Explore hauntings, hexes and other strange happenings from Bay Area history.
Why Do So Many People Think This East Bay Road Is Haunted?
We Just Figured Out Why 598 Guerrero Is the Most Cursed Restaurant Location in SF
Forget Haunted Toys, Sunnyvale Once Had a Haunted Toys R Us
Happy Valentine’s Day! 3 Pairs of Doomed Lovers From San Francisco History
How the Zodiac Killer Investigation Fell Apart in 1978 ... Because of Armistead Maupin
The 12-Year-Old Girl-Gang Leader Who Outraged 1870s San Francisco
The Bleak and Menacing History of San Francisco’s Farallon Islands
In 1896, a Mysterious UFO Brought Northern California to a Mesmerized Halt
5 Real-Life Monsters That Have (Allegedly) Stalked Northern California
What Was Your Great-Grandpa's Favorite Toy? Dynamite, Probably
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"content": "\u003cp>For decades now, there have been rumors that strange specters and ghostly goings-on haunt Niles Canyon Road. The winding, seven-mile stretch of highway, which runs alongside Alameda Creek to the northeast of Fremont, has been the subject of paranormal speculation for almost the entire century that cars have been using it. But why?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One major incident happened in 1950 with a man named Fred Rogers (not to be confused with the cardigan-clad hero of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/mr-rogers\">Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood\u003c/a>\u003c/em>). Rogers reported that, late one night, he saw a girl wearing a white gown and combing her long black hair next to the creek. Concerned for her safety, Rogers drove towards the rock where she sat, only to have her suddenly disappear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13979698']“She was gone,” he told the \u003cem>Oakland Tribune\u003c/em> in 1960. “She vanished the way a rock does when you throw it into a river.” Rogers searched the banks in both directions to no avail and walked down to the area where he had seen the girl. He searched for footprints and found none. “I only know that I saw that girl and I could pick her out of a crowd if I ever saw her again,” he reported.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Rogers is far from the only person witness to strange happenings on Niles Canyon Road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Nov. 28, 1978, a Vietnam veteran named Bill and his wife Pat were driving from Livermore to Fremont when they encountered a massive road block. As they slowly moved around police cars, swirling lights and at least one officer standing outside of his vehicle, Pat saw “a little person” sitting on the edge of the road, laughing hysterically. As the confused couple passed the roadblock, already regretting their decision not to use 680, they both witnessed the figure of a translucent woman with no legs and no facial features floating at the side of the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the couple finally cleared the chaotic corner, Bill glanced at his rearview mirror only to find that the entire scene had vanished into thin air. The tale was later \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FprwJP6CCdw\">shared on YouTube by Bill and Pat’s daughter\u003c/a>, who had spent her entire life being cautioned by her parents to avoid Niles Canyon Road at all costs. She has yet to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was sightings like these that compounded long-held lore that Niles Canyon Road was haunted by a so-called “White Witch.” The origin of that particular legend is unknown, but centers around a tale in which a man picked up a young female hitchhiker who was trying to get to South San Francisco. The story goes that when the driver reached the Dumbarton Bridge, he realized that his mysterious passenger had vanished inexplicably from the seat next to him. When he decided to continue to the final destination she had given him, a woman at that address informed him that her daughter had been killed in a Niles Canyon car crash a full decade earlier, on Feb. 26 or 28. (The date varies according to source.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13976828']The nameless driver, lack of origin year and changing details attached to this particular story suggest this one is the stuff of pure imagination. Over time, however, the story became increasingly embellished. It is said that the mysterious passenger was the spirit of a young woman (the name of whom also varies according to source — Mary, Mary Ann, Lucinda, etc.) who died in a crash alongside her sweetheart, while returning from an event in Sunol. The story persists today not just because of ghostly sightings on Niles Canyon Road; there have also been reports of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEPjbAicdxw\">disembodied footsteps\u003c/a> in the hiking trails nearby. One \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-niles-canyon-road-ghost-18684782.php\">witness who was startled on the road by an unnaturally bright light\u003c/a> in 1979 shared his story with SFGate last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever the truth about the alleged hauntings, there is no denying the fact that Niles Canyon Road has been the site of tragedy and misfortune since it was first constructed. After major investment to build out the road in the early 1930s, the two-lane stretch of State Route 84 remained plagued by floods, slides and repeated incidents of motorists being robbed at gunpoint, highwayman-style.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13982599\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13982599\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd.jpg\" alt=\"A narrow road surrounded by stark hills, running past a creek full of brown water, has a chunk missing. The missing section of the road can be seen near the water below.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This portion of Niles Canyon Road collapsed into Alameda Creek near Sunol in 2024. \u003ccite>(Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>On April 6, 1936, one couple was hit by thieves that were so well organized, one assailant held them at gunpoint, while another stole their valuables and a third disabled the ignition wires in the pair’s car. The couple escaped shaken but unharmed. That same year, four men stole a car, robbed a party of picnickers in Niles Canyon and then promptly smashed their vehicle into guard rails near Farwell Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13892672']Indeed, automobile collisions are what have always most plagued Niles Canyon Road — especially in its earliest years. And it seems to have been local children who first suffered the most. In April 1935, 8-year-old Gloria Arias was struck by a car and killed at the entrance to Niles Canyon Road. Eight months later, on her way to the Niles Grammar School where she was in second grade, Gloria’s friend Rafaella Morilla died at the exact same spot, having been mowed down by a gravel truck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, the number of deadly crashes that happened on Niles Canyon Road was so excessive that a 1947 issue of the \u003cem>Oakland Post Enquirer\u003c/em> referred to one section of the road as “a traffic hazard and death trap.” The newspapers of the era regularly covered horrific, life-ending incidents there. Any number of young women lost their lives on the road during this time. Perhaps that’s why the name of the White Witch varies according to who’s telling the tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Incidents along Niles Canyon Road were also downright bizarre during this period. In 1933, a 30-year-old man named Gene Goss left a party held by a friend and began throwing rocks at vehicles driving on Niles Canyon Road. One of those rocks crashed through the windshield of a car, crushing the skull of its passenger, who was pronounced dead an hour later at Hayward Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goss wasn’t the only man seemingly led astray by the road. In February 1940, a 40-year-old Niles Canyon Road worker wandered into Niles, broke into his sister’s home, threw chairs through her windows, then went about trying to break into the Niles jail using a four-foot plank of wood. When Deputy Sheriff Henry Vervais arrived and asked the unruly man what he was doing, he replied simply, “I guess I’m crazy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Worse still, in 1944, a “badly decomposed” body was discovered in brush just off Niles Canyon Road after a “carefully drawn mystery map” was delivered to a five-and-dime store in Niles. The map led local law enforcement to what amounted to little more than bones. The \u003cem>Oakland Post Enquirer\u003c/em> reported: “Some dry skin remained on the left arm and ribs. A little gray hair held to the scalp. Scraps of clothing and two black shoes, each of different make were also found.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13881990']The plethora of accidents on Niles Canyon Road continued well in the 1950s, with fiery collisions, cars running clear off the road, passengers being thrown from vehicles, cars and trucks overturning and at least one deadly crash that also took out major power lines. Children continued to die in tragic events too, with a 19-month-old dying in Alameda Creek in 1951 while playing with other children, and a 3-year-old named Antone Macias suffering a fractured skull after falling from his father’s car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The infamy of Niles Canyon Road seemed only to compound its deadliness. In 1959, the \u003cem>Oakland Tribune\u003c/em> reported the deaths of five “youngsters” in five weeks, “as the result of violent high speed crashes” on the highway. “Several youths have boasted they could ‘make any curve in Niles Canyon’ at high speed safely,” the newspaper reported. “One youth made this remark and failed on the first curve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it any wonder then, that Niles Canyon Road and the land around it continue to be of fascination to ghost hunters and thrill seekers? If anything, the lore of the White Witch simplifies the true extent of the route’s tragic history. If she is indeed still there, wearing her white gown and brushing her long black hair, it’s fairly likely that she has plenty of company.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For decades now, there have been rumors that strange specters and ghostly goings-on haunt Niles Canyon Road. The winding, seven-mile stretch of highway, which runs alongside Alameda Creek to the northeast of Fremont, has been the subject of paranormal speculation for almost the entire century that cars have been using it. But why?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One major incident happened in 1950 with a man named Fred Rogers (not to be confused with the cardigan-clad hero of \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/mr-rogers\">Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood\u003c/a>\u003c/em>). Rogers reported that, late one night, he saw a girl wearing a white gown and combing her long black hair next to the creek. Concerned for her safety, Rogers drove towards the rock where she sat, only to have her suddenly disappear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“She was gone,” he told the \u003cem>Oakland Tribune\u003c/em> in 1960. “She vanished the way a rock does when you throw it into a river.” Rogers searched the banks in both directions to no avail and walked down to the area where he had seen the girl. He searched for footprints and found none. “I only know that I saw that girl and I could pick her out of a crowd if I ever saw her again,” he reported.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Rogers is far from the only person witness to strange happenings on Niles Canyon Road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Nov. 28, 1978, a Vietnam veteran named Bill and his wife Pat were driving from Livermore to Fremont when they encountered a massive road block. As they slowly moved around police cars, swirling lights and at least one officer standing outside of his vehicle, Pat saw “a little person” sitting on the edge of the road, laughing hysterically. As the confused couple passed the roadblock, already regretting their decision not to use 680, they both witnessed the figure of a translucent woman with no legs and no facial features floating at the side of the road.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the couple finally cleared the chaotic corner, Bill glanced at his rearview mirror only to find that the entire scene had vanished into thin air. The tale was later \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FprwJP6CCdw\">shared on YouTube by Bill and Pat’s daughter\u003c/a>, who had spent her entire life being cautioned by her parents to avoid Niles Canyon Road at all costs. She has yet to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was sightings like these that compounded long-held lore that Niles Canyon Road was haunted by a so-called “White Witch.” The origin of that particular legend is unknown, but centers around a tale in which a man picked up a young female hitchhiker who was trying to get to South San Francisco. The story goes that when the driver reached the Dumbarton Bridge, he realized that his mysterious passenger had vanished inexplicably from the seat next to him. When he decided to continue to the final destination she had given him, a woman at that address informed him that her daughter had been killed in a Niles Canyon car crash a full decade earlier, on Feb. 26 or 28. (The date varies according to source.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The nameless driver, lack of origin year and changing details attached to this particular story suggest this one is the stuff of pure imagination. Over time, however, the story became increasingly embellished. It is said that the mysterious passenger was the spirit of a young woman (the name of whom also varies according to source — Mary, Mary Ann, Lucinda, etc.) who died in a crash alongside her sweetheart, while returning from an event in Sunol. The story persists today not just because of ghostly sightings on Niles Canyon Road; there have also been reports of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEPjbAicdxw\">disembodied footsteps\u003c/a> in the hiking trails nearby. One \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-niles-canyon-road-ghost-18684782.php\">witness who was startled on the road by an unnaturally bright light\u003c/a> in 1979 shared his story with SFGate last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever the truth about the alleged hauntings, there is no denying the fact that Niles Canyon Road has been the site of tragedy and misfortune since it was first constructed. After major investment to build out the road in the early 1930s, the two-lane stretch of State Route 84 remained plagued by floods, slides and repeated incidents of motorists being robbed at gunpoint, highwayman-style.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13982599\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13982599\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd.jpg\" alt=\"A narrow road surrounded by stark hills, running past a creek full of brown water, has a chunk missing. The missing section of the road can be seen near the water below.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/niles-canyon-rd-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This portion of Niles Canyon Road collapsed into Alameda Creek near Sunol in 2024. \u003ccite>(Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>On April 6, 1936, one couple was hit by thieves that were so well organized, one assailant held them at gunpoint, while another stole their valuables and a third disabled the ignition wires in the pair’s car. The couple escaped shaken but unharmed. That same year, four men stole a car, robbed a party of picnickers in Niles Canyon and then promptly smashed their vehicle into guard rails near Farwell Bridge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Indeed, automobile collisions are what have always most plagued Niles Canyon Road — especially in its earliest years. And it seems to have been local children who first suffered the most. In April 1935, 8-year-old Gloria Arias was struck by a car and killed at the entrance to Niles Canyon Road. Eight months later, on her way to the Niles Grammar School where she was in second grade, Gloria’s friend Rafaella Morilla died at the exact same spot, having been mowed down by a gravel truck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, the number of deadly crashes that happened on Niles Canyon Road was so excessive that a 1947 issue of the \u003cem>Oakland Post Enquirer\u003c/em> referred to one section of the road as “a traffic hazard and death trap.” The newspapers of the era regularly covered horrific, life-ending incidents there. Any number of young women lost their lives on the road during this time. Perhaps that’s why the name of the White Witch varies according to who’s telling the tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Incidents along Niles Canyon Road were also downright bizarre during this period. In 1933, a 30-year-old man named Gene Goss left a party held by a friend and began throwing rocks at vehicles driving on Niles Canyon Road. One of those rocks crashed through the windshield of a car, crushing the skull of its passenger, who was pronounced dead an hour later at Hayward Hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goss wasn’t the only man seemingly led astray by the road. In February 1940, a 40-year-old Niles Canyon Road worker wandered into Niles, broke into his sister’s home, threw chairs through her windows, then went about trying to break into the Niles jail using a four-foot plank of wood. When Deputy Sheriff Henry Vervais arrived and asked the unruly man what he was doing, he replied simply, “I guess I’m crazy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Worse still, in 1944, a “badly decomposed” body was discovered in brush just off Niles Canyon Road after a “carefully drawn mystery map” was delivered to a five-and-dime store in Niles. The map led local law enforcement to what amounted to little more than bones. The \u003cem>Oakland Post Enquirer\u003c/em> reported: “Some dry skin remained on the left arm and ribs. A little gray hair held to the scalp. Scraps of clothing and two black shoes, each of different make were also found.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The plethora of accidents on Niles Canyon Road continued well in the 1950s, with fiery collisions, cars running clear off the road, passengers being thrown from vehicles, cars and trucks overturning and at least one deadly crash that also took out major power lines. Children continued to die in tragic events too, with a 19-month-old dying in Alameda Creek in 1951 while playing with other children, and a 3-year-old named Antone Macias suffering a fractured skull after falling from his father’s car.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The infamy of Niles Canyon Road seemed only to compound its deadliness. In 1959, the \u003cem>Oakland Tribune\u003c/em> reported the deaths of five “youngsters” in five weeks, “as the result of violent high speed crashes” on the highway. “Several youths have boasted they could ‘make any curve in Niles Canyon’ at high speed safely,” the newspaper reported. “One youth made this remark and failed on the first curve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it any wonder then, that Niles Canyon Road and the land around it continue to be of fascination to ghost hunters and thrill seekers? If anything, the lore of the White Witch simplifies the true extent of the route’s tragic history. If she is indeed still there, wearing her white gown and brushing her long black hair, it’s fairly likely that she has plenty of company.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "598-guerrero-san-francisco-restaurant-curse-mission-history-handroll-project-als-yuzuki-ebb-craigs",
