Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 21, 2014 1:10:48 GMT -5
Ghosts of the Golden State
Spirits of San Francisco. Hauntings are plentiful in this town of old edifices and new eccentricities, as if the place were constructed atop a supernatural fault line. Today, ghost-hunters rush to San Francisco much as gold seekers did in the distant past. One of San Francisco’s best ghost stories was spawned just as the city’s raucous boomtown days were coming to a close. It involved a duel fought in 1857 between a senator and a judge. The senator was a California Democrat and ardent abolitionist named David Broderick. His critical comment about an antagonist, David Terry, who wanted California to join the ranks of the Confederate states, cost Broderick his life. Neither man was a saint; Broderick had made his fortune during the Gold Rush by turning gold dust into slugs and selling them for more than they were worth; Terry had recently been released from jail for stabbing a man in the neck. Using ornate French pistols, the adversaries settled their feud on a dueling field outside town. (The pistols are on display at the city’s Museum of Money.) Broderick was wounded and carried to the home of fellow abolitionist Leonidas Haskell on property that is now part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The senator lingered for three days before expiring in a second-floor bedroom overlooking the sea.
Haskell’s house, now know as Quarters Three, became a residence for army officers after the property was acquired in 1863 and turned into Fort Mason. Soldiers who have lodged there have reported seeing a man in a long, black coat and top hat walking through the rooms; he appears to be in a reflective mood. A colonel living in Quarters Three once admitted to friends that “something or someone follows me about the house at times.”
An Affair of Honor. The spirits of San Francisco seem to be associated largely with the Victorian era and it is typical that Broderick’s fate hinged on an affair of honor because honor was a matter of importance to the Victorians and, apparently, their spirits. Honor also figures in the tale of the Atherton Mansion (pictured above). After her husband died and left her a good-sized fortune, Dominga de Goni Atherton left suburban San Francisco and moved into the city proper. She built the Atherton Mansion at Octavia and California streets in the exclusive Pacific Heights district in 1881. Dominga lived with her son George, an aimless loser, and his wife Gertrude. George was somewhat of an embarrassment to the socially prominent Athertons and the two strong-willed women with whom he resided constantly called his manhood into question. This is probably why, in 1887, he accepted an invitation to sail to Chile. Ostensibly, he was going to visit friends, but in actuality, he sought to prove his mettle and earn a place of honor in his family.
Unfortunately, the trip proved to be his undoing. George Atherton developed kidney problems during the voyage and died. The ship’s captain preserved the remains by storing the corpse in a barrel of rum, which was shipped back to the United States, arriving at the Atherton home several weeks later. George was duly dried out and buried, but shortly thereafter, his restless spirit apparently decided to avenge itself on the women who had tormented him in life. Dominga and Gertrude reported being awakened at night by knocks at their bedroom doors and feeling a cold and disturbing presence. The phenomenon grew so troublesome that Dominga sold the mansion and moved out. Subsequent owners and tenants also have been unsettled by phantom knockings and roaming cold spots. A séance conducted by a local psychic identified several ghosts active in the house, including those of George and Dominga.
The Rebellious Daughter. Eight blocks east of the Atherton Mansion down California Street, the apparition of a teenage girl in a white dress from the Victorian era wanders aimlessly along the sidewalks of Nob Hill. According to legend, the shade as that of Flora Sommerton, a girl who disappeared from the home of her distinguished family in 1876. Miss Sommerton’s father had arranged a marriage for Flora to a much older man, but the rather independent-minded Flora was less than thrilled at the prospect of an old man for a husband and ran away. The family offered a huge reward for information as to her whereabouts, but in all was vain. Nothing was heard of the recalcitrant daughter until 1926, when her body was discovered in a flophouse in Butte, Montana. Some say she haunts the area near her former home in penance for bringing dishonor to her family.
Specters are also associated with the Russian Hill area several blocks north of Nob Hill. Some of these ghosts, however, seem anchored to earth not by anger rather than honor because their resting place was violated. A cemetery once occupied the land here, but the graves were moved to make room for new houses and office buildings and some of the displaced spirits appear to have attached themselves to the tower at the San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut Street.
