Preston Castle

Visitors and staff at Preston Castle describe a watched feeling throughout the building, concentrated in the basement where the head housekeeper, Anna Corbin, fifty-two, was found beaten to death on 23 February 1950. The case has never been solved — a teenage inmate was charged and, after three trials, acquitted. The castle opened in 1894 as the Preston School of Industry, a 120-room Romanesque Revival building established by the California legislature as a deliberate break from simply imprisoning juvenile offenders. It closed in 1960 and has stood empty since; a separate youth correctional facility operates downhill and is not this building. The Preston Castle Foundation preserves the building today and runs public tours.