, saying he developed a routine of turning off the lights and diving under the covers to avoid any specter. "There I stayed until morning."
Stewart eventually told Wynn Owen, who explained that spirits had followed her family into the house. A girl often appeared at night and always smiled before disappearing Wynn Owen told him, impressed that Stewart was one of the few who noticed the otherworldly paintings.
"She was curious to know if I had experienced other phenomena of this nature, but I hadn’t ... yet," Stewart writes.
The Royal Shakespeare Company actor's beloved and hardworking mother, Gladys, died in 1977 at age 76. Stewart had alone time before the funeral with his mother in an open casket.
"Just before my eyes fixed on her face, I heard her say, 'Oh, hello, Patrick, love,'" Stewart writes. "I know I heard it. I did not imagine it."
Stewart "kissed her on her cheek, told her I loved her and bid Mam farewell."
Stewart's Los Angeles home was so haunted, he bolted to a modern dwelling
While Stewart's childhood paranormal paintings experience caused "more distress than wonder," the mysterious moments got stranger for the Los Angeles-based "TNG" star. After his second season as Picard, Stewart bought a home in Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighborhood where "weird things started happening," he writes.
Returning home from work on the Paramount lot one evening, his nostrils were overpowered by a roasting smell. After a swift kitchen investigation, "the stove was not even turned on, and the oven was cold and empty," he writes. This got worse.
Stewart's son Daniel, who resided in England, was "freaked out" by a stranger occurrence that stopped him from ever staying overnight again at his father's residence.
"When I asked him what was wrong, he led me down into the living room, where the floor was scattered with books that had obviously come from the shelves lining the wall," Stewart writes. "Dan told me he had been watching TV when the books suddenly flew across the room, as if thrown with great force. The incident scared him so badly that he left the house and returned only when he knew I would soon be home."
That's when the sinister sounds really started. Voices, footsteps on empty stairs not to mention temperatures dropping to icy levels each night as Stewart neared the same stair step. "I had an urge to look over my shoulder, but I never dared," he writes.
Stewart rented his haunted home and things turned weirder
Stewart eventually rented out his Silver Lake home and moved to a "modern" Beverly Hills abode. "I moved out like a shot and immediately felt much safer in my new home," Stewart writes.
A few months later, the mother of the tenant family called with washer-dryer problems. After the pleasant chat, she said, “By the way, you never told us about the other things that came with this house.”
Guilty as Macbeth, Stewart fessed up about his paranormal experiences. The tenant said her daughter had seen more, including a shadowy male figure standing in the hall at the foot of those stairs. Stewart was impressed with the family's courage − and relieved he wasn't losing his mind.
"In a way that was a comfort that their family saw things," Stewart says. "And they saw more than I saw."
In his final call to the renter, the woman said she sorted the pesky poltergeist problem. Awoken from a nap by the chronic disembodied voices, she unleashed her fury, walking to the stairs and screaming for the spirits to "leave us in peace," with a key added expletive. The disturbances stopped right then.
The verbal ghostbusting was so effective that Stewart did not feel the need to disclose his paranormal incidents to prospective buyers when he put the house on the market − even though he believed that warning was required by California law. (Turns out, it's not. Only deaths on property within a certain time period must be disclosed).
"To my relief, I never heard anything from my buyers afterward," Stewart says.
Stewart did, however, unexpectedly run into the couple who had sold him the haunted house without warning.
"When I went over to greet them, they were clearly uncomfortable and beat a retreat from me almost immediately," Stewart writes. "I got the distinct impression that they had something to hide."