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Published on 10/19/1998 All articles from this issue

A Main Street ghost and some local witches

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By Joanne Griffith Domingue / Town Crier Staff Writer

Some say a ghost haunts the upstairs of Mac's American Grill in downtown Los Altos. And witches have been sighted in Los Altos Hills.

"My piano and bass players swore a ghost lived upstairs," said Ron Shanholtz, owner of Mac's.

Actually, "It wasn't a ghost," said Bob MacFadyen, the piano player. "It was a little man who disappeared."

One night about 15 years ago, MacFadyen and his buddy Larry Yanette, who played bass, packed up their microphone and the bass, like they did every night, and carried them upstairs to put them away.

It was about 1:30 a.m., MacFayden said, and there was "never anybody up there. Right at the top of the stairs, I leaned the bass in the corner. Then I saw a little man, in his 60s, in a cheap plaid sport coat. He didn't say a word. He didn't move. I turned around, and he was gone. Where'd he go? We checked everywhere. He wasn't up there. We went downstairs. The busboys hadn't seen anybody."

The elevator was really noisy, MacFayden said, and if the little man had come down in it, "You'd have heard it across the street. No one had heard anything. And all the doors were locked. Larry didn't like this. He was uneasy.

"About a week later, Larry said he'd take the bass up. Those are long stairs," MacFayden said. "All of a sudden, I heard Larry coming down the stairs, boom, boom, boom, four stairs at a time. He ran across the room. His face was white. He said the little man was there. A big freeze had come over him. He turned around and the little man was there and his (Yanette's) feet were frozen."

They told their story to Ann Larkin, a night waitress. "She said it sounded like an old timer who did odd jobs around the place. He had no home and the previous owner allowed him to live up there."

MacFayden and Yanette have retired. And there's no more piano bar at Mac's.

But the little man may still be around. Just ask Michael MacKusick, the current nighttime bartender at Mac's.

One night about five years ago, MacKusick went upstairs at closing time. "Something made all the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It was dark, but light enough to see," he said.

Then, about a year later, "I heard clear footsteps with hard-heeled shoes, walking from one banquet room to another." Except there wasn't anybody up there, he said.

As far as the little man and hauntings upstairs at Mac's, "I think there's something. Some employees say, 'I don't go up there at night.'"

Witches of wicca

They may not have warts on their noses. Or wear pointy black hats. But they say they are witches, and they hang out in Los Altos Hills.

One night about a year ago, Santa Clara County Deputy Sheriff Dave Rodriguez was on patrol in Los Altos Hills. Rodriguez, the beat officer for the Hills, was winding down Stonebrook Road about 11 p.m., when all of sudden, around a corner, he came upon three women holding a ceremony in the road.

"They were chanting, out here singing songs," Rodriquez said, "having a service. It was not Halloween. They said they were witches and belonged to wicca, an organized religion."

It may sound spooky to some. But "Witches are a benign nature-oriented group," said J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara. "Members tend to be urban dwellers with a lot of potted plants and a couple of pets." Melton has studied wicca for nearly 20 years.

Worldwide membership in wicca is about 80,000 witches, with maybe 70,000 in the United States, according to Melton. Some have said wicca draws those looking for images of a god that is feminine. A care of the environment may draw others, experts say.

And the women in the Hills? At least "They were not boiling a cat," Rodriguez said.