Banning House Lodge

The Banning brothers owned Santa Catalina Island from 1892, and in 1910 built this house as their summer home on the hilltop above Two Harbors, looking over both Isthmus Cove and Catalina Harbor. They formed the Santa Catalina Island Company to draw visitors, entertained here on a large scale, and in 1919 sold the island to the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. The house then passed through a string of other lives — quarters for U.S. Coast Guard officers during the Second World War, a private girls' camp in the late 1950s, a hunting lodge, staff housing — before becoming the twelve-room lodge it is today. Guests in almost every room have reported a woman in white, identity unknown, standing at the window and staring out before she fades. Others describe the smell of pipe tobacco and fresh fish with no source, which local tellings attribute to a fisherman lost at sea nearby.