"title": "We Just Figured Out Why 598 Guerrero Is the Most Cursed Restaurant Location in SF",
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"headTitle": "We Just Figured Out Why 598 Guerrero Is the Most Cursed Restaurant Location in SF | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>This week, yet another restaurant boldly moved into 598 Guerrero St. in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a>, despite the Mission District location’s many years of proving how cursed it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The owners of \u003ca href=\"https://www.handrollproject.com/\">Handroll Project\u003c/a>, the location’s most recent tenant, will reopen the restaurant as Hamburger Project Two — a second location for \u003ca href=\"https://www.hamburgerproject.com/\">the burger spot at 808 Divisadero\u003c/a>. Handroll Project took over the high-ceilinged space on the corner of 18th Street in 2022 and survived just over three years, having taken over from \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/als-deli-san-francisco\">AL’s Deli\u003c/a>, which soldiered on there for just eight months until March 2020. (At the time of that departure, owner \u003ca href=\"https://sf.eater.com/2020/3/10/21173569/als-deli-aaron-london-mission-closed\">Aaron London told Eater\u003c/a>, “It just never really hit the mass appeal to make that model make sense.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13976828']Remarkably, AL’s Deli wasn’t even the shortest-lived restaurant to occupy 598 Guerrero. That honor belongs to \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ebb-and-flow-san-francisco\">Ebb & Flow\u003c/a>, which lasted just six months in 2010. Before that, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/craigs-place-san-francisco\">Craig’s Place\u003c/a> served diner food between 2007 and 2008. The location’s longest restaurant success story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCTYmTmq2U\">Izakaya Yuzuki\u003c/a>, which endured from 2011 to 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sheer number of restaurants that have tried and failed to make this spot work belies good sense. Situated opposite \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/tartine\">Tartine\u003c/a>’s always bustling original location, and a short walk from \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/delfina\">Delfina\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/bi-rite-market\">Bi-Rite\u003c/a> and other popular neighborhood spots, the repeated failures at 598 Guerrero have been perplexing. (Just a few doors down, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/fayes-san-francisco\">Faye’s\u003c/a> has been going strong since 1998.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Handroll Project was a usually busy sushi joint that I believed would break the spell. I wasn’t the first to think a restaurant could actually survive there. Writing about Izakaya Yuzuki for the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> in 2017, Chris Ying remained idealistic: “It turns out there are no cursed restaurants. It comes down to the right idea taking root, and, when something great begins to grow from it, diners nurturing it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Izakaya Yuzuki was gone two years later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what exactly \u003cem>is\u003c/em> wrong with 598 Guerrero? While claims of a curse have long been pooh-poohed by skeptics (and optimistic new tenants), the answer might be just as strange as rumored.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A paranormal property\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It turns out that, all the way back in 1889, 598 Guerrero was occupied by a “trance medium” and fortune teller by the name of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers. Mayo-Steers held healing circles (“skeptics invited”), “psychometric readings,” “psychic delineations,” and claimed to provide “diagnosis of diseases.” For at least 15 years, Mayo-Steers operated out of locations all over San Francisco — Turk, Market, Oak, Grove, 24th and 17th Streets included — but 598 Guerrero was where she communed with spirits in daily “sittings,” at least for a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a member of the Progressive Mediums’ Society, Mayo-Steers was well known in Victorian San Francisco’s spookier society corners, once speaking at a meeting for Progressive Spiritualists in 1889 and appearing at the State Spiritualist Convention of 1896. In a 1903 edition of \u003cem>Now\u003c/em> — a journal “devoted to the science and art of soul culture” — the editor wrote that “among the Spiritualists, our friend … Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers [has] resumed work in the city. In work along New Thought and psychic lines, our city is wide awake.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13919589']If in fact Mayo-Steers turned 598 Guerrero into a psychic hotspot, that could explain what happened there in 2022, shortly after Handroll Project moved in. At the time, Eater reported that staff members \u003ca href=\"https://sf.eater.com/2022/10/17/23403425/handroll-project-san-francisco-haunted\">believed there was paranormal activity\u003c/a> at the restaurant. Lights were said to inexplicably flicker on and off, and containers seemed to fly across the room on their own volition. One employee even claimed to see a long-haired apparition in the basement break room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just too crazy,” restaurant partner Geoffrey Lee said at the time. “Customers have been saying the veil between the living and the dead is very thin right now because of Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos and I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to hear that stuff.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some observers at the time attributed the paranormal activity to an incident in 2003, just three months after Central American bistro \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/platanos-san-francisco\">Platanos\u003c/a> had moved into 598 Guerrero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After leaving work late one night, Platanos’ executive chef Carlos Perez got into an altercation and died on Valencia near 22nd. The fight reportedly started over the volume of Perez’s car stereo. According to a report in the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> that February, police considered the death a result of self-defense. However, Platanos’ co-owner Lisa Lazarus told the newspaper, “I just saw him in the casket [and] this was not a guy hit with a couple of blows and then stopped breathing … He was beaten to death.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazarus sold Platanos to a new owner, Pascal Rigo, in September 2005. Nine months later, the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>’s Michael Bauer wrote: “The food has now taken an even more delectable turn, and customers are returning.” Within a year, Platanos was gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13980643\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13980643\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white photograph of a 1930s-era streetcar traveling along a residential street in San Francisco.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1176\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-768x452.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-1536x903.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The corner of Guerrero and 18th in December 1939. On the left, out of frame, would be 958 Guerrero. The photographer probably left it out lest their camera burst into flames. \u003ccite>(OpenSFHistory/wnp14.1438)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Raided by federal agents\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So what was at 598 Guerrero between the psychic lady and the failed restaurants? Well, a speakeasy, for one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The building’s post-1906 earthquake iteration arrived in about 1909, when it appeared for sale in the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em>’s “City Real Estate” classifieds as a “clean, level lot 25 x 80” complete with “gas, water, sewer.” By 1920, the address was an entertainment venue under the proprietorship of a J. Hoegeman. That year, Hoegeman advertised the availability of a beverage at his joint called New Crow, marketed as “the California drink that makes YOU FORGET prohibition.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13881990']Clearly, New Crow did not achieve its stated goal. On Sept. 29, 1922, 598 Guerrero was raided by federal prohibition agents who hit venues all over the Mission that night. The speakeasy was forcibly closed for violating alcohol laws, and its operators at the time, Peter Jacobs and Jack Warren — as well as building owner Ellen Boardman — were charged in abatement suits by Assistant United States Attorney Garton D. Keystone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after prohibition hammered 598 Guerrero’s doors closed, the building transformed into a pharmacy — Dunnigan’s in the ’20s and ’30s, and Mission Prescription Pharmacy in the ’50s and ’60s. In the 1970s, the location became a produce store that wound up listed for sale in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>’s “Business Offers” in 1982. It was, the ad noted, “priced to sell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever happens to Hamburger Project Two, you have to admire the devil-may-care confidence to stay at 598 Guerrero. May the ghost of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers enjoy smash burgers and loaded fries as much as the rest of us.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Project Handroll is the latest casualty of the corner spot — one with a history of murder, mediums and ghosts.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This week, yet another restaurant boldly moved into 598 Guerrero St. in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a>, despite the Mission District location’s many years of proving how cursed it is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The owners of \u003ca href=\"https://www.handrollproject.com/\">Handroll Project\u003c/a>, the location’s most recent tenant, will reopen the restaurant as Hamburger Project Two — a second location for \u003ca href=\"https://www.hamburgerproject.com/\">the burger spot at 808 Divisadero\u003c/a>. Handroll Project took over the high-ceilinged space on the corner of 18th Street in 2022 and survived just over three years, having taken over from \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/als-deli-san-francisco\">AL’s Deli\u003c/a>, which soldiered on there for just eight months until March 2020. (At the time of that departure, owner \u003ca href=\"https://sf.eater.com/2020/3/10/21173569/als-deli-aaron-london-mission-closed\">Aaron London told Eater\u003c/a>, “It just never really hit the mass appeal to make that model make sense.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Remarkably, AL’s Deli wasn’t even the shortest-lived restaurant to occupy 598 Guerrero. That honor belongs to \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/ebb-and-flow-san-francisco\">Ebb & Flow\u003c/a>, which lasted just six months in 2010. Before that, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/craigs-place-san-francisco\">Craig’s Place\u003c/a> served diner food between 2007 and 2008. The location’s longest restaurant success story was \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCTYmTmq2U\">Izakaya Yuzuki\u003c/a>, which endured from 2011 to 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sheer number of restaurants that have tried and failed to make this spot work belies good sense. Situated opposite \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/tartine\">Tartine\u003c/a>’s always bustling original location, and a short walk from \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/delfina\">Delfina\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/tag/bi-rite-market\">Bi-Rite\u003c/a> and other popular neighborhood spots, the repeated failures at 598 Guerrero have been perplexing. (Just a few doors down, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/fayes-san-francisco\">Faye’s\u003c/a> has been going strong since 1998.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Handroll Project was a usually busy sushi joint that I believed would break the spell. I wasn’t the first to think a restaurant could actually survive there. Writing about Izakaya Yuzuki for the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> in 2017, Chris Ying remained idealistic: “It turns out there are no cursed restaurants. It comes down to the right idea taking root, and, when something great begins to grow from it, diners nurturing it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Izakaya Yuzuki was gone two years later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what exactly \u003cem>is\u003c/em> wrong with 598 Guerrero? While claims of a curse have long been pooh-poohed by skeptics (and optimistic new tenants), the answer might be just as strange as rumored.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A paranormal property\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It turns out that, all the way back in 1889, 598 Guerrero was occupied by a “trance medium” and fortune teller by the name of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers. Mayo-Steers held healing circles (“skeptics invited”), “psychometric readings,” “psychic delineations,” and claimed to provide “diagnosis of diseases.” For at least 15 years, Mayo-Steers operated out of locations all over San Francisco — Turk, Market, Oak, Grove, 24th and 17th Streets included — but 598 Guerrero was where she communed with spirits in daily “sittings,” at least for a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a member of the Progressive Mediums’ Society, Mayo-Steers was well known in Victorian San Francisco’s spookier society corners, once speaking at a meeting for Progressive Spiritualists in 1889 and appearing at the State Spiritualist Convention of 1896. In a 1903 edition of \u003cem>Now\u003c/em> — a journal “devoted to the science and art of soul culture” — the editor wrote that “among the Spiritualists, our friend … Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers [has] resumed work in the city. In work along New Thought and psychic lines, our city is wide awake.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>If in fact Mayo-Steers turned 598 Guerrero into a psychic hotspot, that could explain what happened there in 2022, shortly after Handroll Project moved in. At the time, Eater reported that staff members \u003ca href=\"https://sf.eater.com/2022/10/17/23403425/handroll-project-san-francisco-haunted\">believed there was paranormal activity\u003c/a> at the restaurant. Lights were said to inexplicably flicker on and off, and containers seemed to fly across the room on their own volition. One employee even claimed to see a long-haired apparition in the basement break room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just too crazy,” restaurant partner Geoffrey Lee said at the time. “Customers have been saying the veil between the living and the dead is very thin right now because of Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos and I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to hear that stuff.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some observers at the time attributed the paranormal activity to an incident in 2003, just three months after Central American bistro \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/platanos-san-francisco\">Platanos\u003c/a> had moved into 598 Guerrero.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After leaving work late one night, Platanos’ executive chef Carlos Perez got into an altercation and died on Valencia near 22nd. The fight reportedly started over the volume of Perez’s car stereo. According to a report in the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> that February, police considered the death a result of self-defense. However, Platanos’ co-owner Lisa Lazarus told the newspaper, “I just saw him in the casket [and] this was not a guy hit with a couple of blows and then stopped breathing … He was beaten to death.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lazarus sold Platanos to a new owner, Pascal Rigo, in September 2005. Nine months later, the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>’s Michael Bauer wrote: “The food has now taken an even more delectable turn, and customers are returning.” Within a year, Platanos was gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13980643\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13980643\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white photograph of a 1930s-era streetcar traveling along a residential street in San Francisco.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1176\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-768x452.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/18th-and-guerrero-1536x903.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The corner of Guerrero and 18th in December 1939. On the left, out of frame, would be 958 Guerrero. The photographer probably left it out lest their camera burst into flames. \u003ccite>(OpenSFHistory/wnp14.1438)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Raided by federal agents\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>So what was at 598 Guerrero between the psychic lady and the failed restaurants? Well, a speakeasy, for one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The building’s post-1906 earthquake iteration arrived in about 1909, when it appeared for sale in the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em>’s “City Real Estate” classifieds as a “clean, level lot 25 x 80” complete with “gas, water, sewer.” By 1920, the address was an entertainment venue under the proprietorship of a J. Hoegeman. That year, Hoegeman advertised the availability of a beverage at his joint called New Crow, marketed as “the California drink that makes YOU FORGET prohibition.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Clearly, New Crow did not achieve its stated goal. On Sept. 29, 1922, 598 Guerrero was raided by federal prohibition agents who hit venues all over the Mission that night. The speakeasy was forcibly closed for violating alcohol laws, and its operators at the time, Peter Jacobs and Jack Warren — as well as building owner Ellen Boardman — were charged in abatement suits by Assistant United States Attorney Garton D. Keystone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after prohibition hammered 598 Guerrero’s doors closed, the building transformed into a pharmacy — Dunnigan’s in the ’20s and ’30s, and Mission Prescription Pharmacy in the ’50s and ’60s. In the 1970s, the location became a produce store that wound up listed for sale in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>’s “Business Offers” in 1982. It was, the ad noted, “priced to sell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever happens to Hamburger Project Two, you have to admire the devil-may-care confidence to stay at 598 Guerrero. May the ghost of Mrs. C. Mayo-Steers enjoy smash burgers and loaded fries as much as the rest of us.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "haunted-toys-r-us-sunnyvale-yonny-johnson-murphy-ranch-doll",
