The House on the Hill
In Los Gatos California
Story by By Justin Collins // Art by Fernando Amaro Jr.

Many spirits walk the shadowy recesses and backroads of this once lonely and peaceful city. One can imagine the shades of years past enjoying a sunlit picnic in the quiet serene rolling hills of Oak Hill Cemetery or in the secluded parts of Kelley Park in central San Jose, in between the busy college district   around San Fernando and San Salvador streets and the desolate expanses of Senter and Monterey Rd., before you reach the South side with street names like Grey Ghost and Frontier Village as you reach Blossom Hill Rd. in the outskirts before Morgan Hill, and further down the lovely stretch, you pass Camden Avenue and Leigh and travel up a slope and emerge with a spectacular view of San Jose's sea of yellow street lights.

As you traverse farther you come to the small city of Los Gatos.   If you go down a long dark alley next to Highway 17, there is a long-abandoned old folks' home or maybe some forgotten Lovecraftean villa with a tiny stagnant pond and a cramped servants' quarters.   The grounds have a dark path up the hill to the main house.   The path is overgrown with ancient thornbush and wild raspberries.   The countless wild cats and watchful raccoons are more at home now than the builders ever were. If you successfully navigate the lost trail as we did in our youth, you come to a second-floor balcony to the left (the first is built into the hillside), and to the right a fallen, once magnificent patio and veranda with grapes hanging down from the ruined structure that biodegraded long before I set eyes on it in the mid nineteen-eighties.

It is incredible that the old house still stands overlooking the old highway in this time of shady transactions and faulty land deals.   If you enter the old vacant building you can sense a feeling of heaviness in the air, a stillness that is not quite empty.   The blackness of no electricity might come to a natural break from the darkness in a windowed room as you wend the pitchblack hallways.   The layout of the old hospital gurantees you can't walk in a straight line for long.   The building is still densely populated by the furniture of long-dead tenants. The inescapable truth of an old folks' home is that people die every day, and leave a stain on some houses and roads that seldom hear the everyday sounds of the living.   The three-leveled structure has a door to a lonely road on the top of the hill that leads to a historic winery and a quiet meadow where one can still spy a mother doe and her fawn grazing on the roadside. The house when seen from the alley has countless broken windows and the far-off voices of long-gone parties in the desolate structure that has stood vacant since the mid-Fifties.   As you stare up at the ruin, you can almost make out shadowy white forms staring back at you from the western facing room of this once-affluent care hospital.

Click here for more:

It's an Eastside Thing
An East San Jose Perspective
Story by Jesse Antolin-Ingram