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Unearthing Spooky Stories in San Francisco and Beyond #HLAS #hereliesastory

🎃 Happy Halloween! 🎃

🖤 Blessed Samhain 🖤

I hope everyone is having a wonderful, magic-filled day as we move officially into the dark season. Halloween is my favorite day of the year, and I plan to eat my weight in tiny Twix bars, peep some cute costumes on Belvedere Street, and watch Hell House Origins on @shudder 🧡

Tomorrow I dive into @nanowrimo and get started on a concept for a novel that I’ve been kicking around for a few months. It’s daunting to talk about wanting to write a book, but it’s something I’ve always dreamed of doing and I’m really invested in the ideas I have for it.

All I can tell you now is it will feature my faves: San Francisco, History, and Women ✌🏻

🎃NEWSLETTER TOMORROW🎃 Happy Halloween! I go

🎃NEWSLETTER TOMORROW🎃

Happy Halloween! I got a newsletter coming out tomorrow featuring a story I adapted from the ultimate purveyors of bizarre and gruesome FAIRY TALES, the Brothers Grimm! I had the honor of publishing it in @strangedayszine, which you should definitely check out if you love high strangeness, ghosts, and UFOs. THREE OF MY FAVES.

@_bearpun made this absolutely cursed illustration for it, which has been my phone wallpaper for awhile and prompted a lot of uncomfortable conversations! Just bc it’s a child revenant with coins for eyes!

Link in bio to sign up, this is one available on the newsletter 🖤 I encourage you to check out the zine and subscribe to that, too!

🤘🏻GHOSTS OF THE MISSION PRT TWO: THE CHAPEL

🤘🏻GHOSTS OF THE MISSION PRT TWO: THE CHAPEL 🤘🏻

On Part Two of our ghosts/drinks/vibes tour of the Mission District, we go to THE CHAPEL - a phenomenal restaurant, bar, and music venue on Valencia that was once the site of a funeral home! Of course it’s haunted!

Please enjoy this photo of me trying to catch a ghost in the mirror, and then head over to the blog to read about the history, the stories, and THE GHOST VIDEO taken at the bar. As Winston Zeddemore said, “that shit will turn you white.”

Link in bio 👧🏼🍾⚰️🚞🎤

Thanks for including my ghost story, @strangedaysz

Thanks for including my ghost story, @strangedayszine! I am seriously living the 90s dream of having my own zine entry. Someone get me a clove and a cup of coffee so I can polish these steel toes. IYKYK 🖤

Check out Strange Days’ zine about all things occult, Fortean, and supernatural. Full of gorgeous art, too 🧡

👻 GHOSTS OF THE MISSION PART ONE: THE HANDROLL

👻 GHOSTS OF THE MISSION PART ONE: THE HANDROLL PROJECT 👻

Halloween is almost here and let’s be honest with ourselves, the world is on fire. I like, want to embrace the darkness of the season, but maybe not too much?? Halloween needs to chill a little bit this year. What I like to do when things are not ideal and I need some good vibes is TO EAT. And maybe TO DRINK.

So this week, we’re doing Ghosts of the Mission with an emphasis on the incredible food, drinks, music, and culture in this part of town. One of my favorite parts of town.

We’re starting off with this cute little corner joint called The Handroll Project. WHICH HAS A GHOST!!!! Also delicious handrolls and good service and little wines in a can that made me happy. Check the link in bio for the full post and book ahead! This place is busssyyyyy which makes me disbelieve rumors of a curse. That’s called the Scientific Method, you guys. 🍶🍣🍙

@handrollproject

🧿 HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13TH! 🧿 Ever wonder WHY

🧿 HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13TH! 🧿

Ever wonder WHY we are superstitious about this day? The folklore has roots in religion, Norse stories, and our American penchant for MASHING IT ALL UP.

Anyway, don’t walk under ladders bc that shit is dangerous! Pet black cats bc they’re adorable! Hold your breath when you walk by a graveyard only if it’s a small one! We don’t want you to pass out!

Link in bio for a post all about it.

As @blong42 pointed out, HE’S PEELING OFF HIS SK

As @blong42 pointed out, HE’S PEELING OFF HIS SKIN uhhhh thanks @mcswys (who are we kidding I love this shit).

⚓️ ONE EYED WELCHY PART 4: THE SQUANDO ⚓️

⚓️ ONE EYED WELCHY PART 4: THE SQUANDO ⚓️

Fall weather has finally set in in San Francisco, the damp and fog are back, which is prime viewing time for the ghost ship SQUANDO.

Welchy’s last tale is about this cursed, spectral ship that haunts the Bay. I covered it in a video (linked in my stories!), but it involves a captain, his wife, and a first mate in a love triangle gone wrong. The captain and his wife murdered the mate, cutting his head off and throwing the body overboard. They thought the current would take the body away, but it didn’t. It was floating right there the next day and they got busted. It’s said that the ship became cursed, and can be seen floating in with the fog on dark nights.