"title": "Forget Haunted Toys, Sunnyvale Once Had a Haunted Toys R Us",
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"content": "\u003cp>Any child of the 1980s knows that Toys R Us could be scary at the best of times. Row upon row of squished-up Cabbage Patch Kids faces. Talking Teddy Ruxpins with their backs made of machinery. The looming figure of creepy store mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. But one Toys R Us in Northern California had an extra-sinister reputation. It was the Sunnyvale location: a store that a multitude of employees, customers and even a famous psychic repeatedly asserted was haunted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the time the store opened at 130 El Camino Real in 1970, stories were rife that something was amiss within its walls. Folks told of lights and faucets turning on and off unassisted. There were tales that doors and toys had minds of their own. Shelves apparently fell down inexplicably and several female employees heard their names whispered in empty rooms. Reports of bangs and loud footsteps emerging from vacated parts of the store were also commonplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13919589']In 1979, the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> carried an article about the store’s unusual issues, featuring a Toys R Us employee named Margie Honey. Honey was deeply disturbed by a 3-foot-tall, jumpsuit-wearing doll with blonde hair that was, by design, supposed to talk. The \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>’s report stated that the doll had been returned to the store after a customer was unable to get it to make a sound. Honey, also unable to get the doll to function, accepted the return. It was only when she placed the doll inside a box that it began to cry out. Every time Honey opened the box, the noise stopped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After this happened a few times, it ceased to be funny,” Honey told the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>. “I began to feel that the doll had a will of its own. Finally I called a clerk and asked him to take the toy away. It cried all the way to the stockroom.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Honey was later plagued by bulletin boards swinging off the wall and stacks of papers falling to the floor, one sheet at a time, despite being nowhere near a breeze, a fan or a vent.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another witness featured in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> was Charlie Brown (\u003cem>good grief!\u003c/em>), an employee who had a hard time locking up one night because every time he secured the doors, loud banging would erupt inside. After checking that no one was stuck in the building, Brown relocked the doors only for the banging to start again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One clerk named Regina Gibson felt unseen hands touching her hair while she was high up a ladder stocking shelves. Another clerk, Bill Peevan, found his meticulously arranged displays dismantled and reconfigured on the floor, even though no other coworkers were around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Five years later, on Halloween 1984, the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> revisited the Sunnyvale Toys R Us, quoting an employee who said they were “spooked” by the store and that “crazy things do happen. I’ve seen something out of the corner of my eye a few times over the past three years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13976843\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13976843 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne.png\" alt=\"A white senior woman with short brown hair stands in front of a Toys ‘R’ Us store.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1358\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-800x543.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1020x693.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-160x109.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-768x521.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1536x1043.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1920x1304.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Who you gonna call?! If you’re the haunted Sunnyvale Toys R Us in 1991, you apparently call TV psychic Sylvia Browne. \u003ccite>(YouTube)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At some point, Toys R Us management was so flabbergasted by all of the strange goings on, they invited one of the most famous psychics in the country to investigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After spending some time in the store, Sylvia Browne claimed that the activity on the property was due to a man named John “Yonny” Johnson who had worked on the land in the late 1800s. Browne said that Johnson was employed on the ranch of Sunnyvale’s founder, Martin Murphy. According to lore, Johnson was desperately in unrequited love with Murphy’s daughter Elizabeth, who was engaged to another man. Johnson, the story goes, eventually bled to death on the property after a terrible accident with an axe, and never wound up winning the woman of his dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13884403']The Murphy ranch’s lovely frame house stayed standing until 1961, when the state historical landmark was destroyed by a fire. Browne claimed that Johnson’s longing for Murphy’s daughter kept him trapped on the property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(You can’t really blame a spirit for acting up under the circumstances: imagine going from haunting a beautiful old mansion to being stuck in a warehouse full of toys and screaming children.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The notoriety of the Sunnyvale Toys R Us continued throughout the 1980s, raising the interest of a variety of television crews. The 1985 report below saw parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach investigating the haunting claims which, by then, included sightings of a “wispy white figure” wandering the aisles. (Skip to 3:40 for an alleged photo of a ghost at the store, apparently taken via infrared light during a seance.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3QKKHtHHxo\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sunnyvale Toys R Us was also featured in a January 1991 episode of \u003cem>Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories\u003c/em>, hosted by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13890009/watch-leonard-nimoy-scare-the-crap-out-of-america-over-the-y2k-bug\">Leonard Nimoy\u003c/a>. During the episode, current and former employees gathered at the store to compare stories and found they had a lot in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13890009']“One little teddy bear, instead of just falling down like it normally would, went out into an arc down to the floor,” reported Lillian “Putt” O’Brien. “So I said to the manager ‘Did that frighten you?’ And he said ‘It sure did, Putt!’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same show, a former manager named Cheryl Royce said that while she was in a bathroom stall, she heard the door next to her open, followed by the sound of water turning on at the sinks. Except, when she glanced through the gap in her own door, she realized that no one was there. Royce lasted just six more weeks in the job, steadfastly refusing to use the store restroom ever again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN5vEX3sYGU&t=54s\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the old Sunnyvale Toys R Us location is now an REI store. Reports of ghostly goings on since REI opened in 2021 have been almost nonexistent, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1fyn02k/is_the_sunnyvale_rei_that_used_to_be_toys_r_us/\">Reddit threads continue\u003c/a> to inquire as to supernatural activity at the location.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, one Reddit user, Artistic_Agency105, claimed that: “The only weird thing I’ve noticed is walkie talkies turn on randomly and the sensor at the front door has a mind of its own.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same thread, a user named mikemu chimed in: “I … talked to a green vest. He claims that since he started working there early on, he has felt someone walk past behind him at the front registers — when there wasn’t anybody that did. And that one of the doors just opened up in the back as if someone was walking through. … No recent occurrences though.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In all honesty, when it comes to the Sunnyvale REI, most online users who’ve been there seem far less concerned with it being haunted than they are worried the store might be understaffed. (Oh, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/rei-sunnyvale?start=40\">the Yelp page\u003c/a> …) With a history like this, it’s no wonder employees are hard to come by.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Any child of the 1980s knows that Toys R Us could be scary at the best of times. Row upon row of squished-up Cabbage Patch Kids faces. Talking Teddy Ruxpins with their backs made of machinery. The looming figure of creepy store mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. But one Toys R Us in Northern California had an extra-sinister reputation. It was the Sunnyvale location: a store that a multitude of employees, customers and even a famous psychic repeatedly asserted was haunted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the time the store opened at 130 El Camino Real in 1970, stories were rife that something was amiss within its walls. Folks told of lights and faucets turning on and off unassisted. There were tales that doors and toys had minds of their own. Shelves apparently fell down inexplicably and several female employees heard their names whispered in empty rooms. Reports of bangs and loud footsteps emerging from vacated parts of the store were also commonplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In 1979, the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> carried an article about the store’s unusual issues, featuring a Toys R Us employee named Margie Honey. Honey was deeply disturbed by a 3-foot-tall, jumpsuit-wearing doll with blonde hair that was, by design, supposed to talk. The \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>’s report stated that the doll had been returned to the store after a customer was unable to get it to make a sound. Honey, also unable to get the doll to function, accepted the return. It was only when she placed the doll inside a box that it began to cry out. Every time Honey opened the box, the noise stopped.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“After this happened a few times, it ceased to be funny,” Honey told the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>. “I began to feel that the doll had a will of its own. Finally I called a clerk and asked him to take the toy away. It cried all the way to the stockroom.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Honey was later plagued by bulletin boards swinging off the wall and stacks of papers falling to the floor, one sheet at a time, despite being nowhere near a breeze, a fan or a vent.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another witness featured in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> was Charlie Brown (\u003cem>good grief!\u003c/em>), an employee who had a hard time locking up one night because every time he secured the doors, loud banging would erupt inside. After checking that no one was stuck in the building, Brown relocked the doors only for the banging to start again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One clerk named Regina Gibson felt unseen hands touching her hair while she was high up a ladder stocking shelves. Another clerk, Bill Peevan, found his meticulously arranged displays dismantled and reconfigured on the floor, even though no other coworkers were around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Five years later, on Halloween 1984, the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> revisited the Sunnyvale Toys R Us, quoting an employee who said they were “spooked” by the store and that “crazy things do happen. I’ve seen something out of the corner of my eye a few times over the past three years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13976843\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13976843 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne.png\" alt=\"A white senior woman with short brown hair stands in front of a Toys ‘R’ Us store.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1358\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-800x543.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1020x693.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-160x109.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-768x521.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1536x1043.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/05/sylvia-Browne-1920x1304.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Who you gonna call?! If you’re the haunted Sunnyvale Toys R Us in 1991, you apparently call TV psychic Sylvia Browne. \u003ccite>(YouTube)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At some point, Toys R Us management was so flabbergasted by all of the strange goings on, they invited one of the most famous psychics in the country to investigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After spending some time in the store, Sylvia Browne claimed that the activity on the property was due to a man named John “Yonny” Johnson who had worked on the land in the late 1800s. Browne said that Johnson was employed on the ranch of Sunnyvale’s founder, Martin Murphy. According to lore, Johnson was desperately in unrequited love with Murphy’s daughter Elizabeth, who was engaged to another man. Johnson, the story goes, eventually bled to death on the property after a terrible accident with an axe, and never wound up winning the woman of his dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The Murphy ranch’s lovely frame house stayed standing until 1961, when the state historical landmark was destroyed by a fire. Browne claimed that Johnson’s longing for Murphy’s daughter kept him trapped on the property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(You can’t really blame a spirit for acting up under the circumstances: imagine going from haunting a beautiful old mansion to being stuck in a warehouse full of toys and screaming children.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The notoriety of the Sunnyvale Toys R Us continued throughout the 1980s, raising the interest of a variety of television crews. The 1985 report below saw parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach investigating the haunting claims which, by then, included sightings of a “wispy white figure” wandering the aisles. (Skip to 3:40 for an alleged photo of a ghost at the store, apparently taken via infrared light during a seance.)\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/t3QKKHtHHxo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/t3QKKHtHHxo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The Sunnyvale Toys R Us was also featured in a January 1991 episode of \u003cem>Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories\u003c/em>, hosted by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13890009/watch-leonard-nimoy-scare-the-crap-out-of-america-over-the-y2k-bug\">Leonard Nimoy\u003c/a>. During the episode, current and former employees gathered at the store to compare stories and found they had a lot in common.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“One little teddy bear, instead of just falling down like it normally would, went out into an arc down to the floor,” reported Lillian “Putt” O’Brien. “So I said to the manager ‘Did that frighten you?’ And he said ‘It sure did, Putt!’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same show, a former manager named Cheryl Royce said that while she was in a bathroom stall, she heard the door next to her open, followed by the sound of water turning on at the sinks. Except, when she glanced through the gap in her own door, she realized that no one was there. Royce lasted just six more weeks in the job, steadfastly refusing to use the store restroom ever again.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/jN5vEX3sYGU'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/jN5vEX3sYGU'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Today, the old Sunnyvale Toys R Us location is now an REI store. Reports of ghostly goings on since REI opened in 2021 have been almost nonexistent, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/REI/comments/1fyn02k/is_the_sunnyvale_rei_that_used_to_be_toys_r_us/\">Reddit threads continue\u003c/a> to inquire as to supernatural activity at the location.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, one Reddit user, Artistic_Agency105, claimed that: “The only weird thing I’ve noticed is walkie talkies turn on randomly and the sensor at the front door has a mind of its own.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same thread, a user named mikemu chimed in: “I … talked to a green vest. He claims that since he started working there early on, he has felt someone walk past behind him at the front registers — when there wasn’t anybody that did. And that one of the doors just opened up in the back as if someone was walking through. … No recent occurrences though.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In all honesty, when it comes to the Sunnyvale REI, most online users who’ve been there seem far less concerned with it being haunted than they are worried the store might be understaffed. (Oh, \u003ca href=\"https://www.yelp.com/biz/rei-sunnyvale?start=40\">the Yelp page\u003c/a> …) With a history like this, it’s no wonder employees are hard to come by.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "san-francisco-murders-history-lovers-happy-valentines-day-doomed",