The Institute was built in the 1920s and its red-tiled roofs and ochre-colored walls distinguish it as a fine example of Spanish Revival architecture. Its tower, in the style of the bell towers of California missions, has been the site of several paranormal occurrences. Early in its history, a night watchman with a room on the top floor was surprised to hear the street-level doors he had locked open and close. Waiting fearfully, he listened to footsteps slowly ascend three sets of stairs. Then the door to his room opened and closed, but no one entered. Some years later, students partying in a room at the top of the tower had a similar experience. Eerie lights are said to flicker in the tower at night and power tools used by sculptors have inexplicably turned on by themselves. When the Institute was renovated in the 1960s, some frightened construction workers walked off the job and a series of near-fatal accidents delayed work for months.
Shades in the Cell Block. The men who once inhabited the cells at Alcatraz were frightening and their spirits are no less terrifying. The prison on Alcatraz Island, a lonely outcropping in the middle of San Francisco Bay, opened in 1933 as a maximum-security facility for America’s most dangerous criminals. Among its most celebrated prisoners were Chicago crime boss Al Capone and Robert “Birdman” Stroud. Life on Alcatraz was hard: inmates were lucky to spend an hour a day outside their cells and those so favored usually spent their time breaking rocks. Violating prison rules could result in many months in solitary confinement – sometimes in the Hole, a tiny cell with no light.
The prison was shut down in 1963 and Alcatraz Island became a national park site. But the building still stands and some of the poor souls that served time and died there seem to be locked forever behind its dark walls. Several visitors have reported hearing moans, agonized cries and chains rattling in cell blocks A, B and particularly C. A psychic who visited the site claimed to identify the unruly spirit of a man named Butcher inhabiting the place. Prison records confirm that Abie Maldowitz, a mob hitman called Butcher, was killed by a fellow inmate in the laundry area of cell block C. The D cell block is supposedly haunted as well, with visitors reporting cold spots and the sound of phantom banjo music coming from rooms that once housed Al Capone.
Deadly Waters. The Golden Gate Bridge connects more than San Francisco and Marin County; it connects the world of the living and the dead. Since its opening in 1937, the 4,200-foot suspension bridge that spans San Francisco Bay has played dispassionate host to more than 1,000 suicides. The bay’s deadly saga, however, predates the bridge. In the 1800s, the clipper ship Tennessee disappeared into the dense fog of Golden Gate Strait and went down with a full crew. The phantom ship has been sighted by credible witnesses over the years, often passing below the bridge, its deck empty, its sails untroubled. In 60 seconds, the ship fades. Occasionally, the clipper passes alongside more substantial vessels. Such was the case in November 1942 when crew members of the USS Kennison fixed their gaze on the outmoded Tennessee. Curiosity quickly turned into amazement, and amazement to bafflement as the strange ship left a wake, but nothing registered on the destroyer’s radar.
The bay’s choppy waters have swallowed more than sailors and suicides. On February 17, 1937, 10 construction workers rode a falling scaffold through a safety net. On many nights when the wind howls through the cables, one can almost hear the ghastly cries of men plummeting to their deaths.
Be assured this venerable bridge conveys more traffic than meets the eye. Some parapsychologists speculate that for every reported ghost sighting, dozens remain undisclosed. What one sees on this imposing structure and what one chooses to report are two different things, separated by goose bumps and perplexity.
San Jose’s Mystery House. In the center of San José, California, stands the sprawling Winchester Mystery House, one of the most bizarre Victorian-era houses ever built, It has 160 rooms, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors , 47 fireplaces and a decorative spider web motif appears in lamps and stained-glass windows. Another peculiar feature involves the number 13. There are 13 bathrooms, 13 windows in several rooms, 13 hooks in closets and a chandelier with 13 lights. Stranger still is the haphazard design of the place, Stairways lead to ceilings. Doors open to walls or sheer drop-offs and some rooms are so out of proportion that an average-size person cannot stand upright in them.