Welchy’s version includes some color commentary - the first mate had flaming red hair, and he was deeply in love with the captain’s scheming wife. According to Welchy, the first mate had been at Sailor’s Home and left his trunk behind before he was murdered. The trunk contained a photograph of his “unfaithful love.” Every night, at a certain time, an angry ginger ghost with a bleeding axe wound at his neck appears in the room with the trunk, throwing things around until he finds the photo of the two timing skeezer (MY COLOR COMMENTARY) that murdered him. The ghost emits a mocking laugh, which descends into a sob, and with that, the trunk slams shut and he disappears.

And that, my friends, is why Ol Welchy never got married! BA DUM DUM (HIS ACTUAL JOKE NOT MINE). FOR SERIOUS, THOUGH - this story has it all. The Sailor’s Home was full of lonely, single men far away from home. They were poor, sometimes disabled from their work, and generally unappreciated. While the shipping trade was largely responsible for the wicked fast growth of the city and its economy in the late 1800’s, workers like the Ol’ Welchy archetype never saw those gains. The story of their harsh lives is told in health records, cemetery excavations, and the social history of the docks in San Francisco. ⬇️

🤕 ONE EYED WELCHY PART 3: THE GHOST OF TINY TIM

🤕 ONE EYED WELCHY PART 3: THE GHOST OF TINY TIM 🤕

This week we are telling the ghost stories of Ol’ One Eyed Welchy, who lived in the Sailor’s Home in San Francisco. Check the earlier posts for background!

You might want to get some apples ready for the story of TINY TIM - he’s a wild one! And by wild I mean violent, drunk, prone to fights, and a fucking PEST in the afterlife. He was called TINY TIM because he was 7 feet tall, obviously. Is Welchy exaggerating here? Probably. These people had barely enough to eat to reach 5 feet tall, IDK how the rickets didn’t leave most of them hovering around 4. Let’s just say the brother was TALL, that’s why he was called TINY, because this dumb ass nicknaming convention has been around since the dawn of time. People have literally always been this dumb.

Tiny Tim had a PEG LEG, which I looked up because I’m here to educate you people. Imagine being the Dept of Homeland Security agent tasked with looking at my search history so I can pay to cut the line with PRE and you see “were peg legs real” do you just give up or is that an automatic APPROVED. Anyway, “peg leg” was an offensive term (NO SHIT!) for low cost prostheses. If you were poor and needed to get around, you might have had something very crude like the devices we see in pirate fiction. MOST people didn’t actually survive amputation, however, especially not at sea.

Tim was a drinker and a brawler, unsurprisingly for Barbary Coast era San Francisco. According to Welchy, he got drunk and picked a fight with the wrong crew. These dudes were packing brass knuckles and foot long knives (at that point it’s just a sword, no?) and they used them to cut Tim’s hand clean off. He bled to death in a gutter, moaning “hey, chuck me out fin, will ya?” I have absolutely no idea what that means, but Welchy claims that when his spirit returned to roam the halls of the Sailor’s Home, he would call out the same thing.

Tiny Tim’s ghost was as mean in the afterlife as it was in his brawling days - it clomped up and down the halls with its false leg, annoying the shit out of the residents and also PINCHING THEM as it passed by. Unpleasant!! ⬇️

💀 ONE EYED WELCHY PART 2- THE SKIPPER GHOST 💀

Gather round ol Welchy’s decrepit little quarters, grab you some grog, and let’s hear about the ghosts of the SAILOR’S HOME.

Before we get into the first story, though, you need to know how to protect yourself. You can’t be freestyling it through this haunted asylum like it’s nbd!! What if you run into THE SKIPPER??? Well, Welchy has some advice for you. To get rid of ghosts, just throw apples at them! How does that work! Who fuckin knows! He’s like the original Zak Bagans. But less fucking dramatic.

Anyway, bring your apples if you’re going to the 4th Floor, because according to Welchy, it’s haunted by THE SKIPPER. The skipper was a ghost who banged on the doors at all hours of the night. Sailors would get up to see who was causing the ruckus, but no one was there. That is, until one night, when the skipper of a ship that left port 3 weeks prior showed up unexpectedly. He was naked and dripping wet, and of course he didn’t just walk in HE FLOATED. It turns out that his ship had just gone down in a storm in the Indian Ocean, and his ghost returned to the Sailor’s Home one final time.

This type of ghost story is pretty common, and often linked to drowning. In folklore, the ghost of a person will return one final time as a harbinger of their death. They’re called different things - a fetch, a wraith, or a doppelganger. They’re often associated with people who died away from home - family will see the loved one appear at a doorway and then disappear, almost as a message that they were dead. The stories often involve drowned people - sailors, passengers, naval personnel. These ghosts were commonly reported in the aftermath of the Fukushima tsunami, as drowned people who appeared at home, looking confused, and dripping wet. It’s actually a harrowing and poignant manifestation of a terrible loss. In some ways I wonder if it isn’t a hallucination brought on by grief. ⬇️

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