[Pride 2020] My Sinister San Francisco

San Francisco is a magical city. In the summer, the fog floods the streets in chilly eeriness and hazy mystery. After 2 a.m., the bars close and wild souls disperse to roam the night – young, drunk and horny straight businessmen willing to do anything, drag queens on the way to 24-hr cafes for pancakes, and young homeless people who tell you the weirdest stories about night ghouls, if you let them. “It’s an old city full of living and dead ghosts,” one dirty, blonde, and charming beachcomber said to me one night. I moved here with no job, friends, or even a place to live, but between my Catholic upbringing, invincible youth, and magical thinking, I was on a pilgrimage to the gay mecca.

I came here for my Tales of the City experience and instead found my American horror story.

I spent two years living the night life and it quickly wore me down. With my oats fully sown, I changed direction, and fell in love with a pragmatic music man. As we settled into our urban life, we eventually found our way to an Edwardian flat in the North of Panhandle neighborhood. It was a skinny railroad apartment, with a south-facing front room on one end, followed by a long hall, then a bedroom in the far back. The ceilings were 12-feet tall, with ornate dark wood walls, a water closet, and the best tap water I’ve ever tasted. It was quirky and we both instantly loved it. The kooky owner told us the building used to be a shelter for wayward women, and around the corner was the Jim Jones cult church. But now it was a six-unit apartment building leased to the highest bidder for about $3000 a month.

What we didn’t know until many years later was how rich the immediate area was in history and death. The city had seen major earthquakes and fires that leveled entire neighborhoods. Our street, Divisadero, split the city in half. Everything east of the street once burned, and the land to west, where our building stood, was used to bury the dead. As the city grew, the cemeteries (well, the headstones anyway) were moved south and the city kept building on the dust of the dead.

After moving in, I purchased a digital camera to capture our new life and one day, I randomly snapped a picture of my partner standing in the hallway. I noticed a smudge and anxiously feared a lens issue. I zoomed in and the face of a gaunt woman emerged, hanging in the air next to my partner. You could make out one shoulder and part of her dress. My eyes widened. I asked my partner to check the photo and he saw it, too. It wasn’t just a cluster of pixels causing me to see a random faces in the shapes. She was there.

I couldn’t sleep that night, my mind fixated on the picture. I got up at 2 a.m. and looked at the picture again, thinking I’d surely see nothing. It was there. I went to work, came home, and checked again. It was there. I was giving entirely too much energy to this and I didn’t want to see it again, so I deleted the photo and reformatted the camera’s SD card. My partner was irate that I deleted a picture like that, but I couldn’t have kept it, influencing my thoughts.

Soon after, we started smelling an old woman’s perfume, like gardenia, in the hall. When it was present, it hung like a ball in the air and you could step into it, smell it, move away, and it would be gone. I thought maybe my neighbor had a candle and its scent was wafting perfectly through an unseen crack in the wall but after asking around, I couldn’t find a source.

The hallway became a central hub of activity. A floppy, blue teddy bear appeared in the hall, placed precariously in a sitting position. I’d move it back to its rightful place in the bedroom inside a latched glass cabinet, and the next morning it was back in the hall to greet us. My keys, wallet and phone also disappeared intermittently and later appeared somewhere in the hall. My increasing frustration led to me accuse my partner, with increasing anger after each episode. I thought his pranking was getting obnoxiously out-of-hand and we were fighting quite frequently.

This was when I first noticed the voice of the other telling me it was doing this on purpose. He was behind all this and would never stop. He would say things about my partner: he is so stupid, he has a secret life, he is going to die this week. This was not my inner voice, the one I knew well, often talked to, reasoned with, and depended on all my life. This was something else. I started arguing back with the other and talking over it, either out loud or in my mind. I had no family history of mental illness, and yet this was abnormal.

Then, the nightmares started. In the first one, I was crashing my car into a wall, over and over again. I found it odd, since I didn’t have a car and didn’t drive. In another dream, my deceased father told me he would kill me. In another, I fell off a bridge, then felt my skull shatter on the ground, and felt icy cold blood rushing out of my collapsed head. In the worst, I slowly sawed my brother’s head off with a serrated knife. This happened every night for several weeks. I was exhausted, drowsy, and constantly irritated. I started to believe that these weren’t my dreams. I was being influenced or tapping into something incredibly dark and horrible. I divulged everything to my therapist and she was very concerned. I was referred to a psychiatrist, was screened, monitored, and deemed not to be a danger to myself or others. I was sent away with a bottle of sleeping pills and a pamphlet on anxiety.

One night, I woke up to find a shadowy, featureless figure standing motionless in the far corner of the room. I reasoned that it was a trick of the light, a jacket, headlights casting a shadow, or perhaps a side effect of the sleeping pills. But night after night, I kept waking up and seeing the figure. It moved around the room, and sometimes, it was further away. Once, it was against the curtains and I could see a more defined outline. It was just darkness, like a flat void with no discernible mass. The next night, I had my camera ready but couldn’t get a picture. My partner, a sound sleeper, saw nothing. I finally realized that I was being targeted and antagonized, and I felt incredibly alone.

The figure appeared the next night at the foot of my bed, closer than it had ever been. I flew out of bed, never losing sight of it, and confronted it. To my surprise, it didn’t move at all. I froze momentarily but put up a fight. With one arm outstretched, I reached and tried to grab it, but walked right through it. It wasn’t there.

