The haunted Toys "R" Us séance, Sunnyvale, California (1978)

A Toys "R" Us opened in 1970 at 130 E. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale. It was part of the chain's expansion into California. The land had once been part of the Murphy family ranch. The original frame house burned down in 1961.

The employees soon had stories. Dolls flying off the shelves. Balls bouncing down the aisles. Bathroom taps that turned on and off with no one there. Lights that came back on after the store had been shut down for the night.

Voices called employees by name in empty rooms. Store manager James Haynie heard footsteps upstairs. Women felt unseen hands tap their shoulders or stroke their hair. Some felt a cold breeze on the back when they were alone. Aisle 15C reportedly smelled of freshly cut flowers; others described a wispy white figure and a feeling of being watched.

Employee Margie Honey put it simply. "I began to feel that the doll had a will of its own." Lillian "Putt" O'Brien said she saw a teddy bear fall and form an arch. Suzanna Heun said her hair was moved. Former manager Cheryl Royce said a bathroom tap turned on and off with nobody present.

1978. Antoinette May had recorded the employees' complaints. Now she brought the psychic Sylvia Browne and the photographer Bill Tidwell into the store overnight.

In Aisle 15, Browne described a young man, tall and thin, in a short brown jacket: "He's got his hands in his pockets, he is looking down at his shoes." She named him Johnny Johnson, a Swedish preacher who worked as a ranch hand on the Murphy farm in the 1880s. He had loved the Murphys' daughter Elizabeth, Browne said, and she ran off with an East Coast lawyer. He cut his leg with an axe and bled to death. Browne called him "the most stubborn, ornery, argumentative ghost I've met."

Tidwell was shooting black and white infrared film. One frame appears to show a tall, lanky figure leaning against a shelf, about two feet from the farthest employee. No one present had seen him. A photo taken at about the same moment on high-speed film shows only Browne and an uncomfortable circle of employees.

May wrote about the case in the San Francisco Examiner on 9 September 1979. Browne reportedly came back a dozen times. The story reached That's Incredible! and then, on 15 May 1991, the CBS series Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories, directed by Tobe Hooper and narrated by Leonard Nimoy. It became one of the Bay Area's best-known ghost stories.

Katie Dowd of SFGate checked the records, and the backstory did not survive the archives. Elizabeth Murphy married William Taaffe in 1863 and died in 1875, aged 30, before Johnson supposedly worked on the farm. Census records for 1860 to 1890 list Swedish-born farm labourers in Sunnyvale, but none matches Browne's Jan Johnson; no California newspaper report of the axe death was found. Snopes rates the story "Legend", while J.M. Plumbley wrote that a store manager admitted in the mid-1990s that the ghost reports brought steady boosts to sales. None of this explains what the employees said they heard and felt.

The store closed in 2018. In 2019 it became a Spirit Halloween store. Since 2021 it has been an REI. Reddit users still report minor oddities there, walkie-talkies switching on by themselves and sensor faults. The infrared photograph remains the case's only physical evidence. No published technical analysis of the negative has surfaced.