US Ghost Adventures are Doubly Thrilling in San Francisco

By Emma Krasov. Photography by Yuri Krasov

Among the hundreds of cities and towns in America covered by the US Ghost Adventures’ fearless tour guides, you’ll be hard pressed to find another city as rich in ghostly history as our native San Francisco! There must be twice more haunted houses, mystery mansions, and otherworldly spirits roaming the streets at night here, in our famous Fog City, than anywhere else.

Just imagine, back in 1849, at the beginning of the California Gold Rush, the entire crews of seamen coming to San Francisco abandoned their ships and went panning for gold. Their vessels were rotting on the foreshore, gradually becoming a landfill for the future Marina district, later built up with posh multi-million-dollar mansions.

On other occasion, the 19^th century sailors, who were spending their time and money at the city’s watering holes in a company of women entertainers, completely lost their bearings only to wake up on a strange boat halfway to China. That wide-spread practice of kidnapping sailors in San Francisco was called, “getting shanghaied,” in other words, drugged, and delivered to some merchant ship captain troubled by labor shortages.

In its early days, the city had a coroner, paid for his gruesome work of collecting the bodies of deceased homeless on the streets and burying them. According to some historical documents, one entrepreneurial coroner buried and then “found” again the same bodies more than once to be paid by the city each time.

From the stories and anecdotes of gold seekers and gold diggers, sailors and prostitutes, business magnates and socialites, our free-spirited city quickly became a living legend. To learn but a small part of it, embark on a San Francisco Ghosts tour with a local guide—an energetic storyteller from the US Ghost Adventures.

The guide takes you on a walking tour of downtown area where you can see the most architecturally stunning historic buildings that survived the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and fire; hear enticing stories about ghosts, apparitions, and mysterious happenings, based on real-life thrills and tragedies, and even try to identified a ghostly presence yourself with a help of a special Electromagnetic Field Detector (EMF) that contains an advanced sensor designed to detect fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. Paranormal investigators believe that the otherworldly presence creates disturbances in these fields.

San Francisco Ghosts tours usually start at 8 pm, last one hour to 90 minutes, and cover about one mile upon the gorgeous Nob Hill, home to Grace Cathedral, historic mansions and world-renowned grand hotels.