I learned about the haunted Toys R Us the same way most other people did. I saw it on the TV show That’s Incredible. It was a show that I liked in general, but when things veered toward the supernatural I was especially interested. With this episode we have a toy store chain that I love where things were moving around on their own. Then they add a psychic to the mix to hold a seance inside the store. Needless to say, it was very memorable and all these years later when I think of the show, this episode really stands out.
That’s Incredible premiered on March 3, 1980. The hour long show was hosted by John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton. In it they would show stories about unusual people or events, dangerous stunts, and sometimes the unexplained. Shows like Real People and In Search Of had shown that people wanted to watch this type of television and they really took to it. The show finished third in the television ratings for the 1979 to 1980 season.
The episode featuring the haunted Toys R Us was first broadcast on September 8, 1980, although it would appear a week or two later in some markets. As you can see from the full episode description, it was quite an episode. Mount St. Helens was still very fresh in people’s minds and I remember a lot of TV for years afterwards was playing and replaying footage of the eruption. I mostly wanted to put a date to this episode because, despite many people talking about it online, the date of the episode hasn’t been documented fully. The episode description above is taken from the September 6, 1980 edition of the Santa Barbara News Press. It was printed on a Saturday but the listing spans the week and the show was broadcast on Monday.
The full episode is not currently posted online, but here is a segment from a later episode of the show.
The Toys R Us featured on the show was in Sunnyvale, California. It opened in 1970 and was located at 130 East El Camino Real. On the outside it appeared to be like any location of the growing chain, but the history that would become attached to the store went back much further.
The stories about strange things happening inside the store started well before its appearance on television. Employees reported merchandise moving and strange noises inside the building. There were also stories about things happening when few or no customers were around. By 1978 these reports were interesting enough to become a national newspaper story.
The stories are what you would expect from a haunting. Employees reported strange noises and voices, things moving on their own, and my favorite, a story about a talking doll. A customer returned a large talking doll reporting that it didn’t work. When it was tested by the staff, they couldn’t get it working either. Then they put it into its box and it began to make noise. Opening the box though would make it stop. They reportedly tried this several times with the doll and it kept only talking while in the box.
Word spread and a group of psychic researchers eventually spent a night inside the store. One of the people involved was Sylvia Browne, who would later become nationally known. Browne believed that there was a man haunting the store, but who?
Now before I get into more details of the haunting I wanted to touch on the background of where the store was built. The land the store was built on had once been part of a larger ranch owned by Martin Murphy Jr. called Bay View Ranch. The Murphy family became an important part of the early history of the area that would become Sunnyvale and their story would eventually provide the haunting with its story.
Browne identified the ghost as a man usually called John, Jan, Johnny, or Yonny Johnson depending on what story you hear. She said he had worked on the Murphy property during the nineteenth century. He was also described as a preacher who sometimes worked on the ranch. According to Browne, Johnson had fallen in love with Martin Murphy’s daughter Elizabeth.
Unfortunately for Johnson, Elizabeth didn’t have feelings for him, and she eventually met someone else and left with them. John kept working at the ranch and was chopping wood when he badly injured his leg with an axe. He tried to stop the bleeding but couldn’t and eventually died from the injury. Browne believed his feelings for Elizabeth had kept him attached to the property where he died.
This story was perfect for a show like That’s Incredible. So many employees were willing to talk about things they had experienced. Then you had a celebrity psychic and a seance that gave the show something it could actually bring its cameras into the store to cover. People love a good ghost story, but what made it special and memorable was that it was also a Toys R Us story. This was a safe place for me, but I could picture it after dark filled with ghosts running amuck.
It’s such a good story, I am not surprised how durable it is. It returned to national television again in 1991 on Haunted Lives, True Ghost Stories hosted by Leonard Nimoy. This special brought current and former employees together to talk about the store and their stories sounded much like the reports that had appeared more than a decade earlier. I am so glad that they made a nineties version of this same story so that the next generation could hear about it.
If you are skeptically minded you might be wondering if anyone has looked into the history of the location to confirm Browne’s story. They did and the history of the Murphy family does not match the story Sylvia Browne told. Elizabeth Murphy married William Taaffe in 1863, and her husband died in 1869. Elizabeth died in 1875 at the age of 30. So she couldn’t have rejected Johnson during the 1880s like in the story. Even the name Browne said the ghost used for Elizabeth causes a problem, since family records indicate she was known as Lizzie rather than Beth.
Researchers have also been unable to find the Johnson described by Browne. Census records show Swedish farm workers in the area, but none who fit the story. Newspaper searches have not uncovered the supposedly documented axe accident either. None of these are stories being told by the employees in the store. They were just sharing what they claimed to see. Their stories were being reported before That’s Incredible and continued long afterward.
The Toys R Us continued operating in Sunnyvale until 2018. I visited the location about 11 years before that just to shop. I didn’t witness anything paranormal. After the chain closed all its American stores, the building was temporarily and appropriately used by Spirit Halloween. REI eventually took over the location and opened there in 2021.
Because of the internet and people’s TV watching memories, the closing of Toys R Us didn’t end the story. Instead it’s found new life online. The old television segments can still be watched and the story is regularly repeated on paranormal sites and in discussions by people who remember shopping there. While the idea of ghosts and haunting is fascinating, having the haunting be in a toy store dials up the interest level. That is certainly why it stayed with me. I saw plenty of strange stories on That’s Incredible, but none of them stuck with me like this one. Once I knew there was supposed to be a haunted one out in California, I never really forgot about it, and I am glad I got to briefly see it firsthand.