All this weird construction was directed by the mansion’s owner, Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune. She lived an idyllic life in Connecticut with her husband, William Worth Winchester, until he died from consumption in 1881. The family’s millions did nothing to appease her grief, so she sought comfort in Spiritualism, a new and wildly popular quasi-religion that offered believers the hope of communing with the dead through spirit mediums. During a séance with a Boston medium named Adam Coons, Sarah did indeed make contact with her late husband – or at least she believed she did – and he issued a strange command. She was to build a house to appease the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. He decreed the construction must never stop because if it did, she would be haunted those who died from gunshots. Convinced the message was genuine, Mrs. Winchester moved west to California in 1884 to do the spirits’ bidding.
Sarah wound up in San Jose, then a small backwater about 50 miles north of San Francisco and bought an eight-room farmhouse, where she held daily séances, obtaining instructions from her spirit guides, who apparently had a bottomless appetite for remodeling. Construction crews worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 38 years, constantly adding to the house. The nonstop work ended only with Sarah’s death in 1922.
The house was always an oddity, of course, but when it was turned into a museum, its peculiarities seemed to exceed the mere peculiarities of design. Caretakers reported hearing chains rattling and mysterious footsteps and seeing doors and windows opening of their own accord. Psychics who spent a night in the home did not feel the presence of Sarah Winchester, but it seems the spirits she summoned for advice still inhabit the place, apparently feeling much at home at a site tailor-made for lost souls.
Haunts of Los Angeles. Many of Hollywood’s ghosts behave in the same manner. The spirit clings to a certain area, seemingly oblivious to viewers, acting out the same scenes again and again. Seeing them is rather like watching a movie in an endless loop – a particularly apt simile in Los Angeles, movie-making’s company town, where cinematic hauntings are played out in a number of public and private locations. If reports are true, the city has a smattering of celebrated “reel” ghosts, as well as shades of despondent would-be stars who never made it and are fated, even in death, to hover around the elusive spotlight.
The Roosevelt Hotel. In its heyday, the venerable Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was a monument to movie star glamour. It was built in 1927 by a partnership that included actor Douglas Fairbanks and his equally celebrated movie-star wife, Mary Pickford, and a year after it opened, the Blossom Room was the site of the first Academy Awards presentations. The 12-story Spanish Revival building was one of the premier hotels in Los Angeles for four decades. It began declining in the 1960s and ‘70s, but its location at the commercial heart of Hollywood Boulevard and its historical value were such that in 1984, new owners decided to make extensive renovations. If reports are true, the new plaster and paint revived more than the hotel’s former grandeur. Almost from the day of the Hollywood Roosevelt’s reopening, staff and guests have encountered inexplicable phenomena: Phone calls are received by the hotel switchboard from unoccupied rooms, cold spots chill the main parlor and a spectral musician plays the piano in the Blossom Room.
Strange as they were, these occurrences were less unsettling than certain activity reported on the ninth floor, particularly in and around Room 928. This room is said to be haunted by the spirit of the troubled and talented Montgomery Clift, who became a respected star in the 1950s with superb performances in such classic films as A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity. He was in his last weeks of shooting the latter movie in 1952 when he checked into room 928. His career was flourishing at the time, but in his private life, Clift was sliding deeper and deeper toward self-destruction. Under pressure from attempting to hide his homosexuality from the pubic, he had begun drinking too much and experimenting with illicit drugs. It was as though Clift’s own unhappiness gave him a special understanding of Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the brooding and doomed antihero who meets his fate in Hawaii the night after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor – the role he was playing in From Here to Eternity. Unfortunately, Clift was drinking heavily off the set with co-star Frank Sinatra and James Jones, author of the novel on which the film was based. Clift died in 1966. Whether his stay at the Hollywood Roosevelt was associated with professional triumph or personal hell, Clift’s shade is said to linger there. Guests in or near Room 928 have reported hearing loud monologues in the hallway, but when they open the door, the corridor is empty. There have been sightings of a man who looks like Clift pacing the hall and then disappearing into Room 928 and guests have been known to bolt from the room because of sudden feelings of dread.
