The Sunnyvale Toys "R" Us ghost

A Toys "R" Us store in Sunnyvale, California, where staff told of items flying off shelves and taps running on their own. Psychic Sylvia Browne said she contacted a farmhand's ghost there.

The Toys "R" Us at 130 E El Camino Real in Sunnyvale opened in 1970. The Mercury News wrote in 2018 that staff had told stories for years of goods leaping from the shelves and taps turning on and off with nobody near them. The building is now an REI store, per Wikipedia.

Sylvia Browne, a psychic, held a séance in the store in 1978 and came back a dozen times, according to an article Snopes reproduces. Wikipedia says she claimed on the TV show That's Incredible! in 1980 to have reached the ghost, whom she named Johnny Johnson. By Browne's account he was a Swedish preacher who had been a farmhand in the orchard that once stood on the site, and he bled to death after an accidental axe wound to his own leg.

The story spread through television. The Snopes-reproduced article says the store appeared on That's Incredible! among other programmes, and that a screenwriter for the film Toys spent two nights there for research. Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories covered it in 1991, per Wikipedia. Loyd Auerbach, who has investigated other California hauntings, found that the toys moved and fell because of trucks driving on the street, per Wikipedia.