"title": "Happy Valentine’s Day! 3 Pairs of Doomed Lovers From San Francisco History",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971513\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1893px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971513\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart.png\" alt=\"A painting depicting a heart stabbed horizontally through its center with a dagger. Above are two bleeding hands. Below are two bleeding feet.\" width=\"1893\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart.png 1893w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-800x845.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-1020x1078.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-160x169.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-768x811.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-1454x1536.png 1454w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1893px) 100vw, 1893px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Love: Not all it’s cracked up to be at the best of times. \u003ccite>(Stigmata of Christ, detail from the Waldburg prayer book, 1486)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As we all know, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/20463/the-dark-and-twisted-history-of-valentines-day\">Valentine’s Day\u003c/a> is intrinsically designed to make single people feel bad about their lives. So, in the interests of bringing balance back to the world, here are some stories of lovers from Bay Area history that could make anyone swear off coupledom for life. Theirs are tales of passion, mayhem and — oh yes — a little bit of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/true-crime\">murder\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behold these messy lovebirds!\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Belle and Charles Cora (1850s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Adventurous couple Charles and Belle Cora found each other in New Orleans in 1848. He was a wealthy gambler and high roller. She was the daughter of a minister, hailed from Baltimore, and had fled to New Orleans after falling pregnant out of wedlock. After her baby died, Belle went to work for a local madam. When Charles saw and approached Belle for the very first time, she is said to have uttered the phrase, “It is destiny.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13893272']Together, the two briefly tried their luck in Sacramento before settling in San Francisco in 1849, where Belle ran a high-end brothel in what is now Chinatown. The duo stood out in the city as a handsome, if controversial, couple. In 1890, the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> recalled that Charles was instantly “struck by her beauty — she was a voluptuous creature.” Charles, a volunteer fireman, was a good match for Bella too. The same article described him as “always dressed neatly and well supplied with money. He had dark hair, dark mustache and dark eyes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trouble for these two began one Thursday night at \u003ca href=\"https://sanfranciscotheatres.blogspot.com/2018/01/maguires-opera-house.html\">Maguire’s Opera House\u003c/a>. A rule of the venue was that “the demi-monde” — any customers not of proper social standing — must only sit (according to a 1910 edition of the \u003cem>San Francisco Bulletin\u003c/em>) in “the parquet behind the dress circle, secluded in boxes.” When Belle and Charles sat in the dress circle, directly behind the wife of U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson, the lawman was incensed. Richardson loudly attempted to get the offending couple removed. When his request was denied, Richardson was left feeling both furious and publicly humiliated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following day, Charles and Richardson had a run-in at the Cosmopolitan Saloon on Montgomery and Clay (where the Transamerica Pyramid stands today) and harsh words were exchanged as Charles defended his wife. After yet another altercation on Saturday, Charles wound up shooting and killing Richardson in the street. Charles swore up and down that it was self-defense (and the position of a knife and gun next to Richardson seemed to confirm that). Regardless, Charles was arrested and put in jail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13959986']Belle tried desperately to get Charles released, paying a fortune to a prestigious lawyer known as Colonel D. D. Baker. It was all for naught. Belle soon heard that vigilantes planned to take Charles’ fate into their own hands. She rushed to Charles’ side, so the pair could be married by a Father Maraschi. Within an hour of the union, Charles — alongside another prisoner named James Casey — was taken away by vigilantes and hanged on Sacramento Street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rumor has it that after Charles’ death, Belle was pressured to leave town by the same Vigilance Committee that had killed her husband. She refused to do so, dying in 1862 in the same house she had shared with Charles on Waverly Place (then known as Pike Street). Today, \u003ca href=\"https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7720349/charles-cora\">Belle and Charles are buried side-by-side in San Francisco\u003c/a>’s Mission Dolores cemetery.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Albert McVicar and Emma LeDoux (1900s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971095\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1745px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971095\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux.png\" alt=\"A turn of the century woman wearing elaborate hat, suit jacket and high necked white shirt stands before a blank wall with a number pinned to her front.\" width=\"1745\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux.png 1745w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-800x917.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-1020x1169.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-160x183.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-768x880.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-1340x1536.png 1340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1745px) 100vw, 1745px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emma LeDoux’s 1906 mugshot for … well, you’ll see. \u003ccite>(Public domain)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Emma and Albert met in Bisbee, Arizona, fell in love, relocated to San Francisco and … then it all went horribly wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite being described by Albert as “a lovely little woman” in letters to his family, Emma wasn’t exactly who she seemed. She had a taste for San Francisco’s nightlife and had already been married twice when Albert met her. Emma’s second husband William Williams died under mysterious circumstances that resulted in her receiving a sizable payout from his insurance company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13926069']Without divorcing Albert, Emma met and married another man (Eugene LeDoux), and Albert soon found himself on the receiving end of a murder plot. Emma lured Albert to a hotel room, spiked his whiskey with morphine and bundled his incapacitated body into a large trunk where he was left to suffocate. Emma intended to stick the trunk on a train, never to be seen again, though reports on her intended final destination are unclear. After being mislabeled, the trunk wound up stuck on a platform at Stockton’s Southern Pacific Railroad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suspicious railway employees called the cops after noticing the trunk’s weight, smell and the thunking noise it made every time they moved it. After police found Albert’s body inside, they quickly traced the trunk back to Emma, who was subsequently arrested in Antioch. “What kind of a woman is she?” Albert’s brother John asked the \u003cem>Stockton Evening and Sunday Record\u003c/em> on Mar. 31, 1906. “She must be a regular human tigress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emma’s trial for Albert’s murder created a huge scandal at the time and resulted in her being the first woman ever sentenced to death in California. In a final plot twist, however, Emma managed to escape her date with a San Quentin noose after a successful appeal to the Supreme Court. In the end, the murderess wound up getting paroled after serving just 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Jimmy Ferrozzo and Teresa Hill (1980s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971521\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971521\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-800x533.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1020x680.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-768x512.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1536x1024.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1920x1280.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A plaque hangs outside the Condor Club in San Francisco’s North Beach. \u003ccite>(Brittany Hosea-Small/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He was a burly and beloved North Beach bouncer. She was a 23-year-old dancer at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, recently arrived in San Francisco from Seattle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite Jimmy being 17 years her senior, Teresa was smitten with the door guy and, at midnight every night, after her shift at the O’Farrell, Teresa would rush to the Condor to close out Ferrozzo’s shift with him. On Nov. 23, 1983, the new couple stayed behind in the club after hours to have a private party of their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13953248']The following morning, at around 7 a.m., a janitor unlocked the Condor’s front door only to find a scene of horror. Teresa and Jimmy were pinned to the ceiling by the club’s famous hydraulic baby grand piano. (The piano was installed to dramatically lower North Beach’s first topless dancer \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10755111/legendary-san-francisco-stripper-carol-doda-dies\">Carol Doda\u003c/a> from her dressing room upstairs onto the floor of the club.) Jimmy was dead from “compression asphyxia” and Teresa, still partially trapped underneath him, was alive but extremely distraught. It took more than three agonizing hours to free her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A homicide inspector on the scene, Whitey Gunther, told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> that the switch that raised and lowered the piano could “easily be kicked” by Jimmy from his position on top of the piano. The paper also reported that “dancers at the club said the motorized lift was very slow and someone distracted could conceivably not notice the upward movement.” Gunther’s fellow inspector Marvin Dean also believed Ferrozzo’s death looked accidental.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13953248/topless-at-the-condor-movie-review-carol-doda-documentary-north-beach-history\">Carol Doda: Topless at the Condor\u003c/a>\u003c/em> had other ideas, suggesting Jimmy’s death may have been a mob hit. No one will ever know for sure — Teresa told the SFPD she had been drinking too heavily to remember anything about the night her boyfriend died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! May those of you in couples live to see March.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Valentine’s Day is designed to make single people feel bad. Let’s revisit some relationships that went really wrong!",
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"title": "Tragic Love Stories From San Francisco History | KQED",
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"headline": "Happy Valentine’s Day! 3 Pairs of Doomed Lovers From San Francisco History",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971513\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1893px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971513\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart.png\" alt=\"A painting depicting a heart stabbed horizontally through its center with a dagger. Above are two bleeding hands. Below are two bleeding feet.\" width=\"1893\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart.png 1893w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-800x845.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-1020x1078.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-160x169.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-768x811.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/heart-1454x1536.png 1454w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1893px) 100vw, 1893px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Love: Not all it’s cracked up to be at the best of times. \u003ccite>(Stigmata of Christ, detail from the Waldburg prayer book, 1486)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As we all know, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/20463/the-dark-and-twisted-history-of-valentines-day\">Valentine’s Day\u003c/a> is intrinsically designed to make single people feel bad about their lives. So, in the interests of bringing balance back to the world, here are some stories of lovers from Bay Area history that could make anyone swear off coupledom for life. Theirs are tales of passion, mayhem and — oh yes — a little bit of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/true-crime\">murder\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behold these messy lovebirds!\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Belle and Charles Cora (1850s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Adventurous couple Charles and Belle Cora found each other in New Orleans in 1848. He was a wealthy gambler and high roller. She was the daughter of a minister, hailed from Baltimore, and had fled to New Orleans after falling pregnant out of wedlock. After her baby died, Belle went to work for a local madam. When Charles saw and approached Belle for the very first time, she is said to have uttered the phrase, “It is destiny.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Together, the two briefly tried their luck in Sacramento before settling in San Francisco in 1849, where Belle ran a high-end brothel in what is now Chinatown. The duo stood out in the city as a handsome, if controversial, couple. In 1890, the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> recalled that Charles was instantly “struck by her beauty — she was a voluptuous creature.” Charles, a volunteer fireman, was a good match for Bella too. The same article described him as “always dressed neatly and well supplied with money. He had dark hair, dark mustache and dark eyes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trouble for these two began one Thursday night at \u003ca href=\"https://sanfranciscotheatres.blogspot.com/2018/01/maguires-opera-house.html\">Maguire’s Opera House\u003c/a>. A rule of the venue was that “the demi-monde” — any customers not of proper social standing — must only sit (according to a 1910 edition of the \u003cem>San Francisco Bulletin\u003c/em>) in “the parquet behind the dress circle, secluded in boxes.” When Belle and Charles sat in the dress circle, directly behind the wife of U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson, the lawman was incensed. Richardson loudly attempted to get the offending couple removed. When his request was denied, Richardson was left feeling both furious and publicly humiliated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following day, Charles and Richardson had a run-in at the Cosmopolitan Saloon on Montgomery and Clay (where the Transamerica Pyramid stands today) and harsh words were exchanged as Charles defended his wife. After yet another altercation on Saturday, Charles wound up shooting and killing Richardson in the street. Charles swore up and down that it was self-defense (and the position of a knife and gun next to Richardson seemed to confirm that). Regardless, Charles was arrested and put in jail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Belle tried desperately to get Charles released, paying a fortune to a prestigious lawyer known as Colonel D. D. Baker. It was all for naught. Belle soon heard that vigilantes planned to take Charles’ fate into their own hands. She rushed to Charles’ side, so the pair could be married by a Father Maraschi. Within an hour of the union, Charles — alongside another prisoner named James Casey — was taken away by vigilantes and hanged on Sacramento Street.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rumor has it that after Charles’ death, Belle was pressured to leave town by the same Vigilance Committee that had killed her husband. She refused to do so, dying in 1862 in the same house she had shared with Charles on Waverly Place (then known as Pike Street). Today, \u003ca href=\"https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7720349/charles-cora\">Belle and Charles are buried side-by-side in San Francisco\u003c/a>’s Mission Dolores cemetery.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Albert McVicar and Emma LeDoux (1900s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971095\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1745px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971095\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux.png\" alt=\"A turn of the century woman wearing elaborate hat, suit jacket and high necked white shirt stands before a blank wall with a number pinned to her front.\" width=\"1745\" height=\"2000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux.png 1745w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-800x917.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-1020x1169.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-160x183.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-768x880.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/emma-ledoux-1340x1536.png 1340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1745px) 100vw, 1745px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emma LeDoux’s 1906 mugshot for … well, you’ll see. \u003ccite>(Public domain)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Emma and Albert met in Bisbee, Arizona, fell in love, relocated to San Francisco and … then it all went horribly wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite being described by Albert as “a lovely little woman” in letters to his family, Emma wasn’t exactly who she seemed. She had a taste for San Francisco’s nightlife and had already been married twice when Albert met her. Emma’s second husband William Williams died under mysterious circumstances that resulted in her receiving a sizable payout from his insurance company.