In 1992, Peter James, a Los Angeles-based psychic, spent a night in the room to investigate the claims. He claimed he sensed intense anger near the doorway, but it didn’t prevent his eventually falling asleep. In the middle of the night, however, he was awakened by the sensation that someone was lying on top of him. He struggled to move and the weight finally lifted. Later in the night, he saw a man sitting in a chair in the corner. For a time, the figure neither moved nor spoke, but it eventually stood up, walked toward the bathroom and disappeared. James felt the visitor was Clift, whose uneasy spirit is somehow trapped in the hotel.
The Last Laugh. While Montgomery Clift’s spirit inhabits the Hollywood Roosevelt, the late Groucho Marx reportedly visits the Laugh Factory, a Sunset Boulevard nightclub. The wisecracking, cigar-smoking leader of the zany Marx Brothers often used the building as an office in his pre-club days. Jamie Masada, the Laugh Factory owner, reports witnessing evidence of Marx’s visits. One evening, after locking up the club. Masada had to return to retrieve his house keys. He opened the door and found candles relit on tables and the stage spotlight on. A strong smell of cigar smoke permeated the room. On another occasion, he arrived at the club one morning to find an image of Marx embossed on a wall.
The Comedy Store has launched the careers of Garry Shandling, David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld, among others. A comic named Steve Lubetkin also once hoped to make it big there, but his career stubbornly refused to take off. One evening in June 1979, after a performance at the Comedy Store failed to generate many laughs, Lubetkin resolved to kill himself. The following night, he made his way to the roof to the Hyatt Hotel next door and after waiting until a crowd lined up at the Comedy Store, jumped from the Hyatt in a final grisly performance. Following his suicide leap, Lubetkin’s ghost began visiting the Comedy Store. The specter appears to be particularly attracted to the upstairs office, where furniture is reportedly moved around and the electricity malfunctions. The disturbances have happened so often that employees have taken to saying, “There’s Steve” when anything untoward happens. Psychics who have visited the building have claimed to feel Lubetkin’s presence – they sense a man with a broken neck or back.
Hoodlum Hauntings. Even before the Lubetkin incident, the building that houses the Comedy Store had a reputation for hauntings. In the 1940s and 50s, it was the site of Ciro’s, a popular nightspot where the stars went to see and be seen. Rumor had it that Ciro’s was controlled by the mob and if its walls could talk, they could describe all sorts of illicit goings-on. By some accounts, the walls do talk. Comedy Store employees have reported seeing a man in a bomber jacket cowering behind a desk as though attempting to avoid an assault. They also say the club’s audience sometimes includes mysterious men dressed in expensive-looking suits tailored in the 1940s style – men who watch performances and then suddenly fade into thin air.
An irritable lot, Comedy Store ghosts express their dissatisfaction in several ways. Chairs and other items have skidded across the room of their own accord in poltergeist-like protests against certain performers. The specters seemed to particularly dislike comic Sam Kinnison, whose act entailed a lot of screaming. Equipment seemed to fail whenever he took the stage. Kinnison died in 1997, but so far, there have been no reports of his joining the ghostly company that haunts the club where he got his start.
The Revenant Reporter. Show business seems to be a common bond for many Los Angeles ghosts, even where the apparitions were not, in life, stars themselves. William “Billy Wilkerson, for example, made a living reporting on celebrities. Wilkerson was the founder and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, a daily paper devoted to coverage of the entertainment industry. It was he who launched Lana Turner’s career when he noticed the beautiful teenager walking out of Schwab’s drugstore and urged her to meet a producer friend of his. Wilkerson died in 1962 and it is said his spirit still resides in the Hollywood Reporter building on Sunset Boulevard despite the fact the paper moved to a new location in 1993. At that time, renovations began as the LA Weekly, another newspaper, prepared to take over the space. Construction crews became alarmed when tools started disappearing and a radio kept changing to a classical music station all by itself and some workers fled after seeing what they believed to be a ghost. Wilkerson’s former office was left largely intact, perhaps making his spirit feel secure, for employees of LA Weekly have reported no encounters with his phantom.
