Visiting Neverland

While Michael Jackson lived at Neverland, there were frequently dozens of fans waiting outside the ranch’s gates hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

“Is Michael Jackson in there?”, 18 year old Calzada yelled into the intercom back in 2003. “Will you please tell him that we are true, dedicated fans out here and we love him a lot?”

“OK, we’ll pass that along,” came the reply.

“Is Michael in there? We drove four hours to get here. Hello?”

Calzada was among the many disappointed fans who didn’t gain entrance to Neverland. But thousands of others did. Although it was never open to the public, over the years that Jackson lived there he funded visits from hundreds of groups of schoolchildren. He also held charity fundraisers, at which guests would be charged a steep entrance fee of thousands of dollars in order to pass through the gates.

Sheree Wilkins, a preschool teacher, visited Neverland on several occasions due to her association with various Jackson fan clubs. She reports that Neverland “smells like cinnamon rolls, vanilla and candy and sounds like children laughing. It’s just like heaven. You never want to leave.” On one occasion, she claimed that she was with a group of fans who gathered to sing birthday wishes to Jackson on his 45th birthday, before he arrived on a golf cart and waved them in.

Before entering, though, every guest at Neverland was required to sign a confidentiality agreement, which included a ban on cameras and recording devices. “Everyone signs it with a big smile on their face,” said Gayaneh Davoodians, who visited in 1996. “Neverland is so peaceful, so serene. When I visited, Michael was not even there. It’s not like he’s standing at the gate, saying, ‘Come in, let me molest you.’”

“The whole day we were there, from 9am until 3am, we had drinks, popcorn, candy ice cream. It was an adventure I will never forget,” recalls Farah Pajuheshfar, who ran the King of Pop Empire fan club. “If I die now, it would be OK.” Daughter Julie continued “We went on the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and the arcade. All the people working at Neverland were smiling all the time.”

“When you’re on the grounds of Neverland, you really get the feeling that he thought of himself as a child”, claimed MTV’s John Norris, who interviewed Jackson at the ranch in 1993.

As well as ailing children, famous guests were a common sight at Neverland. Nicole Richie, daughter of Lionel Richie and star of Fox’s The Simple Life, recalls “When I was young, I would go up there all the time. I would just go for the weekend and go hang out. It’s really big, really gorgeous. It’s like a big amusement park…When I was there, I went with people whose parents were friends of his. It was a group of us who grew up together. I never saw random kids there.”

What was it like to live near a global superstar? Did Michael Jackson’s neighbors resent the development of the ranch into a theme park? Seemingly not. Residents of nearby Los Olivos spoke glowingly of the star following child abuse allegations in 2003. “Everybody thinks he’s weird. That’s a foregone conclusion,” local Bob Senn told USA Today. “But people respect him. He’s a good neighbor.”

“Just about every kid in this town has gone to Neverland,” said coffee shop owner Jeff Feeley. “They take them up there and set them loose.”

Most of the time, though, Neverland’s amusement park and zoo were eerily quiet. “These rides are built to move people every day,” said Corey Oakley of Helm & Sons, which acquired some of Neverland’s attractions after its closure. “But at Neverland they just sat and sat.”

The ranch’s celebrity owner would sometimes ride around alone, tooting the whistle of the steam train. But for Michael Jackson, Neverland eventually lost its magic.

The raids

On November 18, 2003, Jackson was staying in a suite at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, shooting a video for a new song, One More Chance. At the same time, some 70 police offers descended on his Neverland Ranch to search for evidence relating to charges of child molestation.

It was the second such raid in the space of 10 years. The first had occurred on August 21, 1993, when the authorities hired a locksmith to gain access to every room on the estate. On that occasion, Jackson’s lawyers had seen the raid coming and many of his personal possessions had already been removed from the property. When authorities broke into Jackson’s walk-in safe, they found nothing but a black briefcase containing the combination to the safe.

Jackson was distraught after the first raid, describing it as “vicious”. A few months later, though, he hosted a party for two hundred underprivileged children at Neverland, which was covered extensively by the media. The resulting images of Jackson cavorting with the children led one adviser to say “I give up. I f***ing give up.”

The second raid was the tipping point. The star was acquitted of the second round of child molestation charges in 2005. But, in his words, Neverland had been “violated”, and he vowed never to return.

The decline of Neverland

Following the 2003 raid, Jackson initially moved to Bahrain, far away from Neverland. Although he eventually returned to live in the United States, he would never again be resident at his famous ranch.

Inevitably, given the absence of its famous owner, Neverland’s fortunes began to decline. Some estimates put the cost of running the estate at more than $10 million per year, and at its peak Jackson employed as many as 150 staff to maintain it. But he was no longer living there, and was also facing serious financial difficulties as his debts mounted.

In March 2006, Californian authorities ordered Jackson to close Neverland after he failed to pay staff or renew their insurance policies. He was fined $169,000 for failing to cover the wages of 30 staff for two months, and allowing his employees’ insurance to lapse in January of the same year. The state’s department of industrial relations had been alerted to the situation after an employee making an unpaid-wage claim remarked that a co-worker had been injured in an incident at Neverland and was unsure whether he could file a claim due to the lapsed workers’ compensation insurance.

Although Jackson avoided further legal action, by 2007 most of Neverland’s staff had been laid off and many of the facilities were closed.

In October 2007, rumors surfaced that Jackson’s financial problems were so serious that he could lose Neverland altogether. These were fiercely denied by his team, but by February 2008 an official foreclosure notice had been served, stating that unless the singer was able to pay off the outstanding finance of $24,525,009.61, the property would be auctioned off at the county courthouse in Santa Barbara, California.

With one of the largest personal foreclosures in US history approaching, investment firm Colony Capital LLC struck a deal with Jackson and the Fortress Investment Group (the private equity firm that owned the Neverland loan) which saw the title for the property placed into a joint venture. Jackson retained a stake in Neverland, but this would diminish as Colony Capital invested in its upkeep and improvements. The foreclosure auction was cancelled. Jackson said simply that he was “pleased with recent developments involving Neverland ranch…that would allow me to focus on the future.” But he didn’t return.