A bullet-riddled rocking chair from an 1917 courtyard shooting sits on display in this city-run Victorian home.
393 N Hockett St, Porterville, CA 93257
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Nominal admission fee; contact the City of Porterville Parks and Leisure for current rates.
Access
Limited Access
Historic Victorian home with stairs; some areas may not be wheelchair accessible
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1891 · Victorian-Era House Museum · Intact Period Furnishings · Porterville Local History
John Zalud, a Bohemian immigrant, built the house at 393 N Hockett Street in Porterville in 1891. It is a vernacular Victorian home, furnished with original family pieces, and represents the material world of a prosperous Central Valley family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mary Jane Zalud died of tuberculosis in 1912. Tuberculosis was a common cause of death in California in this period and the Zalud family's experience was not unusual, but it was the beginning of a sequence of losses that would come to define the house's public identity.
In 1917, William Brooke—Mary Jane's husband—was shot dead in the courtyard of a Porterville hotel. The circumstances of the shooting are documented in local records. A rocking chair associated with Brooke, reportedly bearing bullet damage, remained in the family's possession and is now on display in the museum. The chair became the artifact most associated with the house's haunted reputation.
The remaining Zalud family members preserved the home and its contents with unusual fidelity—furniture, household objects, and personal items remained largely in place as they had been in the early 20th century. In 1970, the family donated the property to the City of Porterville, which opened it as a house museum. The intact interiors give the museum an unusual sense of temporal compression: the house has the quality of a life interrupted rather than an exhibit assembled.
In 2016, the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures filmed an episode at the Zalud House, bringing the museum national paranormal-audience attention. The city continues to operate tours.
Sources
The rocking chair associated with William Brooke's 1917 shooting is the focal point of the Zalud House's paranormal reputation. Visitors have reported physical symptoms—most commonly a sensation of chest tightness or pain—when approaching or sitting in the chair. The Wikipedia article on the Zalud House documents these visitor reports, and the city museum staff have accumulated accounts over the decades the house has been open.
Beyond the chair, accounts describe cold spots in specific rooms, sounds with no clear source, and occasional visual anomalies in the period-furnished interiors. The concentration of intact Victorian-era objects in the house—personal items, furniture, clothing—gives investigators a staging ground that differs from empty or renovated spaces.
Ghost Adventures visited in 2016 and produced an episode centered on the house's layered tragedies: the tuberculosis death, the shooting, and the decades of the family living surrounded by those memories. The show's treatment introduced the Zalud House to a national paranormal audience that has sustained interest in the site since.
The house's character as dark-tourism destination is inseparable from its character as a history museum: the artifacts that generate the paranormal accounts are the same artifacts that make it an unusually well-preserved record of early 20th-century Central Valley domestic life.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
The City of Porterville operates guided tours through the 1891 Zalud House, covering the family's history, the original Victorian-era furnishings, and the objects associated with the family tragedies—including the rocking chair allegedly damaged when William Brooke was shot in 1917. Ghost Adventures filmed an episode at the house in 2016.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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