Welch's Incredible Sightings

Strange Tales From a Famous Astrologer

By Sandy Sanders
The Sonoma Index-Tribune
April 2, 1980

Famous local astrologer Walden Welch is not surprised when he sees a ghost. "My first reaction when I see one is that I know them," he explained. Often he realizes it was a ghost only when it has disappeared.

Once, while still living in San Francisco, he was watching television when he noticed a man with blue eyes and black hair, dressed in a blue suit. The man looked at him, winked and smiled. "I just looked at him and smiled back, and continued watching TV," recalled Welch. Then he wondered what had made the man smile. It didn't occur to him to wonder who the man was or how he had gotten there. Welch turned to him again, and the man winked again and smiled, then disappeared with a shimmer of air. Only then did Welch realize that he was alone in the house and that he did not know this man.

For Welch, seeing a ghost is a natural experience. Only after the ghost had gone does he realize that the colors of its eyes, hair and clothing were perhaps more vivid than they might be otherwise. He usually sees ghosts in the daytime, "Out of nowhere. I just turn around and they are sitting or standing beside me and and I think I know them." he said.

The psychic saw his first ghost when he was five. He was praying beside his bed. The man told him that his mother wouldn't die and added, "Tell her that she is a silly --." Walden didn't know the word the man used, but when he passed on the message to his mother later, she cried. The strange word was her Portuguese grandfather's pet nickname for her, and meant "silly goose."

As a young adult, Welch owned an antique shop on Divisadero Street in San Francisco. He lived in the same building. Upstairs was and English lady named Alice Meyers who was divorced and living alone. She was always smiling and often stopped to visit on her way to a bus stop below en route to her babysitting jobs. One day when he hadn't seen her for quite some time he was stripping furniture in the antique shop when he saw her walk by. She was walking to the bus stop, wearing her blue coat and pillow box hat. If Welch had stopped working, the coat of varnish he was applying wouldn't dry to an even color. But he felt guilty about not visiting with her. Her face had seemed sad. Later that day the landlord asked if he had seen Alice Meyers recently, for no one else had. When her apartment was opened, her body was found. She had been dead for two weeks. "Alice's biggest fear was to die alone and not be found", remembered Welch. "She was just trying to let someone know."

He has met other ghosts too who seemed to have a purpose in letting their selves be seen.

One time he was going to do a astrological reading for a man and woman; but when they walked into his office at Curry & I Antiques in Boyes Hot Springs, there was another woman with them. He assumed he had made a mistake in scheduling two appointments at once, but he asked them to make themselves comfortable. Only the man and woman sat down, near the fireplace. The third woman remained standing by a low table facing them; and it was only then that Welch realized she had no legs. Only the upper part of her body was visible. She did not look at him, but only at the couple facing her, and drew her wedding ring off her finger, tossing it toward the woman's lap. She repeated the gesture several times before vanishing. The astrologer thought, "I'm not going to tell these people. They will become scared and think I'm a lunatic." But compelled to relate the sighting he questioned the man as to whether he had recently lost his wife and was feeling guilty about wanting to remarry. He asked his client if his deceased wife had very black hair which she wore in a bun and had worn red as a favorite dress color, and preferred dresses with a Peter Pan collar. Had she worn a wedding ring with a very large diamond set off the band with little sparkly objects on the side? The man had become pale and agitated, but he confirmed everything. The large "diamond" ring was a zircon. So Welch described what he had seen and said he felt the woman was trying to tell her husband she approved of him marrying again. Next the man pulled out his wallet. Inside was a picture of the same woman, wearing the same red dress. It had been taken at Christmas time the year before.

A different ghostly experience occurred at another reading Welch gave in his office. A Los Altos woman had come in fairly casually, only because a friend of hers had had a reading done and praised Welch's abilities. She was curious.  Some 15 minutes into the reading, which was being tape-recorded by the woman, Welch saw that her husband would die soon. He asked her if her husband was gravely ill, and she said yes. So the astrologer began gently talking around the subject, not telling her directly that her husband would die, but trying to prepare her. After he finished the reading, the woman asked to spot-check her tape before she left. She was afraid a reel had finished somewhere in the middle.  Exactly at that point where Welch had started to ask about her husband, his voice was no longer on the tape. It had been blocked out by a man's voice, singing like a cantor in a temple. The woman froze with fear. "It's my father!" she exclaimed. He had died some 40 years before when she was in her teens. He had been a rabbi. At the point on the tape where Welch had gone on to other subjects, there was his voice again, and the singing was gone.

When the woman left she was still upset and fearful. Later, Welch learned that the tape had been checked and verified as not being a fake by Stanford University, and that a copy had gone into their Department of Parapsychology Dept. The woman's husband died shortly there after. When she phoned Walden and told him, she agreed that the message on the tape, though a shock at the time, had given her consolation in her husband's death. She had never before believed in the survival of the spirit.

Welch puts ghost sightings into two categories. For some people, seeing or hearing a much-loved relative or friend at a time of personal need is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Usually these people are not believers in ghost.

Other ghosts are the familiar "haunts", spirits, which remain about a certain place they knew in life. Welch believes that these are "earthbound" spirits who do not realize they have died. Often when an old house is remodeled and no longer familiar to them they leave. In other instances they may be 'spirit guides' or if one prefers, 'Guardian Angels'.