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Without divorcing Albert, Emma met and married another man (Eugene LeDoux), and Albert soon found himself on the receiving end of a murder plot. Emma lured Albert to a hotel room, spiked his whiskey with morphine and bundled his incapacitated body into a large trunk where he was left to suffocate. Emma intended to stick the trunk on a train, never to be seen again, though reports on her intended final destination are unclear. After being mislabeled, the trunk wound up stuck on a platform at Stockton’s Southern Pacific Railroad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suspicious railway employees called the cops after noticing the trunk’s weight, smell and the thunking noise it made every time they moved it. After police found Albert’s body inside, they quickly traced the trunk back to Emma, who was subsequently arrested in Antioch. “What kind of a woman is she?” Albert’s brother John asked the \u003cem>Stockton Evening and Sunday Record\u003c/em> on Mar. 31, 1906. “She must be a regular human tigress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emma’s trial for Albert’s murder created a huge scandal at the time and resulted in her being the first woman ever sentenced to death in California. In a final plot twist, however, Emma managed to escape her date with a San Quentin noose after a successful appeal to the Supreme Court. In the end, the murderess wound up getting paroled after serving just 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Jimmy Ferrozzo and Teresa Hill (1980s)\u003c/h2>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13971521\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13971521\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-800x533.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1020x680.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-768x512.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1536x1024.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/condor-1920x1280.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A plaque hangs outside the Condor Club in San Francisco’s North Beach. \u003ccite>(Brittany Hosea-Small/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He was a burly and beloved North Beach bouncer. She was a 23-year-old dancer at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, recently arrived in San Francisco from Seattle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite Jimmy being 17 years her senior, Teresa was smitten with the door guy and, at midnight every night, after her shift at the O’Farrell, Teresa would rush to the Condor to close out Ferrozzo’s shift with him. On Nov. 23, 1983, the new couple stayed behind in the club after hours to have a private party of their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The following morning, at around 7 a.m., a janitor unlocked the Condor’s front door only to find a scene of horror. Teresa and Jimmy were pinned to the ceiling by the club’s famous hydraulic baby grand piano. (The piano was installed to dramatically lower North Beach’s first topless dancer \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10755111/legendary-san-francisco-stripper-carol-doda-dies\">Carol Doda\u003c/a> from her dressing room upstairs onto the floor of the club.) Jimmy was dead from “compression asphyxia” and Teresa, still partially trapped underneath him, was alive but extremely distraught. It took more than three agonizing hours to free her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A homicide inspector on the scene, Whitey Gunther, told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> that the switch that raised and lowered the piano could “easily be kicked” by Jimmy from his position on top of the piano. The paper also reported that “dancers at the club said the motorized lift was very slow and someone distracted could conceivably not notice the upward movement.” Gunther’s fellow inspector Marvin Dean also believed Ferrozzo’s death looked accidental.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2024 documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13953248/topless-at-the-condor-movie-review-carol-doda-documentary-north-beach-history\">Carol Doda: Topless at the Condor\u003c/a>\u003c/em> had other ideas, suggesting Jimmy’s death may have been a mob hit. No one will ever know for sure — Teresa told the SFPD she had been drinking too heavily to remember anything about the night her boyfriend died.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! May those of you in couples live to see March.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In 1978, San Francisco was an anarchic place to be. A burgeoning punk rock scene was in the process of eviscerating the city’s reputation as a hippie haven. Civil rights campaigns raged all over: the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/black-panthers\">Black Panthers\u003c/a> were over a decade into their struggle, LGBTQ folks were \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11966077/inside-the-trial-that-overturned-californias-same-sex-marriage-ban-proposition-8-mike-johnson-lgbtq-rights\">at war with Anita Bryant\u003c/a>, and feminists were trying to “\u003ca href=\"https://www.againstviolence.art/take-back-the-night\">Take Back the Night\u003c/a>” outside of North Beach’s strip clubs. This most turbulent of years also culminated in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/118592/relatives-remember-jonestown-35-years-after-the-killings\">Jonestown Massacre\u003c/a> \u003cem>and\u003c/em> the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13953890']If there hadn’t been so much going on, it’s possible that one very strange turn of events might have stayed in the public consciousness for a bit longer. Because yes, it’s almost as bonkers as everything else that happened that year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July 1978, nine years after the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/zodiac-killer\">Zodiac Killer\u003c/a> first struck, one of the most prominent homicide cops working the case was suddenly removed from his post. By that time, Inspector David R. Toschi — who had been on the case since day one — is said to have interviewed 5,000 people and examined more than 2,000 suspects. So it’s probable that his sudden transfer from homicide to (in Toschi’s own words) “the pawnshop detail” was always going to make some headlines. The reason it blew up into a citywide reason to gossip was the person responsible for his demotion — \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/111091/everything-you-need-to-know-about-tales-of-the-city-before-the-netflix-update\">\u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em>\u003c/a> author and jaunty man about San Francisco, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/10814/armistead-maupin-on-saying-goodbye-to-san-francisco-and-tales-of-the-city\">Armistead Maupin\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880964\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880964\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1296\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-768x498.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1020x661.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1920x1244.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Armistead Maupin, not causing any controversies. \u003ccite>(Christopher Turner)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This whole thing started in August 1976 when Maupin consulted Toschi so he might better write the character of homicide detective Henry Tandy. Tandy was featured in Maupin’s \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> column and in the first \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> book that combined many of those stories. True to Maupin’s tendency to blend fiction and reality, Toschi was also written in as Tandy’s mentor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13833330']All very normal and fine so far? Well, yes, but not for long. According to Maupin, “within the [first] week” of Toschi’s name appearing in \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em>, the author received two fake fan letters that included praise for Toschi. Maupin clocked the notes as phony only some weeks later when even more arrived, at which point he suspected that Toschi was sending them himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin later stated that he regarded the letters “as a harmless, if somewhat reckless action on the part of a police officer.” He also told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em>: “I was extremely embarrassed for him. The letters were so transparent, so pathetic that I couldn’t bring myself to [confront] him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13966328\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13966328 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi.jpg\" alt=\"A man wearing a white shirt, bow tie and suspenders looks though a stack of paper files.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1192\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-800x477.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1020x608.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-160x95.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-768x458.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1536x915.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1920x1144.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Toschi in 1976, the same year he sent Armistead Maupin fan mail… in praise of himself. \u003ccite>(San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the same time he was sending the fake fan letters, Toschi was also sending Maupin some unusual packages, signed directly from himself. These included one containing a signed photograph of himself posing with \u003cem>The Streets of San Francisco\u003c/em> actor \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Malden\">Karl Malden\u003c/a> and another containing a felt wall calendar. (Herb Caen also reportedly received one of these calendars and, Maupin believes, phony fan mail from Toschi.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Things escalated in April 1978 when, after a four-year period of silence from the Zodiac, a new letter purporting to be from the serial killer arrived at the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>’s offices. It read, in part:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>This is the Zodiac speaking I am back with you. Tell herb caen I am here, I have always been here. That city pig toschi is good — but I am smarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>After Maupin saw the letter, he began to suspect that Toschi might have faked it. For one, no prior Zodiac letters had ever mentioned any individual police officers before. In addition, Maupin thought that the tone, the “margin stops” and the shape of the Ds in the Zodiac letter looked similar to ones he saw in Toschi’s fabricated fan mail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13966330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13966330\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1669\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-800x668.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1020x851.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-160x134.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-768x641.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1536x1282.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1920x1602.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The final Zodiac letter from April 1978, that Armistead Maupin suspected Inspector David Toschi had forged.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Maupin was concerned enough that he contacted Toschi’s superiors at the San Francisco Police Department; they immediately launched an investigation. Toschi publicly admitted to sending the fake fan letters to Maupin and was swiftly removed from the Zodiac case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a foolish thing to do,” he said at the time. “I am ashamed of it.” However, Toschi also denied meddling in the Zodiac case. He declared to the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>, “I wrote no Zodiac letter. I don’t need another letter. It only brings me tons of extra work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same interview, Toschi dismissed Maupin’s suspicions as a baseless publicity stunt timed specifically to coincide with the release of the first \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13904265']“Can a man be destroyed because of vague accusations about ‘tone’?” Toschi said. “You bet he can! The complaint signed by Maupin and his publicist [Kenneth Maley] says that I ‘may’ have forged the last … Zodiac letter. ‘May have forged.’ ‘Similarity of tone.’ Just this. No evidence … I’ll be exonerated eventually but my credibility has been smashed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked what the lowest point of the controversy had been for him, Toschi explained: “Someone from Internal Affairs asked me where I had been on the night that Zodiac murdered the cab driver Paul Stine. I told him — home in bed — but I got sick to my stomach. Apparently some reporter had asked the department: ‘Could Toschi be Zodiac?’ You’ll never know how that hurt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Regardless of the suspicions placed on Toschi, he was eventually exonerated of forging the final Zodiac letter. He stayed with the SFPD until 1985, before taking on the role of director of security at both Union Square’s Pan Pacific Hotel and St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission. Toschi died in 2018 at the age of 86 but, as he predicted, the controversy about the final Zodiac letter never dissipated — and Toschi’s name is now synonymous with it. As the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> wrote on July 11, 1978: “It may just be that he is a man done in by his own admiration for newspaper stories that mentioned his name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Maupin, the controversy he started had zero effect on his career. As the years passed, Maupin’s association with the Zodiac case became a distant memory for almost everyone except true crime nerds. Maupin went on to release nine enormously popular \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> books over a span of 36 years. \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> was also turned into \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/tales.html\">a PBS series starring Laura Linney\u003c/a> in 1993 and \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80211563\">rebooted by Netflix\u003c/a> in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sadly for the former cop, the David Toschi and Henry Tandy characters never made an appearance in either screen adaptation.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 1978, San Francisco was an anarchic place to be. A burgeoning punk rock scene was in the process of eviscerating the city’s reputation as a hippie haven. Civil rights campaigns raged all over: the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/black-panthers\">Black Panthers\u003c/a> were over a decade into their struggle, LGBTQ folks were \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11966077/inside-the-trial-that-overturned-californias-same-sex-marriage-ban-proposition-8-mike-johnson-lgbtq-rights\">at war with Anita Bryant\u003c/a>, and feminists were trying to “\u003ca href=\"https://www.againstviolence.art/take-back-the-night\">Take Back the Night\u003c/a>” outside of North Beach’s strip clubs. This most turbulent of years also culminated in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/118592/relatives-remember-jonestown-35-years-after-the-killings\">Jonestown Massacre\u003c/a> \u003cem>and\u003c/em> the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>If there hadn’t been so much going on, it’s possible that one very strange turn of events might have stayed in the public consciousness for a bit longer. Because yes, it’s almost as bonkers as everything else that happened that year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July 1978, nine years after the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/tag/zodiac-killer\">Zodiac Killer\u003c/a> first struck, one of the most prominent homicide cops working the case was suddenly removed from his post. By that time, Inspector David R. Toschi — who had been on the case since day one — is said to have interviewed 5,000 people and examined more than 2,000 suspects. So it’s probable that his sudden transfer from homicide to (in Toschi’s own words) “the pawnshop detail” was always going to make some headlines. The reason it blew up into a citywide reason to gossip was the person responsible for his demotion — \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/111091/everything-you-need-to-know-about-tales-of-the-city-before-the-netflix-update\">\u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em>\u003c/a> author and jaunty man about San Francisco, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/10814/armistead-maupin-on-saying-goodbye-to-san-francisco-and-tales-of-the-city\">Armistead Maupin\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880964\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880964\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1296\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-768x498.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1020x661.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1920x1244.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Armistead Maupin, not causing any controversies. \u003ccite>(Christopher Turner)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This whole thing started in August 1976 when Maupin consulted Toschi so he might better write the character of homicide detective Henry Tandy. Tandy was featured in Maupin’s \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> column and in the first \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> book that combined many of those stories. True to Maupin’s tendency to blend fiction and reality, Toschi was also written in as Tandy’s mentor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>All very normal and fine so far? Well, yes, but not for long. According to Maupin, “within the [first] week” of Toschi’s name appearing in \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em>, the author received two fake fan letters that included praise for Toschi. Maupin clocked the notes as phony only some weeks later when even more arrived, at which point he suspected that Toschi was sending them himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maupin later stated that he regarded the letters “as a harmless, if somewhat reckless action on the part of a police officer.” He also told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em>: “I was extremely embarrassed for him. The letters were so transparent, so pathetic that I couldn’t bring myself to [confront] him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13966328\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13966328 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi.jpg\" alt=\"A man wearing a white shirt, bow tie and suspenders looks though a stack of paper files.