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Claim: The Southern California community of Tarzana was so named after the famous "ape man" character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the town's early residents.

Status: False.

Origins: Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, was born in Chicago in 1875. After being booted out of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., Burroughs attended Orchard Lake Michigan Military Academy and later served in the cavalry for nearly a year
in Arizona. Bored with army life, Burroughs obtained a discharge, got married, went off to mine for gold in Idaho, joined the police force in Salt Lake City, worked as an accountant, and returned to Chicago to work in the stenographic department at Sears, Roebuck before finally trying his hand at fiction. Burroughs sold his first "Tarzan" story to a magazine in 1912 but continued to move around as his book-length Tarzan efforts were turned down by all the publishers he contacted. Burroughs and his wife spent the winter of 1913 in San Diego, then returned to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park before the A.C. McClurg Co. published Burroughs' first book, Tarzan of the Apes, in 1914. The response was phenomenal, and Burroughs went on to pen twenty-three Tarzan novels in all. In 1910, however, several years before he achieved success as a writer, Burroughs had purchased 550 acres in the heart of Southern California's San Fernando Valley. (Burroughs later wrote that the Valley represented "all that was good and wholesome in Southern California, in contrast to big, bad Hollywood." wink He dubbed his land "Tarzana Ranch," after the sleepy little community in which it was situated, and his creation of a character named "Tarzan" two years later can hardly be considered a coincidence. Because Tarzana did not become an "official" community with its own post office until 1930 the legend has arisen that the town was named after Burroughs' ape man, but actually the reverse is true. Had Burroughs lived a few miles to the west, in the Topanga Canyon, we would undoubtedly know his immortal creation as "Topang, the ape man" instead.

Enter the Play-Doh aisle at your own risk. Browse the children's books with caution. And don't even ask to go upstairs, where the toys are stacked.
The Toys 'R' Us in Sunnyvale is haunted by a man named Johnson, employees and psychics say.

"I don't believe in ghosts," said Putt-Putt O'Brien, who has spent 18 years stacking toys at the store. "But you feel a breeze behind you. Someone calls your name and there's nobody there. Funny things happen here that you can't explain."

Rag dolls and toy trucks leap off shelves. Balls bounce down the aisles. Children's books fall out of racks. Baby swings move on their own. The folks at Toys 'R' Us say they've tried to explain it logically but can't.

"Many people have experiences, not just one or two of us," O'Brien said. "He's like Casper. Nothing he does ever hurt anybody."

Others have taken notice, too. Newspapers have written about him.

The store has been featured on television's That's Incredible and other shows. A Hollywood script writer for the movie Toys spent two nights inside doing research. Psychic Sylvia Browne held a seance there in 1978 and has been back a dozen times.

Browne said Johnson told her he was a preacher and ranch hand in the 1880s on the Murphy family farm, where the toy store sits today. He spoke with a mild Swedish accent, and his first name was John, Yon, or Johan. Ten of sixteen people assembled there for the seance said they heard a "high buzzing noise" when Browne was supposedly listening to the ghost.

Browne said the ghost told her he had been in love with Murphy's daughter Elizabeth, who ran off with an East Coast lawyer. Old news clippings say Johnson accidentally hacked his leg with an ax while carelessly chopping down trees. Another story said Johnson was found dead in the orchard with an ax wound in his neck. Both stories say he bled to death.

O'Brien said she saw Johnson once: A young man in his 20s or 30s, wearing knickers, a white long-sleeved work shirt , and a gray tweed snap-brim cap, walked past her. Another time she heard the sound of galloping horses.

"Yohan used to exercise the horses, they say," O'Brien said.

Now he apparently gets his exercise playing with the staff. There was the time when men were waxing the floor, for instance, and a horse kept appearing in each aisle as they moved their equipment through the store. There's the overwhelming sweet smell of garden flowers that haunts Aisle 15C, next to the Mickey Mouse dolls and the Batman toothbrush sets.

So, now the obvious question: Is it all just a desperate sales gimmick?

"It's very good publicity for us," said store director Stephanie Lewis. "But I personally don't believe in it." But even if Lewis doesn't believe it, others do. "Last week we had to chase three or four teenagers away," she said.

"They were sitting out front at 4 a.m. with a Ouija board, trying to conjure up the ghost. Once a week someone comes in here asking about it. Teenagers beg us to let them spend the night on the floor."

"I have employees who will not go into the women's bathroom alone," Lewis said. That's because Johnson follows them in there and turns on the water faucets, she said.

Longtime employees say Johnson has also pulled pranks on contractors who come to do short-term jobs. They see a toy leap from a shelf and refuse to come back.

O'Brien believes Johnson lives upstairs in a breezy, cool corner.

The pranks he pulls upstairs are also harmless, she said, but it's spookier because one is usually alone. "When I go up there, I'll say, 'Johan, I'm only here to work,'" O'Brien said.

So if the place is haunted, why stick around?

"It's a good ghost," said Lisa, another employee, who didn't give her last name. "It's fun here."

Barbara "spirited" Mikkelson

Last updated: 29 October 1998




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