A few nights later, I woke up in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling. I resolved not to look in the corner and turned over to my partner, who lay in bed next to me. Between us, in those few inches of space, was the shadow figure. I couldn’t see my partner. There was just the inky darkness with no features, up close and personal. I was mortally terrified and somehow in awe. I stared at it for a second, closed my eyes instinctively, and punched it. My fist landed with a thud on my partner’s back. With eyes still closed, I prayed out loud, somehow remembering all the words to the Lord’s Prayer. When had I last uttered that? I opened my eyes, and it was gone. My startled partner, now awake, asked me what the hell I was doing. I prayed every night and it never came back.

A few weeks later at a Halloween party, my neighbor, Rebecca, introduced me to Sam, a wispy girl with a look of affected bewilderment. She asked to see my apartment across the hall. Upon entering, she announced two things: she was a medium, and she wasn’t going to try to convince me about her gifts. She didn’t care if I believed it or not. Sam immediately sensed a small boy, and said he hated me because I yelled at my partner all the time. She asked me to talk to him, and I did so without any hesitation. I told him I was sorry and that I loved my partner very much and would not yell at him anymore. Years earlier, my partner told me when he was young, a ghost boy lived in his closet. This imaginary friend of his had followed us to San Francisco. Sam said my partner was a kind of beacon, like a lighthouse, that drew the living and dead to him. He is incredibly charismatic.

She moved further down the hall and sensed many traveling souls, calling our flat something like a train station. These souls came and went through a portal deep in the house, but some lingered and stayed behind. As she stared into the bedroom, I grew very nervous. Aside from my therapists, I hadn’t told anyone what was happening. Sam darted past me saying she needed a smoke. I followed her outside. While she nervously fumbled with her clove cigarettes, I asked what was in my home. She felt that something incredibly dark was feeding on us and it was hiding deep in the heart of house. We had to get rid of it immediately. I didn’t protest or ask any more questions.

Rebecca confided in me that she, too, was experiencing awful dreams and other disturbances and asked Sam to come over. Rebecca believed that something had always been in this house, but it was never as pronounced as it was now. My partner is a beacon, I thought. In one week, we would perform a cleansing ritual. Sam gave us a list of materials and specific instructions for the ritual but she could not do perform it herself. It had to be the rightful inhabitants of the home, she said. Magic was something I resisted, but I was tired of the disquiet, and even our friends were becoming afraid to visit.

On an unusually warm summer afternoon in November. I asked my partner, who I felt was vulnerable or susceptible, to leave the house. He did so without protest. Sam said our hallway was the epicenter, so Rebecca and I would perform the ritual in my apartment. Every window, door, drawer, and cabinet was opened, and every light was turned on. I proceeded to the back most room, and waved a bundled sage stick in the air, while reciting good intentions. I felt stupid. I traced every wall, nook, and cranny of each room with the smudge stick, then shut the windows and doors and turned off the lights. I then sealed the door’s threshold with a line of salt. This was repeated, room by room, until we met at the center hallway. The south-facing room’s window remained opened and the threshold remained unsalted. The apartment was filled with the intoxicating aroma of sweet sage.

In the hall, we had prepared a silver bowl filled with salt, denatured alcohol, and some herbs that Sam provided us. We lit the contents on fire and the herbs immediately charred and wafted into the air like fireflies. Over the salt danced a low, blue flame and the special bowl almost seemed to hum. I held the bowl firmly, pacing up and down the hallway, while we recited a long incantation. The bedroom door rattled open, and something seemed to declare its presence. As we continued with the incantation, a pressure filled my head as if I was quickly losing altitude. The flame in the bowl changed from a calm blue to a bright, flickering yellow-orange. As we repeated the words a third time, the fire flared up, exploding out of the bowl and hitting the ceiling. Suddenly, a gust of wind shot out of the bedroom like a cannonball, rolling right past us. We heard a growl and the gust flew out the window in the far end. Rebecca ran to the window, shut it, and salted the sill. The flame in the bowl instantly died down to its previous calm blue state then flickered out.

We looked at each other in bewilderment, but before we had time to react, we heard people running down the stairs in the outer hallway. The fire alarm had been tripped, the sound was deafening, and the lights were flashing. We raced outside with the other tenants, fearing that we had started a fire. The fire truck eventually pulled up and a fireman ran into the building. Nothing was detected and it was considered a false alarm. My partner hurriedly walked up the street, past the gathered crowd to see if we were alright. We were spooked but we were safe, (and we had the pleasure of being surrounded by San Francisco’s finest).

I never experienced anything else in that apartment or had dreams like those again, thank God. My partner and I grew stronger but decided to move out, and soon, we left San Francisco permanently.

I look back at my time in San Francisco with a mix of wonder and unease. Something unexplained happened to me and then it ended, but it wasn’t like an overwrought horror movie. I was being consumed slowly, one small bite at a time. It was almost imperceptible. Time sands down the splintered shards of broken memories to make them easier to swallow. Now, I’m more inclined to believe that this episode was all in my dramatic mind, but occasionally, I will see a fleeting shadow on the wall and I am instantly terrified. Has it come back again? Has it found me? There is a lingering effect in which I am constantly doubting myself, my experience, and my feelings. Even writing this now, I don’t know where the truth lies. It’s said that the devil’s strongest weapon is doubt. And in that doubt lies your truest defeat.