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1192\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-800x477.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1020x608.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-160x95.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-768x458.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1536x915.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/David-Toschi-1920x1144.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Toschi in 1976, the same year he sent Armistead Maupin fan mail… in praise of himself. \u003ccite>(San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the same time he was sending the fake fan letters, Toschi was also sending Maupin some unusual packages, signed directly from himself. These included one containing a signed photograph of himself posing with \u003cem>The Streets of San Francisco\u003c/em> actor \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Malden\">Karl Malden\u003c/a> and another containing a felt wall calendar. (Herb Caen also reportedly received one of these calendars and, Maupin believes, phony fan mail from Toschi.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Things escalated in April 1978 when, after a four-year period of silence from the Zodiac, a new letter purporting to be from the serial killer arrived at the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>’s offices. It read, in part:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>This is the Zodiac speaking I am back with you. Tell herb caen I am here, I have always been here. That city pig toschi is good — but I am smarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>After Maupin saw the letter, he began to suspect that Toschi might have faked it. For one, no prior Zodiac letters had ever mentioned any individual police officers before. In addition, Maupin thought that the tone, the “margin stops” and the shape of the Ds in the Zodiac letter looked similar to ones he saw in Toschi’s fabricated fan mail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13966330\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13966330\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1669\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-800x668.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1020x851.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-160x134.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-768x641.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1536x1282.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/10/zodiac-78-1920x1602.png 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The final Zodiac letter from April 1978, that Armistead Maupin suspected Inspector David Toschi had forged.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Maupin was concerned enough that he contacted Toschi’s superiors at the San Francisco Police Department; they immediately launched an investigation. Toschi publicly admitted to sending the fake fan letters to Maupin and was swiftly removed from the Zodiac case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a foolish thing to do,” he said at the time. “I am ashamed of it.” However, Toschi also denied meddling in the Zodiac case. He declared to the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>, “I wrote no Zodiac letter. I don’t need another letter. It only brings me tons of extra work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the same interview, Toschi dismissed Maupin’s suspicions as a baseless publicity stunt timed specifically to coincide with the release of the first \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Can a man be destroyed because of vague accusations about ‘tone’?” Toschi said. “You bet he can! The complaint signed by Maupin and his publicist [Kenneth Maley] says that I ‘may’ have forged the last … Zodiac letter. ‘May have forged.’ ‘Similarity of tone.’ Just this. No evidence … I’ll be exonerated eventually but my credibility has been smashed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked what the lowest point of the controversy had been for him, Toschi explained: “Someone from Internal Affairs asked me where I had been on the night that Zodiac murdered the cab driver Paul Stine. I told him — home in bed — but I got sick to my stomach. Apparently some reporter had asked the department: ‘Could Toschi be Zodiac?’ You’ll never know how that hurt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Regardless of the suspicions placed on Toschi, he was eventually exonerated of forging the final Zodiac letter. He stayed with the SFPD until 1985, before taking on the role of director of security at both Union Square’s Pan Pacific Hotel and St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission. Toschi died in 2018 at the age of 86 but, as he predicted, the controversy about the final Zodiac letter never dissipated — and Toschi’s name is now synonymous with it. As the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> wrote on July 11, 1978: “It may just be that he is a man done in by his own admiration for newspaper stories that mentioned his name.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Maupin, the controversy he started had zero effect on his career. As the years passed, Maupin’s association with the Zodiac case became a distant memory for almost everyone except true crime nerds. Maupin went on to release nine enormously popular \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> books over a span of 36 years. \u003cem>Tales of the City\u003c/em> was also turned into \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/theater/tales.html\">a PBS series starring Laura Linney\u003c/a> in 1993 and \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80211563\">rebooted by Netflix\u003c/a> in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sadly for the former cop, the David Toschi and Henry Tandy characters never made an appearance in either screen adaptation.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>One night in November 1877, a dainty 12-year-old girl named Mary Avery pried open the cellar door of San Francisco’s Allen & Co. gun store at 515 Market St. and entered with six cohorts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time they had ransacked the premises, the children — all boys except for Avery — had snatched 112 pistols, as well as ammunition and gun powder. The haul was worth about $1,000, or nearly $30,000 today when adjusted for inflation. The kids went about concealing their illicit gains on their parents’ roofs and in their basements. (One kid named George Gasper went to the trouble of digging a three-foot hole in his parents’ cellar.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13934227']Two days before the brazen gun burglary, Avery had led another break-in. This one took place at Fiegenbaum & Co’s — a “wholesale fancy good house” situated on the corner of Sansome and Pine in downtown San Francisco. That night, Avery and a co-conspirator named James Walsh utilized the roof of a Pine Street shoeshine stand to break in through Fiegenbaum & Co’s window, while a crew of their friends waited by the window to help cart the stolen goods away. Avery and Walsh used an interior elevator to get their spoils to their friends. This time what they mostly took were toys and expensive music boxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group thefts were bold, but Avery was, by that point, an already experienced thief. After one arrest, police discovered that Avery was so dedicated to stealing, she wore customized dresses specifically designed for the purpose. Avery cut holes in her pockets and doubled up the petticoats underneath in order to take and conceal objects without detection. This was one of the reasons her friends called her “Little Dick Turpin,” after the infamous English highwayman who was hanged for his crimes in 1739.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a couple of years in the 1870s, before she was even a teenager, Avery was a bonafide menace to San Francisco society. Avery was fearless, showed no remorse and thought nothing of making a mockery of both police stations and court rooms. She had no regard for authority and, as such, newspapers in the city enjoyed presenting Avery as the personification of everything that was wrong with San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why in this wealthy city,” read one\u003cem> San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> headline of the time, “are the young suffered to grow up in vice and misery?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prompted by Avery and her crew’s misadventures, the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> decried their entire neighborhood. Avery and her friends lived in Tar Flat, an impoverished region of SoMa beset by stinking sludge from the San Francisco Gas Company’s coal-distillation process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13912657']“The lower portion of Stevenson St. which forms the northern boundary of that delectable precinct known as Tar Flat is prolific of the worst examples of depravity that are discovered in the city,” the \u003cem>San Francisco\u003c/em> \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported. “The children are permitted to run wild, the only discipline to which they are subjected being punctuality in the conveyance of beer and whisky from the corner grocery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avery and her friends might have gotten away with their burglaries were it not for the cockiness of one of the boys involved. After days of searching pawnshops for the stolen guns, police stumbled across the boy at Jessie and First Street, showing off “a beautifully mounted pistol.” They quickly apprehended him and took him to the city prison for questioning. Unfortunately for his co-conspirators, the boy sang like a bird and told all. When Avery’s name came up, the police weren’t even surprised. She had been arrested and sentenced to time at the industrial school in Balboa Park (a reform institution for delinquents) eight months earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that occasion, Avery and her friends’ crime had been relatively tame. She and five pals — all between the ages of 10 and 13, except for one homeless 17-year-old boy — had been found spending the night, lying in pairs, in a straw-covered loft over a blacksmith’s shop. It was how Avery behaved after her arrest, however, that got her the most notoriety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the children were first hauled into the police station from the blacksmith’s that night, they put on quite the show, crying and acting scared. It was after the police put the three boys in one cell and the three girls in the other that they realized just how unbothered the kids really were. The girls smoked, danced and sang at a volume loud enough to bother the whole police station. They talked “in the unintelligible slang used by criminals,” according to a report in the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>. Finally, at 3am, after Avery started loudly propositioning one of the boys in an adjoining cell, she was removed from her friends and put in a separate cell of her own. Only then did the children lie down and go to sleep. Only then did the police discover that Avery was concealing a knife in her skirt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13957514']On Mar. 29, 1877, Avery and her friends appeared in court over the blacksmith break-in, accompanied by parents. The three girls all brought their mothers, the two younger boys brought their fathers. The 17-year-old appeared alone. At first, the kids attempted to use their youth to appeal to the judge’s sympathy. “The vicious juveniles ranged in a tearful circle around the judicial bench for examination,” the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported. Their efforts fooled no one. “The judge in a side movement remarked ‘I’ve seen the mothers frequently, as well as the girls.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avery and her mom distinguished themselves by being loudly unbothered by the court proceedings. They laughed loudly at other girls’ mothers, called them out for lying, and applauded others’ sentences to the industrial school. The \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> referred to Avery — who was also sent to the industrial school that day — as “the smallest, prettiest and most abandoned of the trio of girls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her first stint in the industrial school clearly didn’t dampen Avery’s desires to commit crimes. The thefts at Fiegenbaum’s and the gun shop happened shortly after she was released for the blacksmith break-in. Then, back to the industrial school she went once more. Perhaps that stint calmed Avery’s felonious ambitions, because, after that, the precocious thief quickly fell off the city’s radar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13926069']The final crime that earned Avery a spot in San Francisco newspapers happened in May 1879. On that occasion, Avery and a friend by the name of Marcella Columbia were arrested for drunkenness after being located on the roof of a Jessie Street building with a group of “small boys screaming and swearing at the top of their voices.” The boys got away, but Avery and Columbia weren’t fast enough. They didn’t help their own situation, spewing forth a series of curse words at their arresting officers. (“The round oaths which fell in a continuous stream from their lips were shocking in the extreme,” the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may be the precise moment that Avery’s luck ran out. She was swiftly incarcerated at \u003ca href=\"https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/sfs-magdalen-asylum/\">San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum\u003c/a>. The institution for wayward girls — by then, the industrial school housed boys only — was run by Irish nuns who used their charges as free factory labor. According to census records, the 14-year-old Avery was still being held at the asylum, situated on the north side of where SF General stands today, in June 1880. Magdalen organizations were known for their harsh conditions and the fact that girls rarely got released from them until they turned 18. San Francisco’s didn’t close down until 1931.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What became of Mary Avery after her stint in the Magdalen Asylum is unknown. No death certificate is on file for her in California. No further crimes wound up in the newspapers. But, if she were as “incorrigible” and “vicious” as the newspapers of her day reported, it is unlikely that she would have given up her crimes willingly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> once said: “[Avery] has a damaging record in the line of petty thievery and display[s] a wonderful ability in that particular business. [Her] methods of contriving such bold burglaries would reflect credit on old hands in this business.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Two days before the brazen gun burglary, Avery had led another break-in. This one took place at Fiegenbaum & Co’s — a “wholesale fancy good house” situated on the corner of Sansome and Pine in downtown San Francisco. That night, Avery and a co-conspirator named James Walsh utilized the roof of a Pine Street shoeshine stand to break in through Fiegenbaum & Co’s window, while a crew of their friends waited by the window to help cart the stolen goods away. Avery and Walsh used an interior elevator to get their spoils to their friends. This time what they mostly took were toys and expensive music boxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group thefts were bold, but Avery was, by that point, an already experienced thief. After one arrest, police discovered that Avery was so dedicated to stealing, she wore customized dresses specifically designed for the purpose. Avery cut holes in her pockets and doubled up the petticoats underneath in order to take and conceal objects without detection. This was one of the reasons her friends called her “Little Dick Turpin,” after the infamous English highwayman who was hanged for his crimes in 1739.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a couple of years in the 1870s, before she was even a teenager, Avery was a bonafide menace to San Francisco society. Avery was fearless, showed no remorse and thought nothing of making a mockery of both police stations and court rooms. She had no regard for authority and, as such, newspapers in the city enjoyed presenting Avery as the personification of everything that was wrong with San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Why in this wealthy city,” read one\u003cem> San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> headline of the time, “are the young suffered to grow up in vice and misery?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prompted by Avery and her crew’s misadventures, the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em> decried their entire neighborhood. Avery and her friends lived in Tar Flat, an impoverished region of SoMa beset by stinking sludge from the San Francisco Gas Company’s coal-distillation process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“The lower portion of Stevenson St. which forms the northern boundary of that delectable precinct known as Tar Flat is prolific of the worst examples of depravity that are discovered in the city,” the \u003cem>San Francisco\u003c/em> \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported. “The children are permitted to run wild, the only discipline to which they are subjected being punctuality in the conveyance of beer and whisky from the corner grocery.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avery and her friends might have gotten away with their burglaries were it not for the cockiness of one of the boys involved. After days of searching pawnshops for the stolen guns, police stumbled across the boy at Jessie and First Street, showing off “a beautifully mounted pistol.” They quickly apprehended him and took him to the city prison for questioning. Unfortunately for his co-conspirators, the boy sang like a bird and told all. When Avery’s name came up, the police weren’t even surprised. She had been arrested and sentenced to time at the industrial school in Balboa Park (a reform institution for delinquents) eight months earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On that occasion, Avery and her friends’ crime had been relatively tame. She and five pals — all between the ages of 10 and 13, except for one homeless 17-year-old boy — had been found spending the night, lying in pairs, in a straw-covered loft over a blacksmith’s shop. It was how Avery behaved after her arrest, however, that got her the most notoriety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the children were first hauled into the police station from the blacksmith’s that night, they put on quite the show, crying and acting scared. It was after the police put the three boys in one cell and the three girls in the other that they realized just how unbothered the kids really were. The girls smoked, danced and sang at a volume loud enough to bother the whole police station. They talked “in the unintelligible slang used by criminals,” according to a report in the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em>. Finally, at 3am, after Avery started loudly propositioning one of the boys in an adjoining cell, she was removed from her friends and put in a separate cell of her own. Only then did the children lie down and go to sleep. Only then did the police discover that Avery was concealing a knife in her skirt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>On Mar. 29, 1877, Avery and her friends appeared in court over the blacksmith break-in, accompanied by parents. The three girls all brought their mothers, the two younger boys brought their fathers. The 17-year-old appeared alone. At first, the kids attempted to use their youth to appeal to the judge’s sympathy. “The vicious juveniles ranged in a tearful circle around the judicial bench for examination,” the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported. Their efforts fooled no one. “The judge in a side movement remarked ‘I’ve seen the mothers frequently, as well as the girls.