Haunted San Francisco

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Newspaper Stories
The Kearny Street Ghost C Mark Twain
House of the Demons C San Francisco Chronicle
    and Sacramento Daily Union
Three Phantoms C San Francisco Chronicle
Was Haunted Long Ago C San Francisco Examiner
Park Ghost Holds Up Automobile Party C San Francisco Chronicle
Pish! Colony of Spooks in Park C San Francisco Examiner

Haunted Houses and Ships
The Haskell House C Antoinette May
The San Francisco Art Institute C Antoinette May
The Montandon Townhouse C Antoinette May
Murder So Foul C Barbara Smith
Ghostly Lifesaver C Barbara Smith

Victorian-Era Fiction
Are the Dead Dead? C Emma Francis Dawson
The Herald of Fate C Charles Dwight Willard
Beyond the Wall C Ambrose Bierce
A Mirage of Murder C Howard Markle Hoke
Who Believes in Ghosts! C Jack London
Over an Absinthe Bottle C William C. Morrow

Humorous Ghost Stories
The Ghost of Fan-Tai C Amy M. Parish
The Ghost Extinguisher C Gelett Burgess

20th-Century Ghost Stories
The Vanishing Hitchhiker C Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey
Death of a Good Cook C Sara Gerstle
The Phantom Still Flees C Barbara Smith
Spirits of Alcatraz C Barbara Smith
The Press Club=s Ghost C Col. Carroll E. B. Peeke

Preface

As someone who constantly does research on San Francisco and its history I am always coming across interesting tidbits on the City and its past. Recently I discovered a few ghost stories by 19th century authors Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce that were set in San Francisco. It sparked my curiosity as to how many other San Francisco ghost stories there might be. As I dug deeper I was surprised to find many more than I expected. They varied quite a bit in their approaches and styles of writing. But I thought that here might be a way to approach San Francisco history from a different angle: how writers of both fiction and nonfiction have used San Francisco as a backdrop for a popular genre, the ghost story.

The stories in this anthology span nearly a century and a half, from the 1850s to the 1990s, and all use San Francisco as their setting. But the unifying entity of San Francisco ends there, inasmuch as the modes of storytelling range from journalism to investigative sleuthing to folklore to just pure fiction. The styles of writing vary too. Twenty-first century readers may find 19th century writing styles a bit antique, but that, in my view, just adds to their charm: they impart a flavor of the times in which they were written.

Some readers, because of the wide range of writing styles and topics, may find certain of the stories more to their liking than others. But I felt that it was important to show the broad range of coverage of the topic. And I hope I have provided value in republishing the works of long-deceased writers whose stories, in some cases, are seeing print here again for the first time in more than a hundred years.

Most of the stories are reprinted just as they were when first published, but in the interests of keeping the focus on the ghost parts of the story and maintaining a tight story line I have abridged a couple of the tales. Those stories in which I have made more than very minor abridgements I have noted in parentheses next to the title: (Abridged). I did no re-writing, and limited myself to correcting an occasional misspelled word that had slipped through in the original. I did not change spellings and punctuations that were common at the time, since I wanted to preserve, as much as possible, the flavor of the original copy and the words of the writers just as they wrote them. For example, although today the word street is capitalized when used after a specific street as in Market Street, in the 19th century the word street was commonly not capitalized in such usage. So I left those as is. Other examples include words such as today, which were frequently hyphenated then: to-day.

I also did not “clean up” terms that we find offensive today but that readers of a hundred years ago did not. References to Asian and other minorities reflected the times. Gelett Burgess, for example, in his story “The Ghost Extinguisher” (published in 1905), uses the word “Japs” as short for Japanese.

Since I have noted the source of each story, including the date, either at the beginning or the end,
I have not included a bibliography.

Index

            A
Affiliated Colleges, 34
Alcatraz, 159, 174B176
Argonaut, The, 54B56, 73, 93, 114, 138

            B
Beardsley, Richard K., 160
Bierce, Ambrose, ix, 54B55, 94, 104
Broadway, 7
Broderick, David C., 37B39
Brown, Sylvia, 38, 175
Burgess, Gelett, x, 139, 146

            C
California Folklore Quarterly, 159, 161
California Street, 171
ACan Such Things Be?@, 104
Chaldean necromancy, 115
Chestnut Street, 5, 17B18
Chinatown, 162
Chinese cooks, 162B164, 166B68, 170
Clay Street, 7
Cosmopolitan Magazine, 158

            D
Davis, Richard Harding, 180
Dawson, Emma Frances, 54, 57
Divisadero Street, 27, 29

            E
Embarcadero Center, 49

            F
Fifth Street, 160
First Street, 161
Frederick Street, 33
Fulton Street, 27, 29

            G
Gerstle, Sara, 159, 162
Ghost Stories of California, xi, 1, 49, 73, 176
Golden Era, The, 3
Golden Gate, 90
Golden Gate Park, 30B32, 33B35

            H
Hankey, Rosalie, 160
Haskell, 39
Haskell House, The, 36
Haunted Houses of California, xi, 39, 47
Hitchcock, Alfred, xii, 54
Hoke, Howard Markle, 55, 105
AHouse of the Demons,@ 17
Houseworth=s, 7
Hucks, J. J., 21B22
Humorous Ghost Stories, 139

            K
Kearny Street, 2
Krum, Albert, 2

            L
Larkin Street, 5, 17, 27
Lombard Street, 18, 21, 44B45
London, Jack, 55, 115, 125
Lone Mountain Cemetery, 141

            M
Manrow, J. P., 6B7, 9B11, 16
Market Street, 126
Mason Street, 18, 23, 127, 137
May, Antoinette, xi, 36B37, 40, 44, 47
Meiggs, Henry, 5
Mission Street, 160B61
Montandon Townhouse, 36, 44B47
Montandon, Pat, 44B47
Morrow, William C., 56, 126
Murrieta, Joaquin, 159, 178B80

            N
Nob Hill1, 59, 171, 173
Nocerino, Nick, 42, 46B47

            O
O=Connell, Dan, 26B29
Ocean Beach, 95
Overland Monthly, 145

            P
Pacific Street, 105
Parish, Amy M., 139B40
Patton, Gerri, 46
Paul, Almarin Brooks, 6B7, 9B15
Peeke, Col. Carroll E. B., 159, 177
Pelton, Chuck, 42
Post Street, 26B27

            Q
Quigley house, 33B35

            R
Rhodes, William H., 6B7, 9, 12B17
Richmond District, 139B41
Rincon Hill, 98B99
Russian Hill, 5, 7, 36, 139

            S
Sacramento Daily Union, 1, 4, 9, 12, 14
Saint Patrick=s Church, 67
San Francisco Art Institute, xi, 36, 40B43
San Francisco Bay, 48, 174
San Francisco Chronicle, 1, 4, 17B18, 30
San Francisco Examiner, 26, 33, 56
Sansome Street, 74, 77
Second Street Cut, 99
Sky Deck Observatory, 49
Smith, Barbara, xi, 36, 48B50, 159, 171, 173B74, 176
Sommerton, Flora, 159, 171B73
spiritualism, 6
Squando, (ship), 36, 48B49
Stanyan Street, 34
Sunset District, 140B41
Sutter Street, 57

            T
Territorial Enterprise, 3
Terry, David S., 37
Twain, Mark, ix, 1B2, 54
Twin Peaks, 160

            U
University of San Francisco, 170

            V
Valencia Street, 57
Vertigo, xii
Victorian-Era Fiction, 54B56

            W
Waller Street, 34
Willard, Charles Dwight, 54, 74
Woodward, Robert B., 20, 22B24
Woodward=s Gardens, 20