Article courtesy of the Tahoe Mountain News
© Copyright 2004 Tahoe Mountain News, all rights reserved.
This article cannot be reprinted without written permission from Tahoe Mountain News.

Mountain News Spotlight
The Ghost of Alpina Café

By Catherine Abel

Jay Seals was vacuuming the carpet at Alpina coffee shop, which he and his wife, Stephanie, bought in July. He was doing a thorough, careful job, he said. “There was some kind of white powder on the floor and I got it all up. Then I turned around and when I looked back, it was there again.”

The same sort of thing has happened over and over. A little pile of coffee beans or poppy seeds will be swept up, only to have a duplicate pile reappear.
Allie Broadhurst said she’s wiped up raspberry syrup time after time only to find more on the countertop she’s just cleaned, all without anyone touching the syrup bottles. “I thought, wait a minute, I just did that,” she said, “but I didn’t think much about it until it happened again.” And again.

Jay and Stephanie, along with their employees, are at least semiconvinced that a ghost lives in the shop. “He’s a prankster,” Stephanie said. “There’s no creepy vibes or anything like that,” added Allie.

But it would have creeped out some people to watch the pumps on the coffee carafes push themselves down and start a stream of hot coffee. “They’re not that easy to push,” Jay said.
Then there’s the recent incident in which the start button on the espresso machine was activated when no one was nearby. Stephanie was in the office upstairs one day going over things with her accountant when they heard a doorbell ring. Stephanie hadn’t known the building had a doorbell. She checked all the doors. No doorbell. “And then we both heard it again, ding dong.” If indeed there is a ghost playing tricks in the old building, she said, it’s not like stories she’s heard. “We don’t see any kind of vapor, we don’t feel a chill.” “I’m a straightforward kind of guy,” said Jay, “but when I vacuum the same spot three times and the poppy seeds keep coming back....and then there’s the cards.” He nods at a display of note cards with nature designs in a threetiered cardboard rack. “I’ll get them arranged nicely and then turn around and they’re all over the floor.” And this happens when no one is passing by or opening a door to create a breeze.

Christian Waskiewicz, who owned the Alpen Sierra coffee house in the building from 1992 to 2000, said he often sat in the shop, lights out, after closing to decompress after a busy day. “I heard noises upstairs, but I thought it was the kind of thing you’d expect in an old building,” he said. “I’ve had people come in and tell me they’d seen silhouettes inside. I heard it was the ghost of an old lady.”

“I’m a straightforward kind of guy,” said Jay,
“but when I vacuum the same spot three
times and the poppy seeds keep coming back....”

When he moved into the building, Waskiewicz gutted the downstairs and totally rebuilt it
into the cafe it remains today. “When we tore the walls apart we found shredded cedar bark they’d used as insulation,” he said. He estimated that the building dates to the mid or late 1920s, with the back half built first. Dave Wakeman says the oldest part of the building is the middle, which began as an 18x30 foot cabin built in the 1930s. Dave’s father, Bob, bought the building in 1946 as a home for his growing family and an office for the lumberyard he started on the twoacre site. Bob Wakeman added on to both ends of the cabin and made bedrooms upstairs. “My dad was great at building,” Dave said. “He built a couple of different kinds of pre-fab cabins, in sections, and had a helicopter deliver them up above Fallen Leaf Lake.”

By the early 1950s, Bob’s wife and Dave’s mother, Jan, had agreed to have the El Dorado
County Library’s Tahoe branch in her house. (Half of it, anyway; Pat Amundsen housed the other half in her Al Tahoe log cabin.) Bob moved the lumber company office to another building on the site to make room for the books. Since his folks moved out in the 1960s, Dave Wakeman said, the old building has housed “a number of other things. It was a dial-a-horoscope business, a beauty salon...” Another building on the property, known as the Davis Building, contained such businesses as a laundromat and a print shop. Jim McKinney began his real estate business in what was still known as the Wakeman house in the 1980s.

France Carreau remembers that her brother, Duane Carreau, had a rental shop, Bikes and Blades, there in 1991-92. “He built the sign which is still out front,” she said, although now it’s painted to advertise the Alpina Coffee Cafe.

So some of the tenants in the old building have had at least hints of an other-worldly presence. With all the history that’s happened there and all the people who’ve lived or worked there, perhaps that’s not surprising.

Actually, Jay Seals says, it’s sort of fun to have a resident mischievous ghost. Despite the small tasks that must be repeated, the ghost’s pranks “lift your spirit,” he said.