Patrick Stewart's haunted Hollywood home and the ghost stories he swore were real
Patrick Stewart's haunted Hollywood home and the ghost stories he swore were real
Bryan Alexander, USA TODAYSat, October 31, 2026 at 3:55 PM UTC
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Then the noises began: the sound of voices coming from a room that was empty; the sound of footsteps on the stairs when nobody was using them.
Zoinks! That eerie passage sounds like something straight out of a Stephen King horror novel. But the twisted tidbit comes from the 2023 memoir "Making It So" by Patrick Stewart, the beloved "Star Trek" legend who died Wednesday, Oct. 28, at age 86.
The classically trained English actor, best known for playing 24th-century space explorer Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek: Picard," shared his lifelong paranormal experiences in the memoir, including recurring ghostly encounters that frightened him so badly that he fled his Los Angeles home.
"I have been witnessing stuff since I was 12 years old," Stewart told USA TODAY in a 2023 interview. "And it has stayed with me throughout my life. I have sometimes quite intense feelings and nighttime experiences, and occasionally I witness things."
Stewart was adamant that these were no tall tales.
"It happens to me. I'm not inventing it," Stewart said. "Why would I invent it? Because I always feel slightly foolish when I talk about this."
In the spirit of Halloween, here are Stewart's most chilling ghost encounters, as recounted in his memoir and exclusive USA TODAY interview.
Patrick Stewart's first paranormal experience was as a kid in England
The spooky experiences began during Stewart's youth in Yorkshire, England, when he stayed at the home of his influential first drama teacher, Ruth Wynn Owen, to whom his memoir is dedicated.
Two striking paintings of 17th-century women in the home appeared to be shrouded in an "unexplainable mist," Stewart wrote. The painting in the guest room was particularly unsettling, emitting a "spooky glow" after dark.
"This scared me, fundamentally," Stewart wrote. He developed a nightly ritual of switching off the lights and diving under the covers to avoid the specter of a spectre. "There I stayed until morning."
Stewart eventually told his drama teacher, who explained that spirits had followed her family into the house. A girl often appeared at night and always smiled before disappearing, Wynn Owen told him. She was impressed that Stewart was one of the few who noticed the otherworldly paintings.
"She was curious to know if I had experienced other phenomena of this nature, but I hadn’t ... yet," Stewart wrote.
Stewart's beloved, hardworking mother, Gladys, died in 1977 at age 76. The Royal Shakespeare Company actor spent time alone with her as she lay in an open casket before the funeral. Then came a moment Stewart insisted was no trick of the mind.
"Just before my eyes fixed on her face, I heard her say, 'Oh, hello, Patrick, love,'" Stewart wrote. "I know I heard it. I did not imagine it."
Stewart "kissed her on her cheek, told her I loved her and bid Mam farewell."
Stewart's Los Angeles home was so haunted, he bolted to a modern dwelling
While Stewart's childhood encounters with the paranormal paintings caused "more distress than wonder," the unexplained experiences only grew stranger for the Los Angeles-based "Star Trek" star.
After completing his second season as Picard on "The Next Generation" in 1989, Stewart bought a home in Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighborhood, where "weird things started happening," he wrote.
Returning home from work at the Paramount lot one evening, Stewart was overwhelmed by the smell of something roasting. But a quick search of the kitchen turned up nothing."The stove was not even turned on, and the oven was cold and empty," he wrote.
Things got worse.
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Stewart's son Daniel, who lived in England, was "freaked out" by a terrifying incident that stopped him from ever staying overnight at his father's residence again.
"When I asked him what was wrong, he led me down into the living room, where the floor was scattered with books that had obviously come from the shelves lining the wall," Stewart wrote. "Dan told me he had been watching TV when the books suddenly flew across the room, as if thrown with great force. The incident scared him so badly that he left the house and returned only when he knew I would soon be home."
That's when the sinister sounds really started. Voices came from empty rooms. Footsteps echoed on deserted stairs. And temperatures dropped to icy levels each night as Stewart approached the same step on his stairs.
"I had an urge to look over my shoulder, but I never dared," he wrote.
Stewart rented his haunted home. Things got even weirder
Stewart eventually rented out his Silver Lake home and moved to a "modern" Beverly Hills abode.
"I moved out like a shot and immediately felt much safer in my new home," Stewart wrote.
A few months later, the mother of the tenant family called with washer-dryer problems. After a pleasant chat, she dropped a bombshell.
“By the way, you never told us about the other things that came with this house," she said.
Guilty as Macbeth, Stewart fessed up about his paranormal experiences.
The tenant said that her daughter had witnessed even more, including a shadowy male figure standing in the hall at the foot of those infamous stairs.
Stewart was impressed by the family's courage and relieved to learn he wasn't alone in experiencing the strange phenomena.
"In a way it was a comfort that their family saw things," Stewart told USA TODAY in 2023. "And they saw more than I saw."
In his final call with the renter, the woman revealed that she had solved the pesky poltergeist problem.
Awakened from a nap by the chronic disembodied voices, she unleashed her fury, marching to the stairs and screaming for the spirits to "leave us in peace," with a choice expletive thrown in for good measure.
The disturbances stopped right then.
The verbal ghostbusting was so effective that Stewart did not feel the need to disclose his paranormal experiences to prospective buyers when he put the house on the market, even though he believed California law required it. (Turns out, it doesn't. Only deaths on a property within a certain time period must be disclosed.)
"To my relief, I never heard anything from my buyers afterward," Stewart told USA TODAY.
Stewart did, however, have an unexpected encounter with the couple who had sold him the haunted house without mentioning its spectral residents.
"When I went over to greet them, they were clearly uncomfortable and beat a retreat from me almost immediately," Stewart wrote. "I got the distinct impression that they had something to hide."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Patrick Stewart's haunted Hollywood home and the ghost stories he swore were real
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