Forget Haunted Toys, Sunnyvale Once Had a Haunted Toys R Us

Any child of the 1980s knows that Toys R Us could be scary at the best of times. Row upon row of squished-up Cabbage Patch Kids faces. Talking Teddy Ruxpins with their backs made of machinery. The looming figure of creepy store mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. But one Toys R Us in Northern California had an extra-sinister reputation. It was the Sunnyvale location: a store that a multitude of employees, customers and even a famous psychic repeatedly asserted was haunted.

From the time the store opened at 130 El Camino Real in 1970, stories were rife that something was amiss within its walls. Folks told of lights and faucets turning on and off unassisted. There were tales that doors and toys had minds of their own. Shelves apparently fell down inexplicably and several female employees heard their names whispered in empty rooms. Reports of bangs and loud footsteps emerging from vacated parts of the store were also commonplace.

In 1979, the San Francisco Examiner carried an article about the store’s unusual issues, featuring a Toys R Us employee named Margie Honey. Honey was deeply disturbed by a 3-foot-tall, jumpsuit-wearing doll with blonde hair that was, by design, supposed to talk. The Examiner’s report stated that the doll had been returned to the store after a customer was unable to get it to make a sound. Honey, also unable to get the doll to function, accepted the return. It was only when she placed the doll inside a box that it began to cry out. Every time Honey opened the box, the noise stopped.

“After this happened a few times, it ceased to be funny,” Honey told the Examiner. “I began to feel that the doll had a will of its own. Finally I called a clerk and asked him to take the toy away. It cried all the way to the stockroom.”

(Honey was later plagued by bulletin boards swinging off the wall and stacks of papers falling to the floor, one sheet at a time, despite being nowhere near a breeze, a fan or a vent.)

Another witness featured in the Examiner was Charlie Brown (good grief!), an employee who had a hard time locking up one night because every time he secured the doors, loud banging would erupt inside. After checking that no one was stuck in the building, Brown relocked the doors only for the banging to start again.

One clerk named Regina Gibson felt unseen hands touching her hair while she was high up a ladder stocking shelves. Another clerk, Bill Peevan, found his meticulously arranged displays dismantled and reconfigured on the floor, even though no other coworkers were around.

Five years later, on Halloween 1984, the Examiner revisited the Sunnyvale Toys R Us, quoting an employee who said they were “spooked” by the store and that “crazy things do happen. I’ve seen something out of the corner of my eye a few times over the past three years.”

At some point, Toys R Us management was so flabbergasted by all of the strange goings on, they invited one of the most famous psychics in the country to investigate.

After spending some time in the store, Sylvia Browne claimed that the activity on the property was due to a man named John “Yonny” Johnson who had worked on the land in the late 1800s. Browne said that Johnson was employed on the ranch of Sunnyvale’s founder, Martin Murphy. According to lore, Johnson was desperately in unrequited love with Murphy’s daughter Elizabeth, who was engaged to another man. Johnson, the story goes, eventually bled to death on the property after a terrible accident with an axe, and never wound up winning the woman of his dreams.

The Murphy ranch’s lovely frame house stayed standing until 1961, when the state historical landmark was destroyed by a fire. Browne claimed that Johnson’s longing for Murphy’s daughter kept him trapped on the property.

(You can’t really blame a spirit for acting up under the circumstances: imagine going from haunting a beautiful old mansion to being stuck in a warehouse full of toys and screaming children.)

The notoriety of the Sunnyvale Toys R Us continued throughout the 1980s, raising the interest of a variety of television crews. The 1985 report below saw parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach investigating the haunting claims which, by then, included sightings of a “wispy white figure” wandering the aisles. (Skip to 3:40 for an alleged photo of a ghost at the store, apparently taken via infrared light during a seance.)

The Sunnyvale Toys R Us was also featured in a January 1991 episode of Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories, hosted by Leonard Nimoy. During the episode, current and former employees gathered at the store to compare stories and found they had a lot in common.

“One little teddy bear, instead of just falling down like it normally would, went out into an arc down to the floor,” reported Lillian “Putt” O’Brien. “So I said to the manager ‘Did that frighten you?’ And he said ‘It sure did, Putt!’”

In the same show, a former manager named Cheryl Royce said that while she was in a bathroom stall, she heard the door next to her open, followed by the sound of water turning on at the sinks. Except, when she glanced through the gap in her own door, she realized that no one was there. Royce lasted just six more weeks in the job, steadfastly refusing to use the store restroom ever again.

Today, the old Sunnyvale Toys R Us location is now an REI store. Reports of ghostly goings on since REI opened in 2021 have been almost nonexistent, but Reddit threads continue to inquire as to supernatural activity at the location.

Last year, one Reddit user, Artistic_Agency105, claimed that: “The only weird thing I’ve noticed is walkie talkies turn on randomly and the sensor at the front door has a mind of its own.”

In the same thread, a user named mikemu chimed in: “I … talked to a green vest. He claims that since he started working there early on, he has felt someone walk past behind him at the front registers — when there wasn’t anybody that did. And that one of the doors just opened up in the back as if someone was walking through. … No recent occurrences though.”

In all honesty, when it comes to the Sunnyvale REI, most online users who’ve been there seem far less concerned with it being haunted than they are worried the store might be understaffed. (Oh, the Yelp page …) With a history like this, it’s no wonder employees are hard to come by.