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avery and her mom distinguished themselves by being loudly unbothered by the court proceedings. They laughed loudly at other girls’ mothers, called them out for lying, and applauded others’ sentences to the industrial school. The \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> referred to Avery — who was also sent to the industrial school that day — as “the smallest, prettiest and most abandoned of the trio of girls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her first stint in the industrial school clearly didn’t dampen Avery’s desires to commit crimes. The thefts at Fiegenbaum’s and the gun shop happened shortly after she was released for the blacksmith break-in. Then, back to the industrial school she went once more. Perhaps that stint calmed Avery’s felonious ambitions, because, after that, the precocious thief quickly fell off the city’s radar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The final crime that earned Avery a spot in San Francisco newspapers happened in May 1879. On that occasion, Avery and a friend by the name of Marcella Columbia were arrested for drunkenness after being located on the roof of a Jessie Street building with a group of “small boys screaming and swearing at the top of their voices.” The boys got away, but Avery and Columbia weren’t fast enough. They didn’t help their own situation, spewing forth a series of curse words at their arresting officers. (“The round oaths which fell in a continuous stream from their lips were shocking in the extreme,” the \u003cem>Chronicle\u003c/em> reported.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may be the precise moment that Avery’s luck ran out. She was swiftly incarcerated at \u003ca href=\"https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/sfs-magdalen-asylum/\">San Francisco’s Magdalen Asylum\u003c/a>. The institution for wayward girls — by then, the industrial school housed boys only — was run by Irish nuns who used their charges as free factory labor. According to census records, the 14-year-old Avery was still being held at the asylum, situated on the north side of where SF General stands today, in June 1880. Magdalen organizations were known for their harsh conditions and the fact that girls rarely got released from them until they turned 18. San Francisco’s didn’t close down until 1931.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What became of Mary Avery after her stint in the Magdalen Asylum is unknown. No death certificate is on file for her in California. No further crimes wound up in the newspapers. But, if she were as “incorrigible” and “vicious” as the newspapers of her day reported, it is unlikely that she would have given up her crimes willingly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> once said: “[Avery] has a damaging record in the line of petty thievery and display[s] a wonderful ability in that particular business. [Her] methods of contriving such bold burglaries would reflect credit on old hands in this business.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Farallon Islands have always had proverbial dark clouds hanging over them. The rocky outcrops 28 miles west of San Francisco have long held ominous nicknames, including “Islands of the Dead” and “the Devil’s Teeth.” Take even a passing glimpse at the islands’ history and both of those titles feel perfectly justified — and not just because of the more than \u003ca href=\"https://farallones.noaa.gov/heritage/shipwrecks.html\">400 shipwrecks\u003c/a> they’ve caused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Farallons are only accessible to birds, animals and biologists. This is undoubtedly a good thing — any time humans get close to the islands, terrible things seem to occur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some examples of note:\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959242\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959242\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A large rabbit with thin legs and very large ears faces forward. It has very wide eyes.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1672\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-800x523.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1020x666.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-160x105.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-768x502.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1536x1003.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-2048x1338.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1920x1254.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Russians brought rabbits to the Farallon Islands in the early 1800s. \u003ccite>(Getty Images Plus/ Darren415)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Furious rabbits\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A party of Russian seal hunters landed on South Farallon in the early 1800s, bringing with them a handful of rabbits. Nothing good came of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Occupying stone houses they built along Fort Ross, the hunters went about systematically annihilating the local populations of fur seals, sea lions and sea otters for their pelts. Elephant seals were killed for their blubber. As the hunters were busy focusing on murdering the sea-life, their rabbits multiplied unimpeded and took shelter in a large, 20-foot-high cave on the southeast slope of Lighthouse Hill. The ragtag army of bunnies eventually overran the island.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[The rabbits of South Farallon] devoured what meager vegetation there once was,” one 1960 \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> article reported. “[They] ate dead fish, seaweed and each other … According to reports, they were the meanest, ugliest rabbits in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the settlers had destroyed the local animal communities to the point that hunting was no longer profitable, they abandoned the Farallons in 1840. The rabbits, however, stuck around. Several attempts were made to thin their numbers over the years, but the efforts came to naught. That is, until 1972, when biologists from Point Reyes Bird Observatory arrived to assess avian numbers and concluded that the rabbits, as an invasive species, were negatively impacting the bird population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scientists subsequently spent years killing off the rabbits. The population was eventually wiped out in 1975. Today, a similar mass slaughter is being considered for house mice thriving on the islands. Apparently, everyone who sets foot on the Farallons wants to immediately kill anything with fur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959240\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 750px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13959240 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white image showing men walking along a rocky island, each holding a large basket.\" width=\"750\" height=\"633\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097.jpg 750w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097-160x135.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Egg gatherers in the 1870s, spread out and keen to steal the offspring of every murre bird on the island. \u003ccite>(OpenSFHistory/ wnp4/wnp4.1097)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Egg wars\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Turns out animals with feathers haven’t always fared well on the islands either. In the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s, the influx of gold-seekers to San Francisco caused a population boom that put a massive strain on local agriculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1949, the food scarcity inspired a pharmacist named Doc Robinson to sail to the Farallons with his brother-in-law and raid the eggs of the murre birds that nested on the islands. After their first egg haul netted them $3,000 (about $122,000 in 2024 money), crews of other egg hunters quickly followed suit. In the four decades that followed, approximately 14 million murre eggs were stolen and sent to San Francisco, and rival crews of poachers went to war with each other. Guns and even canons were fired as the egg thieves fought. Several were shot and killed. Tensions were so high that even the local lighthouse keepers were assaulted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The egg wars continued until the end of the 19th century, and were ultimately brought to an end not by the authorities, but by the establishment of Petaluma as an egg farming hub. By then, the murre population had been decimated. Despite the Farallons’ current status as a bird sanctuary, murre numbers have never recovered. Their population remains only a quarter of its pre-Gold Rush size.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959243\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959243\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-615317046-scaled-e1717554138747.jpg\" alt=\"A war ship in unrecognizable, blackened ruins.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1496\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The USS Independence (CVL 22) on July 2, 1946 after it was hit with an atomic explosion, and before its radioactive scrap was buried in the Bay near the Farallons. \u003ccite>(CORBIS/ Corbis via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Nuclear waste\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Back in 1951, the Farallons were chosen as the final resting place for an aircraft carrier called USS Independence (CVL-22). At the time it was sunk with torpedos, the vessel was extremely radioactive, having been used in the now-infamous \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll\">1946 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make matters even more toxic, between 1946 and 1970, at least 47,500 barrels of radioactive waste were ditched in a 540-square-mile area, starting just south of the Farallons. Those barrels were notoriously unstable and by 1990, investigators reported that many of them had broken open. A multitude more could not even be located. By then, the problem was well-established. In 1982, Governor Jerry Brown made a statement to the House Subcommittee on Oceanography to point out the dangers of dumping nuclear waste in the ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In California,” he wrote, “we have learned from our experience with the Farallon Islands nuclear dumpsite that remedial action is virtually impossible when unforeseen problems arise. The specter of leaking barrels of plutonium now lurks on the ocean bottom less than 50 miles from the Golden Gate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959338\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959338\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"2533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-800x792.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1020x1009.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-160x158.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-768x760.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1536x1520.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-2048x2027.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1920x1900.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 21-year-old man from Burlingame named John Rochette is wheeled away from a coast guard rescue helicopter after being attacked by “a huge shark” while diving near the Farallon Islands in 1963. Both his legs sustained very serious injuries. \u003ccite>(Bettmann/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Shark attacks\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1990, a headline in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> declared: “Bay Area Becoming Shark Attack Capital.” The story followed a series of attacks in which humans had near misses with gigantic sharks — some reportedly 18 feet long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The attacks near the Farallons during that period were plentiful: Concord scuba diver LeRoy French was saved from serious injury when the attacking shark was scared off by his oxygen tank. Mark Tiserand from San Francisco wound up with teeth embedded in his leg that had to be removed by doctors. A paddle boarder named Rodney Orr was flipped off his board and immediately found his head in the mouth of a shark. He escaped with “bite gashes around his left eye and neck” after clubbing the animal with a spear gun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Steinhart Aquarium scientist John McCosker said that attacks were most likely to happen in what he called “The Red Triangle” — a patch of water 25 miles west of the islands where sharks\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpuTQzjfpB0\"> hunt sea lions and harbor seals\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959244\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1196px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13959244 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims.png\" alt=\"A man in 1960s-era swimming cap and goggles swims aggressively in the ocean.\" width=\"1196\" height=\"1070\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims.png 1196w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-800x716.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-1020x913.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-160x143.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-768x687.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1196px) 100vw, 1196px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">It took Ted Erikson three attempts to swim from the Farallones to Marin. He finally succeeded in 1967. \u003ccite>(San Francisco Examiner/ Newspapers.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The worst swimming on Earth\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1965, Ted Erikson took it upon himself to swim the English channel between France and the U.K., and then turn around and go right back again. The roundtrip took him 30 hours and three minutes and set a record. And yet, when it came to swimming the span from the Farallon Islands to Marin, he struggled, succeeding only on his third attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His first jaunt from the Farallons was an outright failure. His second in 1966 ended 17 hours in, with him being pulled from the water in the middle of the night, almost unconscious and “swimming in all directions.” A multitude of swimmers before him — including a 15-year-old girl named Myra Thompson — had suffered similar endings on their masochistic swim journeys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bizarrely, before his third swim, Erikson had contacted “various marine life keepers” and asked them to donate a dolphin to swim alongside him. According to the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>, he believed this would “discourage the sharks.” In the end, he was forced to make the journey sans dolphin. Sharks were discouraged the good old-fashioned way — gunshots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erikson, a 38-year-old research chemist from Chicago, finally completed his journey on Sept. 17, 1967, boosted by mild weather and “relatively warm water.” After successfully finishing his 14-hour, 38-minute swim, Erikson — like an absolute maniac — referred to his victory as “a lark.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than a half-century later, it’s clear very little about the Farallons should be described in such a way.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Farallon Islands have always had proverbial dark clouds hanging over them. The rocky outcrops 28 miles west of San Francisco have long held ominous nicknames, including “Islands of the Dead” and “the Devil’s Teeth.” Take even a passing glimpse at the islands’ history and both of those titles feel perfectly justified — and not just because of the more than \u003ca href=\"https://farallones.noaa.gov/heritage/shipwrecks.html\">400 shipwrecks\u003c/a> they’ve caused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Farallons are only accessible to birds, animals and biologists. This is undoubtedly a good thing — any time humans get close to the islands, terrible things seem to occur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some examples of note:\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959242\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959242\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"A large rabbit with thin legs and very large ears faces forward. It has very wide eyes.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1672\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-800x523.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1020x666.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-160x105.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-768x502.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1536x1003.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-2048x1338.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-1303665858-1920x1254.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Russians brought rabbits to the Farallon Islands in the early 1800s. \u003ccite>(Getty Images Plus/ Darren415)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Furious rabbits\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>A party of Russian seal hunters landed on South Farallon in the early 1800s, bringing with them a handful of rabbits. Nothing good came of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Occupying stone houses they built along Fort Ross, the hunters went about systematically annihilating the local populations of fur seals, sea lions and sea otters for their pelts. Elephant seals were killed for their blubber. As the hunters were busy focusing on murdering the sea-life, their rabbits multiplied unimpeded and took shelter in a large, 20-foot-high cave on the southeast slope of Lighthouse Hill. The ragtag army of bunnies eventually overran the island.