Jack Bessler’s UFO, Aliens, Ghosts and Zombie Adventuress in Nevada, California and Louisiana: Chapter 6 The Ghosts of San Francisco
On March 30, 2013 I hopped on Amtrak to go to San Francisco my favorite city and stayed at the Monarch Hotel in the Tenderloin area of the city on the corner of Geary and Polk one block away from my favorite Hof Brau, Tommy’s Joynt on the corner of Geary and Van Ness. One of my favorite novels of the supernatural is Our Lady Of Darkness a Lovecraft type story dealing with San Francisco and its occult history was written by Fritz Leiber who lived at 811 Geary two blocks away and so does the main character of the novel. A creepy story where the Transamerica pyramid emits paranormal powers and as I gazed at the building from my hotel room and tried to visualize what Leiber saw. Leiber received money from the game Dungeons and Dragons what was inspired by his writings.
Having gone on ghost hunts in my two other favorite cities New Orleans and Las Vegas I wanted to go on one in San Francisco I did a Google search and came up with this:
http://www.sfghosthunt.com/fatcow.com/About_The_Ghost_Hunt.html
So I walked from my hotel to a the Queen Anne Hotel at the corner of Sutter and Octavia in the more upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood where I met the tour guide and organizer Jim Fassbinder of the San Francisco Ghost Hunt which only costs $20! When everybody had arrived for the tour at 7PM we started our tour of the charming Queen Anne Hotel while we heard about the haunted history and ghosts of the hotel.
The Queen Anne is a four-story Bed & Breakfast Hotel that has been in existence since 1980, which was once an elite boarding school that was built back in 1890 by Senator James G. Fair who was rich from silver mining in Nevada. Fair built this so his daughters would have a boarding school to attend. Fairs favorite mistress was Mary Lake and she became the head mistress of The Mary Lake School For Girls. The school closed in 1896 due to financial difficulties and a heart broken Mary Lake disappeared from San Francisco. However people still see her ghost in today’s hotel wandering around. We went into the different rooms and heard stories of various supernatural occurrences. I was using an EMF meter for detecting spirits like I did a month later in Goodsprings, NV at the haunted Pioneer Saloon 35 miles south of Las Vegas. On the fourth floor I went into a couple rooms known for hauntings and the EMF meter was going wild and I was feeling cold spots and I felt like I was being watched by an unseen presence. I took a selfie of me in the mirror of one of the rooms, which is shown, at the beginning of this chapter. It was a fun but creepy experience!
After we left the Queen Anne Hotel we started climbing the hills in the Pacific Heights neighborhood where I was bringing up the rear trying to keep up with the tour which twenty years earlier and about 70 pounds less was easy and I lost about 7 pounds after that weekend and these are not the steepest hills in the city but I managed to keep up. The “painted ladies” as the Victorian homes that were repainted during the psychedelic era of the 60’s and early 70’s are a sight to behold!
We heard about Flora a ghost who haunts California Street and next we came to the house that the author Gertrude lived. Gertrude was a wealthy woman who threw lavish parties at her mansion and one night a barrel of rum was delivered to the party and it contained her husband’s corpse!
We went to the corner of Octavia and Bush where the Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park is which is now eucalyptus trees and a plaque honoring this black woman who both a civil rights leader and wealthy entrepreneur during the 19th century. Mary Ellen was called the “Voodoo Queen of San Francisco” as an 1869 newspaper headline proclaimed and her mansion was called “The House of Mystery.” This fascinated me because I did not know that San Francisco had a Voodoo Queen who before moving to San Francisco had lived in New Orleans and studied under Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans whose grave I have visited in New Orleans. I find Voodoo fascinating and was thrilled to find out that San Francisco also had a Voodoo Queen!
We headed back to the Queen Hotel where I tipped the guide $5 for this interesting tour that I highly recommend!
After that I went back to Tommy’s Joynt for a few brews before retiring to bed.
