Customer Reviews

Haunted San Francisco: Ghost Stories From the City's Past

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Rand Richards' Haunted San Francisco represents the first anthology of ghost stories completely set in San Francisco, providing over two dozen spanning over 150 years and including both literary writers and other popular writers of both fiction and non-fiction. The broad range of story styles, choices and settings will enhance the unusual San Francisco geographical locale, appealing to both San Francisco fans and ghost story enthusiasts alike.

While some may complain that HAUNTED SAN FRANCISCO is a misbegotten salmagundi, blending fact and fiction in a manner deleterious to them both, to me it is a splendid concordance of the ghosts which every sensible person will admit still haunt our city. Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Gelett Burgess, and Jack London, are but a few of the more famous names of those who have written up these spooks over the past 150 years, and Rand Richards includes tales by all here. The front cover gives the clue, it is a ghostly photo by Larry Moon which was recreated in Hitchcock's famous thriller VERTIGO, likewise set in San Francisco that is even now becoming a dream, the SF of the immediate postwar era when gaslight was still within the memory of living man and woman.

There are also interesting reminscences of the bell tower of the San Francisco Art Institute, written by Antoinette May. Ms. May interviewed several artists who happen to be quite well-known, among them Bill Morehouse, Hayward King and Wally Hedrick. Alas, since they testified about the 1947=1948 apparitions of the bell tower ghosts, both King and Hedrick, two of the six artiats and poets who began the famous "6" Gallery in San Francisco, the place where Allen Ginsberg first read HOWL, have passed on. Richards rings the multicultural bell by including Hayward King in his book, for so often when compiling ghost stories the experience of African-American participants is neglected, and King was one of the notable black artists of the 1950s through the 1980s.

I also like the story of the haunted penthouse of Pat Montandon. In May another book will appear called OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL in which young Sean Wilsey, the son of Pat Montandon, will expose her as a kind of second rate Auntie Mame, but his book glorifies her haunted penthouse as a sort of atelier of ghostly ambition. In San Francisco there are always stories within stories, and once in a while a drop of truth squeezes out like a tear.