History
San Francisco has a habit of burying things and building on top of them. It did it with ships, with a burned-out city, and with its own dead.
A Fort and a Mission
The city began in 1776 as a Spanish fort and a mission. The land belonged to the Yelamu, a tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone, who are still here. Colonization brought new diseases and mission communities meant to replace tribal life. Mission Dolores shows the cost. About 200 headstones stand in its cemetery, but the local history archive FoundSF counts some 10,000 burials there, about 5,000 of them Native people.
Gold, Ships, and Landfill
In January 1847, the settlement on Yerba Buena Cove took the name San Francisco. It had a few hundred people. Then gold turned up on the American River, and by 1849, close to 25,000 people lived in the town. By 1852, there were 36,000.
They came by sea, and many of the ships never left. Passengers and crews deserted for the gold fields. By 1850, more than a thousand vessels crowded the cove, a sight described as a “forest of masts.” The city filled in the shallows around them to make more land. The hulls were buried where they sat, and downtown San Francisco stands on top of them. One of those ships, the Arkansas, became a saloon, and a bar called the Old Ship Saloon still stands on the spot.
Fires, Vigilantes, and the Barbary Coast
The boomtown kept burning. Six disastrous fires had swept it by 1851, and the one on May 3 of that year took almost 2,000 buildings. Crime kept pace. One historian counted 1,200 homicides between 1849 and the mid-1850s. Businessmen formed a Committee of Vigilance that hanged four men in 1851. A second committee hanged four more in 1856, a city supervisor among them.
The vice district along Pacific Street got a name in the 1860s: the Barbary Coast. A writer in 1876 called it “the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind.” On its waterfront blocks, a sailor could be shanghaied, which meant being forced aboard an outbound ship as crew while the men who delivered him collected a fee.
Chinatown
By 1890, about 21,000 Chinese immigrants lived in San Francisco, and a trade in trafficked girls ran through Chinatown. Rescued girls told an investigating commission they had been sold for $2,000 to $3,000 apiece. In March 1900, bubonic plague was identified in the neighborhood. The city quarantined Chinatown the next day, and California’s governor spent two years denying there was an outbreak. By 1905, the plague had killed 113 people, almost all of them in Chinatown.
April 18, 1906
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the ground shook for more than 40 seconds. Gas mains broke and started fires, the pipeline that carried water into the city was cut, and San Francisco burned for three days. The earthquake and fire left 225,000 people homeless.
The official death list stopped at 478. City archivist Gladys Hansen’s research put the toll between 3,000 and 4,000. She argued that city leaders had hidden the real number because it was bad for business. The US Geological Survey now says at least 3,000.
Why Is San Francisco Haunted?
Katie Dowd of the Bay Area news site SFGate writes that San Francisco, “with its wild and tawdry history, has long been a hotbed of ghostly activity.” Many of the city’s ghost stories grow out of the cemeteries it emptied, the Barbary Coast, the 1906 earthquake, and the prison on Alcatraz.
Cemeteries
Four big cemeteries, Laurel Hill, Calvary, the Masonic and the Odd Fellows, once covered 60 to 70 city blocks around Lone Mountain, on land the University of San Francisco now occupies. As the city grew, homes went up on every side of them, and streetcars had to route around them. “This now became very valuable land, and people turned against the cemeteries,” historian Michael Svanevik told KQED, the Bay Area public radio station. Newspapers ran headlines like “Cemeteries must go!”, and residents worried over claims that the graves made people sick.
In 1900, Mayor James D. Phelan signed the order: no burials inside San Francisco after August 1, 1901. With no new burials, the cemeteries had no money for upkeep, and they fell into ruin. Statues were toppled, and the bronze doors of mausoleums were stolen. “Entire skeletons were carried away to be used as Halloween decorations,” Svanevik says.
In 1913, the city’s Board of Supervisors ordered the bodies removed, and voters overturned the order. In 1937, the city ordered the bodies removed again, and this time the voters agreed. Nearly 150,000 people were dug up and reburied in Colma, thousands of them in a mass grave.
Colma is a small town on the peninsula just south of San Francisco, past Daly City. Its cemetery associations incorporated it in 1924, and its historical association says it is the only city founded to protect the dead. Nearly three-quarters of its 2.2 square miles are zoned for its 17 cemeteries. In 2017, about 1,400 people lived there, and Pat Hatfield of the historical association put the dead at “maybe a million and a half underground.”
The headstones mostly stayed behind. The bodies moved for free, but families had to pay to keep a tombstone, and most stones never made the trip. The city put them to work. Discarded tombstones went into a seawall along the Great Highway, and crypts were dumped in the bay as breakwaters. In 2012, wind and shifting sand uncovered gravestones at Ocean Beach. Pieces of headstones line a sidewalk in Buena Vista Park.
Near Geary Boulevard and Stanyan Street, the Columbarium is all that remains of the Odd Fellows Cemetery. It holds the ashes of some 30,000 San Franciscans. In 2011, its caretaker, Emmitt Watson, told the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian that the building’s “sole specter” is a little girl who roams its hallways at night.
The Bodies Left Behind
“They missed a lot of the bodies,” University of San Francisco historian Alan Ziajka has said. His campus stands on former cemetery land, and remains have turned up with every major excavation there.
Lincoln Park, with its golf course and the Legion of Honor art museum, was laid out over the old City Cemetery without the bodies being removed. In 1993, a renovation at the museum uncovered about 750 of them. The National Park Service estimates that between 10,000 and 19,700 burials remain under Lincoln Park.
Bones kept turning up. “Whenever we find a bone we put it right back,” a gardener on the Lincoln Park Golf Course told the Bay Guardian. “We don’t want any bad luck.” Workers there, the paper said, had reported “everything from feeling uneasy to ghostly shoulder-tapping.”
The Barbary Coast
“Murder was an exceptionally fashionable crime in the San Francisco of early gold-rush days,” Joseph Henry Jackson wrote in his 1947 book San Francisco Murders. The Old Ship Saloon stands at Pacific Avenue and Battery Street, on the old waterfront blocks where sailors were shanghaied. Its kitchen staff are convinced the bar is haunted. When co-owner Tod Alsman put up a clock in the kitchen and found it broken a couple of days later, one of the cooks told him it was “the ghost.” “I choose to believe it,” Alsman said.
The Earthquake
The earthquake and fire of 1906 run through several of the city’s ghost stories. The Fairmont on Nob Hill was due to open the morning the earthquake struck, the hotel’s own history says. San Francisco Ghosts, a local ghost tour company, says many people claimed the hotel was cursed after the earthquake. It also says “a variety of workers and other spirits have been said to make themselves known to guests unexpectedly.”
The San Remo Hotel in North Beach went up that year to shelter people the fire had burned out. Robert Magee, who guides a ghost tour through North Beach, tells of a brothel madam who died in Room 33 and has appeared there since, “her ravaged countenance always the same, superimposed on a painting.”
In Chinatown, firemen dynamited the mission home on Sacramento Street that sheltered trafficked girls, trying to stop the fire. It was rebuilt as what is now Cameron House. Julia Flynn Siler, who wrote a history of the home, says a staffer once told her he had sensed a ghost in its musty basement, where girls had hidden from their former owners. The fire also destroyed the city’s police and coroner’s reports, and with them any report there may have been of the drowning behind the White Lady of Stow Lake.
Alcatraz
Out in the bay, Alcatraz held more than 1,500 federal prisoners between 1934 and 1963. The gangster Al Capone was one of them, and he took up the banjo there. Legends of America, a popular history site, says many have reported hearing a phantom banjo strumming in his cell. At least four ghost-hunting television shows have filmed on the island.