When Welch first came to Sonoma Valley he saw a ghost at The Blue Wing Inn in Sonoma. A company of friends had gathered together for a party in the patio behind the building. When one of the women got up and said she was going upstairs to the bathroom, Welch told her that he had just seen someone else go in and advised her to wait. But when no one came out after a long while, she asked whom he had seen. As he described the figure, there was a gasp from another guest, who told him that for the better part of a century there were tales of a ghost who ascended these stairs. She was depicted exactly as Walden had described her.

The ghost was a young woman with her hair tied up in a bun, adorned in an old fashioned, full-length dress. The dress had a high lace collar, was puffy at the bottom, and had a pattern of rosebuds on a beige background. She was also carrying a candle. "They always look so real, flesh and blood, to me", Welch replied. "I simply thought it was someone who dressed eccentrically in order to be noticed."

Welch once had two friends in the valley, two elderly women whom he did occasional errands. The older woman was the mother of the second, and was in her seventies. The mother sometimes told Welch that she was worried about dying before her daughter, because the daughter was less stable and would not be able to handle her mother's death well.

The daughter had no religious beliefs and was inclined to drink too much, whereas the mother, Welch said, was very spiritual and accepting of life after death. But it was the mother who died first. And immediately after her death while Welch was in their home with the daughter, he saw the dead mother sitting on her bed. "She 'spoke in my head' and told me she had hidden $10,000.00 dollars in a black purse in her closet to be given to her daughter to help her in the future, but that I was not to give it to her all at once for she would waste it on liquor." He said nothing to the daughter. But some time later, she called him late and night and asked him to come over. She was very frightened because she had seen her mother. The mother had stroked her cheek as she lay in bed, and then disappeared. Welch tried to comfort her; for the lady could not believe in the reassurance of the gesture she had felt. He did not tell that he, too, had seen her mother. Nor of the message she gave regarding the money. She would have been too unable to accept that without fear, he felt. The next day he pretended to come across the $10,000.00 dollars by accident as he helped clean the closest of her mother's bedroom. It was stuffed into the lining of a black purse.

Since that time he has occasionally seen the mother in the window of her daughter's house, looking at him with a smile as he passes by to where his car is parked. Each time he recognizes her and smiles back. It seems natural. When he remembers she is dead and looks to see her again, she is gone. Welch feels that she cannot stop worrying about her daughter and still feels responsible for her. Therefore, she too has become earthbound for the time being, for she still feels the need to care for her daughter.

Welch has had only one unpleasant experience with a ghost, and that was while his cousin was visiting him in a house here in the valley. The cousin had gone to sleep watching television in Walden's room, so Welch went to sleep in the front bedroom so as not to wake his cousin. He awakened to a terrifying sense of fists beating hard on his back. There seemed to be no air in the room. He gasped for air. It also seemed as if he were being electrified. Somehow he managed to push himself abruptly up out of bed and ran downstairs. It was 4:30 a.m.

He said nothing to his cousin, who was a little unstable and did not believe in ghosts anyway. The next night the cousin slept in the front bedroom and Welch slept in his own. "My cousin came running into my room and screamed that something was beating him!" It was again 4:30 a.m. remembered Welch. His cousin would never come to visit again. Another man usually sleeps in that bedroom. He has seen the ghost as well but is neither frightened nor harassed by it. It is a woman who pauses by the foot of the bed and watches him a while, then drifts off. "Doesn't it scare you?" Welch has asked him; and he replies, "No, whoever it is, I know she likes me." Welch senses he is right, and that the ghost became abusive to him and his cousin out of resentment at finding someone else in the bed taking the original man's place. Welch thinks she is a woman in her 20's or early 30's, and that she had something to do with show business, most likely an actress in the early 20's and 1930's. Ironically enough the bed once belonged to famous Broadway actress Jeanne Eagles! When Welch has seen her she is simply a milky white, not colorful, as is the case with most ghosts he has seen.

Clara Pregger, a psychic from Napa, once visited the house (which is The Curry & I Building which is owned by Welch) and paused at the doorway, saying she felt someone had fallen on that spot and had been killed. She was standing below on odd cut-off angle below one corner of the front bedroom. Later, Welch discovered the frame of an old window embedded in the wall, which cuts off that corner. He has also learned that the building was a bordello shortly after the turn of the century. Previous owners told him of a story in which a man roughhoused with a woman upstairs, and that she fell out of the window to her death. "I have never seen her spirit, but there is a definite cold spot at that place which never goes away", Welch stated.

Walden Welch's descriptions of ghostly sightings are among the most dramatic and incredible stories imaginable. Yet Welch is calm and totally matter of fact about them. He does not suggest that he "sensed" a strange figure and then "knew" that a murder had occurred, or any or the other all- knowing claims one associates with psychics who "see" ghosts.

For him these are not supernatural mysteries seen only with the mind's eye, or at night, but in fact are totally real and fully human figures seen in full daylight. They bring with them no sense of fear or anything unnatural. "A ghost is a soul", he says simply. "We are all souls. A ghost is the "soul body", which has left the physical body and nothing more. Why in the world would anyone be afraid of one? It simply proves we survive death. It would frighten me to believe we did not. What could be more natural?"