Old Ship Saloon

History

The Old Ship Saloon, at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Battery Street, began inside a ship. In 2016, crews digging foundations for condos next door found a 15-foot timber about 25 feet down in the mud. James Allan, the archaeologist who led the team that examined it, believes it came from that ship, the Arkansas. The Arkansas had reached San Francisco from New York in December 1849 and run aground on Alcatraz. The damaged ship was then run ashore at the Pacific Street wharf, on a shoreline that landfill has since buried. Stripped of its masts, it became a store ship. In 1851, according to a 2021 city planning report on the bar, an Englishman named Joe Anthony opened an ale house in its hull.

The ship was eventually broken up. The bar carried on in a building on the same corner. In a 2013 history column, the San Francisco writer Gary Kamiya called the Old Ship “a relic of the city’s shanghaiing days.” Its bar, he wrote, was tended by one of the most famous crimps, James Laflin. Crimps got men drunk or drugged them, then delivered them to ships short of crew. The bar’s own history, attached to the city’s report, says Laflin had been the cabin boy on the Arkansas. In 1907, after the fires that followed the 1906 earthquake, the brick building that stands now went up on the site. Its upper floors, once a hotel, are now single rooms rented to tenants.

Hauntings & Lore

Two owners of the Old Ship, 10 years apart, have told San Francisco newspapers about something in the building. Both were passing on what other people there had told them.

The Rooms Upstairs and the Kitchen Clock

In 2016, Bill Duffy, who owned the bar then, told the San Francisco Chronicle that tenants in the rooms upstairs sometimes came to him with stories. He called what they described “some kind of ghostly presence, something like that.” Duffy sold the bar the next year.

By 2026, Tod Alsman was one of its co-owners, and his story is set in the kitchen. He told the San Francisco Examiner that July that he hadn’t seen anything suspicious himself, but the kitchen staff were convinced. Alsman had put up a clock in the kitchen and found it broken a couple of days later. When he asked what happened, one of the cooks told him matter-of-factly that it was “the ghost.” “I choose to believe it,” Alsman said.