A Valley woman who grew up on the property said there was "something" there even decades ago at the so-called "Alien Ranch" near Buckeye. But her encounter was a little more ghostly than extraterrestrial.
To Gina Irons, the ranch, now known as Stardust Ranch, was, and always will be, "The Old Homestead." Her family moved in back in the early 1970s.
"At that point, there was just the house," Irons wrote in a message, "over the years, we built the shop, barns, fences, etc., put in a big swimming pool, and added on to the main house."
Irons said the couple who lived there before them wasn't sad about letting the property go.
"The couple who lived there was tight-lipped and happy to get rid of the house," she said. "They didn’t say why and left town shortly after. Even left their guard dog on the property which we happily adopted."
Almost immediately after moving in, Irons said they discovered "something" was already living there.
In her messages Irons painted a eerie picture of the inside of their home.
While there aren’t any photos of the interior of the house in the listing, picture an enormous living room with a huge fireplace on the south wall. On the long west wall of this giant room is one smallish entrance to a long, dark, windowless interior hallway leading to the master bedroom/bath, a bathroom, and two other bedrooms where my siblings and I originally slept.
Iron said that dark hallway was "the place" where "we almost always saw…well, whatever it was we saw."
She wrote:
My mother, my siblings, and I all saw ‘it’ in slightly different forms and colors (usually some variation of green), in different places, and there was always a big drop in temperature whenever it was around. My brother’s room – just to the right of the hallway entrance -- was always ice-cold, even in summer. We didn’t have an air conditioner back then so that old block house got warm. As kids, we decided that must have been where it lived.
But as the years went by, Irons said they got used to the presence and "strange happenings" that seemed to haunt their home.
"While I wouldn’t say it was ‘normal,’" she said, "we at least weren’t terrified anymore. It seemed benign."
Irons and her family kept quiet about their alleged haunter.
"Those were different times and we were (and are) private people," she said, "probably the last family you would ever think might be living in a haunted house."
Unfortunate for anyone who came to spend time at the home. Irons recalled a particular story that stood out to her. One she says, turned a "non-believer" into "someone who started looking over his shoulder."
She wrote:
One evening, we were watching TV in the big main room – the TV was on that long wall with the hallway entrance. The non-believer was sitting in a recliner facing the TV (and thus the hallway). Suddenly, there was an explosion of movement as he hurled himself out of the chair, jumped over the couch, and ran down the hallway yelling as the rest of us sat there wondering what the heck was going on. He then ran back through the living room to the back door where we kept the shotguns ready (remember this was a remote ranch property with livestock and we had large predators lurking), grabbed one, and went charging back down the hallway.
He had apparently seen "it," Irons said. He returned shaking and with the hairs on his arms standing straight up, claiming to have seen a person dressed in green fatigues standing in the hallway.
"He thought it was an intruder and gave chase," Irons said. "And…there wasn’t anyone there. He was stunned into silence."
Irons left for college in the 80s, she said, and never lived in the house again.
These days, the ranch is for sale and should be well-known to fans of the extraterrestrial and paranormal. The Stardust Ranch was featured in an episode of "Ghost Adventures" on the Travel Channel. Its owner claims to have encounter something else on the property: aliens.
Irons said she's driven by the property on occasion to check on it. Until recently, she said, her family owned the land behind the ranch.
"Must say though," she said. "I’ve never had the least bit of desire to ever go back inside."