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Michael Jackson, owner of The Property Conference Center, believes it has a ghost. The English Tudor building on West Gila Bend Highway was constructed as a private home, probably in the early 1940s.

The couple who built it, former state Sen. Peter H. Ethington and his wife, Anna, had moved to Casa Grande in 1921. Both were leaders at Calvary Southern Baptist Church and were well respected in the community. They had a dairy, installed Casa Grande’s first ice cream factory, farmed thousands of acres, helped resettle families fleeing the Dust Bowl, created Ethington Motor Co., helped fund development of Grand Canyon College (now Grand Canyon University) and raised seven children.

One of their grandchildren, Tom Ethington, wrote in an email interview: “The house was unique and a far cry different from the wood house that was the Ethington ‘homestead’ on the northwest corner of Ethington Road and Arizona Highway 84.”

Peter Ethington died in 1953. Annie died in 1970 at Casa Grande’s old Hoemako Hospital, and the house was sold.

Jackson said the 7,000-square-foot home was sold and abandoned at least twice before he bought it. He was told that after Mrs. Ethington’s death, a caretaker lived in the home and saw something several times. One night before going to sleep, he and his young son put their jeans and boots on the floor at the foot of their beds, and when they awoke the next morning, both sets of clothes were in another room. Two nights later he saw the image of a woman telling him to renounce Jesus, and he and his son moved out.

When Jackson bought the house in the late 1970s, a hired man was helping with odd jobs and living in the basement. Jackson arrived one morning and found a bed sheet hanging on the chain-link fence that surrounded the property. The hired man was gone.

A mutual friend drove up and said the man had seen a vision of “La Llorona,” the weeping woman of Mexican legend, in the basement. He was so frightened he ran to Stanfield without clothes or shoes and would not return even to pick up his paycheck.

The ghost at The Property Conference Center is described in Ellen Robson’s “Haunted Arizona” as “The Lady in White.”

Jackson said he, too, lived in the basement of the house for a while and was awakened one night by the sound of someone coming down the stairs.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Jackson said, “But I was afraid of something that night. There was something coming down the stairs, and I don’t know what it was.”

He waited with a pistol, but nothing came close enough for him to see what it was.

After the building was reopened as a restaurant, Jackson said one of the bartenders told him that he felt someone’s presence when he was there alone.

Former bartender John Pederson said in a telephone interview that one night he was alone, counting receipts at the bar, and a cold wave of air washed over him. The air conditioning was off. He looked behind him into the round room and felt something staring at him.

“I didn’t see anybody,” Pederson said, “but I felt somebody. Every hair on my arms stood up.”

He said he grabbed the money, threw it in the safe and ran. Once outside the building, he had to pass the round room’s French windows to reach his car.

“And I distinctly remember averting my eyes because I didn’t want to see something inside. I could live with it being just my imagination, but if I saw something, it would be entirely different.”

Pederson added that when one of the cooks would hear pots and pans rattling in the empty kitchen, she would yell, “Hush up in there!”

“And it would hush up,” he said. “That is a weird building.”

Jackson said a waitress called him late one night and said she was ready to close.

He told her he would be there in 10 minutes, and when he arrived, she was in the parking lot.

She told him, “After I hung up the phone, I heard somebody say my name, and I knew it couldn’t be you. Then they said my name again, and I had to get out of the building.”

Bar manager Katie Montiel, Jackson’s daughter, said she and her mother Nancy and brother Tim were in The Property’s kitchen on New Year’s morning in 2000 and a chair started moving by itself.

“It was about 2:30 or 3 o’clock in the morning,” Montiel said, “when that chair, the back legs lifted up, and it pushed itself underneath the desk.

“All three of us saw it, so I know I wasn’t seeing things,” she said.

She said she looked at her mother and brother and said, “Now, are you guys ready?”

Their mother said, “It is time to go, right now.”

Montiel said there have been some crazy things inside The Property. “Nothing harmful. I don’t think anyone’s ever been hurt, but she lets you know when it’s time to leave.”

Jackson said the most recent incident was Oct. 11 during the class of 1964 reunion.

An alum was in the lobby doing a video interview and something moved behind him and then in front of him. No one noticed it until the video was played back.

“We’re sure there’s a spirit out there,” Jackson said. “It’s a scary place to be alone.”

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