Spirits in Vogue. Even in fame-driven Hollywood, some ghosts are anonymous. A number of them seem to haunt the older sections of town along Hollywood and Sunset boulevards where there are stretches of Art Deco buildings from the 1920s and ‘30s. Though architecturally interesting, old Hollywood has been turning seedy since the 1970s despite efforts to revitalize it. Perhaps because so many of its buildings are now said relics, the area attracts spirits in search of the days of glamour.
Built in 1936, the Vogue Theater at 6675 Hollywood Boulevard was a movie house for decades. For four years, from 1997 to 2001, it housed the offices of the International Society for Paranormal Research, a parapsychology group that investigates haunted buildings and takes interested parties on ghost-hunting tours. One would expect ghost chasers to inhabit a specter-ridden headquarters and so it seems was the case. While in residence, ISPR members confirmed the presence of several entities at the Vogue. They encountered cold spots throughout the building and heard slamming doors and phantom footsteps in empty rooms.
The Man in the Balcony. Similar phenomena occur at the nearby Pantages Theater. Another of old Hollywood’s grand movie houses, this Art Deco masterpiece was owned and operated by theater magnate Alexander Pantages. In 1949, millionaire Howard Hughes purchased all the Pantages properties when he acquired RKO Pictures. He kept an office on the second floor of the theater until he sold RKO in the mid-1950s. The theater changed hands again in 1967, this time going to the Pacific Theater chain. It was transformed into a performance theater in the 1990s – and that’s when strange things started to happen. Employees working in Hughes’ former office often feel an angry presence in the room and there were odd temperature drops and cold drafts that persisted even when the windows were closed. There have been sightings of a tall man who looks like Hughes and the odors of cigarette smoke. Inside the theater, people have reported hearing a female voice singing, a voice that has been picked up by microphone.
Phantoms of The Palace. The Palace, at 1735 Vine near the fabled corner of Hollywood and Vine, is said to house several spirits. The Palace opened in 1927 as the Hollywood Playhouse and there have been many incarnations since, including a stint as a television studio for programs such as This is Your Life and The Merve Griffin Show. It is now a nightclub, but some of its former denizens seem to return in insubstantial form in search of old Hollywood flair – ghosts that manifest themselves as eerie lights at night and the sounds of phantom pianos playing in deserted rooms. A man in a tuxedo makes the rounds of the building on some nights and a couple has been seen animatedly talking in a balcony, only to disappear when someone approaches.
San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. One of San Diego’s most impressive landmarks is the Hotel del Coronado. This Victorian structure has been host to 16 American presidents and an assortment of royalty. It has also served as the setting for several Hollywood films, notably Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe. Erected on the Coronado peninsula in 1888, the hotel was the first building in California to have electric lights. After all these years, it is still one of the best hotels in San Diego – and a fine location for anyone in search of ghosts.
The center of the action is Room 3502 (originally 502) and accounts vary regarding the manifestations, which range from doors and windows opening by themselves to sounds of disembodied footsteps. Legend has it that its manifestations are somehow linked to the sad fate of a young woman named Kate Morgan (aka Lottie A. Bernard). Kate and her husband, Tom Morgan, worked the western United States as con artists and professional gamblers. In November 1892, they were traveling in California when Kate announced she was pregnant. Tom was not at all pleased and ordered her to have an abortion. Kate was unwilling, so the pair separated.
Kate checked into the Hotel del Coronado where she apparently aborted the child after all. Then she sent several telegrams from the hotel, trying to entice her husband to return, or at least extract a little money from him. Evidently, she did not get the response she wanted. She went into San Diego one evening, bought a gun and returned to the hotel. On November 29, in the midst of a fierce storm, she made her way to an exterior staircase leading to the ocean and shot herself. She was found dead the following morning. The Morgans had traveled under an assumed name, making it difficult for San Diego authorities to identify the suicide victim. After they did come up with an identity, a relative sent money to retrieve Kate’s body and this was the last anyone heard of her, however, it was just the beginning of the haunting. A careful investigation of the story in the 1980s revealed that Kate Morgan did, indeed, stay at the hotel, but not in room 502 where all the phenomena take place, but in what was originally 312 (currently 3327). As it turns out, 502 is where the pregnant mistress of the hotel’s builder is said to have committed suicide.
Source: Christian Kinney, Discovery Travel.