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[The rabbits of South Farallon] devoured what meager vegetation there once was,” one 1960 \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> article reported. “[They] ate dead fish, seaweed and each other … According to reports, they were the meanest, ugliest rabbits in the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the settlers had destroyed the local animal communities to the point that hunting was no longer profitable, they abandoned the Farallons in 1840. The rabbits, however, stuck around. Several attempts were made to thin their numbers over the years, but the efforts came to naught. That is, until 1972, when biologists from Point Reyes Bird Observatory arrived to assess avian numbers and concluded that the rabbits, as an invasive species, were negatively impacting the bird population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scientists subsequently spent years killing off the rabbits. The population was eventually wiped out in 1975. Today, a similar mass slaughter is being considered for house mice thriving on the islands. Apparently, everyone who sets foot on the Farallons wants to immediately kill anything with fur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959240\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 750px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13959240 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097.jpg\" alt=\"A black and white image showing men walking along a rocky island, each holding a large basket.\" width=\"750\" height=\"633\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097.jpg 750w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/opensfhistory_wnp4_wnp4.1097-160x135.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Egg gatherers in the 1870s, spread out and keen to steal the offspring of every murre bird on the island. \u003ccite>(OpenSFHistory/ wnp4/wnp4.1097)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Egg wars\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Turns out animals with feathers haven’t always fared well on the islands either. In the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s, the influx of gold-seekers to San Francisco caused a population boom that put a massive strain on local agriculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1949, the food scarcity inspired a pharmacist named Doc Robinson to sail to the Farallons with his brother-in-law and raid the eggs of the murre birds that nested on the islands. After their first egg haul netted them $3,000 (about $122,000 in 2024 money), crews of other egg hunters quickly followed suit. In the four decades that followed, approximately 14 million murre eggs were stolen and sent to San Francisco, and rival crews of poachers went to war with each other. Guns and even canons were fired as the egg thieves fought. Several were shot and killed. Tensions were so high that even the local lighthouse keepers were assaulted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The egg wars continued until the end of the 19th century, and were ultimately brought to an end not by the authorities, but by the establishment of Petaluma as an egg farming hub. By then, the murre population had been decimated. Despite the Farallons’ current status as a bird sanctuary, murre numbers have never recovered. Their population remains only a quarter of its pre-Gold Rush size.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959243\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959243\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-615317046-scaled-e1717554138747.jpg\" alt=\"A war ship in unrecognizable, blackened ruins.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1496\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The USS Independence (CVL 22) on July 2, 1946 after it was hit with an atomic explosion, and before its radioactive scrap was buried in the Bay near the Farallons. \u003ccite>(CORBIS/ Corbis via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Nuclear waste\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Back in 1951, the Farallons were chosen as the final resting place for an aircraft carrier called USS Independence (CVL-22). At the time it was sunk with torpedos, the vessel was extremely radioactive, having been used in the now-infamous \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atoll\">1946 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make matters even more toxic, between 1946 and 1970, at least 47,500 barrels of radioactive waste were ditched in a 540-square-mile area, starting just south of the Farallons. Those barrels were notoriously unstable and by 1990, investigators reported that many of them had broken open. A multitude more could not even be located. By then, the problem was well-established. In 1982, Governor Jerry Brown made a statement to the House Subcommittee on Oceanography to point out the dangers of dumping nuclear waste in the ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In California,” he wrote, “we have learned from our experience with the Farallon Islands nuclear dumpsite that remedial action is virtually impossible when unforeseen problems arise. The specter of leaking barrels of plutonium now lurks on the ocean bottom less than 50 miles from the Golden Gate.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"mceTemp\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959338\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13959338\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"2533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-800x792.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1020x1009.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-160x158.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-768x760.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1536x1520.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-2048x2027.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/GettyImages-515553802-1-1920x1900.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 21-year-old man from Burlingame named John Rochette is wheeled away from a coast guard rescue helicopter after being attacked by “a huge shark” while diving near the Farallon Islands in 1963. Both his legs sustained very serious injuries. \u003ccite>(Bettmann/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Shark attacks\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1990, a headline in the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em> declared: “Bay Area Becoming Shark Attack Capital.” The story followed a series of attacks in which humans had near misses with gigantic sharks — some reportedly 18 feet long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The attacks near the Farallons during that period were plentiful: Concord scuba diver LeRoy French was saved from serious injury when the attacking shark was scared off by his oxygen tank. Mark Tiserand from San Francisco wound up with teeth embedded in his leg that had to be removed by doctors. A paddle boarder named Rodney Orr was flipped off his board and immediately found his head in the mouth of a shark. He escaped with “bite gashes around his left eye and neck” after clubbing the animal with a spear gun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Steinhart Aquarium scientist John McCosker said that attacks were most likely to happen in what he called “The Red Triangle” — a patch of water 25 miles west of the islands where sharks\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpuTQzjfpB0\"> hunt sea lions and harbor seals\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13959244\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1196px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-13959244 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims.png\" alt=\"A man in 1960s-era swimming cap and goggles swims aggressively in the ocean.\" width=\"1196\" height=\"1070\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims.png 1196w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-800x716.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-1020x913.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-160x143.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/06/Ted-swims-768x687.png 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1196px) 100vw, 1196px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">It took Ted Erikson three attempts to swim from the Farallones to Marin. He finally succeeded in 1967. \u003ccite>(San Francisco Examiner/ Newspapers.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The worst swimming on Earth\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1965, Ted Erikson took it upon himself to swim the English channel between France and the U.K., and then turn around and go right back again. The roundtrip took him 30 hours and three minutes and set a record. And yet, when it came to swimming the span from the Farallon Islands to Marin, he struggled, succeeding only on his third attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His first jaunt from the Farallons was an outright failure. His second in 1966 ended 17 hours in, with him being pulled from the water in the middle of the night, almost unconscious and “swimming in all directions.” A multitude of swimmers before him — including a 15-year-old girl named Myra Thompson — had suffered similar endings on their masochistic swim journeys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bizarrely, before his third swim, Erikson had contacted “various marine life keepers” and asked them to donate a dolphin to swim alongside him. According to the \u003cem>Examiner\u003c/em>, he believed this would “discourage the sharks.” In the end, he was forced to make the journey sans dolphin. Sharks were discouraged the good old-fashioned way — gunshots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erikson, a 38-year-old research chemist from Chicago, finally completed his journey on Sept. 17, 1967, boosted by mild weather and “relatively warm water.” After successfully finishing his 14-hour, 38-minute swim, Erikson — like an absolute maniac — referred to his victory as “a lark.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than a half-century later, it’s clear very little about the Farallons should be described in such a way.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "In 1896, a Mysterious UFO Brought Northern California to a Mesmerized Halt",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13957590\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1130px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13957590\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-4.30.03-PM.png\" alt=\"A Victorian illustration of two men watching an airship with wings and spotlights flying near the top of the Capitol building.\" width=\"1130\" height=\"994\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A rendition of the airship seen in the skies above Sacramento, as illustrated in ‘The San Francisco Call and Post’ on Nov. 29, 1896.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the 1890s, Northern California was in flux — living with Victorian sensibilities, but surrounded by remnants of the gold rush. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13912657/gum-girls-midwinter-fair-san-francisco-history-golden-gate-park\">San Francisco’s Midwinter Fair\u003c/a> in 1894 had ushered in an age of electricity-fueled modernity, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13932525/mother-thompson-san-francisco-tavern-owner-bay-area-history\">sailors were still brawling\u003c/a> it out down on the Embarcadero. New-fangled ways to have fun — like the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13909983/victorian-attractions-san-francisco-chutes-gravity-railroad-woodwards-gardens-bonet-tower-auditorium-skating\">Haight Street Chutes\u003c/a> and home \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13924208/uc-santa-barbara-edison-phonograph-audio-cylinder-archive-vaudeville-racism\">phonographs\u003c/a> — were all the rage, but, for most, life revolved around basic necessities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In November 1896, however, the entire region was excited and united by one thing: a mysterious “airship” that was spotted repeatedly in the skies over San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. At the time, airships had been invented but they were flown primarily in Europe and had yet to make a West Coast debut. To see an airship over the Bay Area in 1896 wasn’t just unusual, it was entirely unheard of — and yet, suddenly, hundreds of witnesses began reporting just that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13917340']Making these sightings all the more perplexing was the fact that they only happened at night, and the aircraft in question reportedly had wings, making it unlike any airship that existed at the time. Multiple passengers on an Oakland streetcar one November night described the craft hovering over Fruitvale as “resembling a huge bird in its outlines … which seemed to rise and fall in its course.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That night, the streetcar’s conductor said the ship had one powerful headlight and several smaller lights on board. This was a welcome elaboration, as many witnesses around the Bay had reported seeing only bright lights in the sky. The day after the sighting on the streetcar, \u003cem>The San Francisco Call and Post\u003c/em> reported that:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>[The airship] was high in the heavens and appeared to be of huge size. When first seen, it seemed to be floating over San Leandro. It moved rapidly, going at least twenty miles an hour. It shot across the skies in the northwest, then turned quickly and disappeared in the direction of Hayward.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The newspaper was particularly invested in the story, since its very own advertising manager, Samuel Foltz, had seen the craft from his Parnassus Heights home in San Francisco. He wasn’t the only one. Colonel W. H. Menton of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company saw the airship from the Supreme Court building at Larkin and McAllister. “The light was far brighter than any of the electric lights I saw just below, in and about the park,” he also told \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another witness cited in the newspaper that day was Mayor Adolph Sutro, who had several employees who’d seen the craft days before newspapers had even begun reporting the sightings. “I certainly think that some shrewd inventor has solved the problem of aerial navigation,” Sutro said, “and that we will hear all about it within a short time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13919589']Here, then, is where the mystery deepens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No such inventor ever came forward. And no winged airship was ever patented and produced. In fact, the first gas-powered Zeppelin didn’t fly until July 1900, and its maiden voyage was in Germany. Airships weren’t even used by the US Army until 1908. So what were so many people seeing in the skies around the Bay in 1896?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13957579\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1598px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13957579\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM.png\" alt=\"A Victorian illustration of a man gazing up at dark skies, astonished to see a clipper ship there.\" width=\"1598\" height=\"1246\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM.png 1598w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-800x624.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-1020x795.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-160x125.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-768x599.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-1536x1198.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1598px) 100vw, 1598px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This cartoon, referencing renowned ship builder and inventor Irving M. Scott, appeared in ‘The San Francisco Call’ in Nov. 1896, during the peak of the UFO sightings. \u003ccite>(The San Francisco Call and Post/ Newspapers.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the time, newspapers swirled with conjecture about whether or not a patent attorney named George Collins knew who the inventor of the mysterious craft was. Collins publicly spoke of being visited by a man who was seeking a patent for a new airship that he claimed had been spotted over Sacramento. Collins told the man he could not provide a patent without first seeing a model of the aircraft. With that, Collins told reporters, the client was gone, never to be seen again. “I know nothing about the airship,” the attorney said. “I do not know what it is made of, what power propels it, nor where its inventor now is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frustrated by Collins’ lack of information, rumors began swirling around San Francisco that the mysterious inventor was a 34-year-old dentist named E. H. Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin had patented a variety of dental equipment through Collins and also acted as his dentist. But when a \u003cem>Call\u003c/em> reporter tracked him down, the dentist simply said: “I only wish I was the inventor. But I am inclined to think I would be afraid to go up in it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13935838']By the end of 1896, Bay Area airship sightings had stopped altogether. The confounding thing is, they quickly started up in other parts of the country — first Nebraska in Feb. 1897, followed by Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. The craft seen in Marshfield, Wisconsin was described as “cone-shaped with glaring headlights,” moving up to 70 mph — very similar to what had been seen in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many newspapers of the era described credible sightings, alongside hoax attempts. Fake photos of a flying airship — made using images of a painted canvas on wires — were reported in Rogers Park, Illinois. Groups of men in Omaha, Nebraska and Burlington, Iowa confessed to sending up huge balloons to confuse people actively looking for the airship. And on April 2, 1897, the K\u003cem>ansas City Journal, \u003c/em>mindful that what it was describing may have been an April Fool’s prank, nevertheless reported a:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flying machine in view for more than an hour … [Witnesses] assert that the floating power seemed to be in a mammoth bag, supposedly filled with gas. To this were attached four light wings of triangular form, two on either side and from the great bag was suspended a cage or car. This car was canoe-shaped and appeared to be from twenty-five to thirty feet long. A few declared that the ship had red lights hung over the edges of the car.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one was quite sure what to believe, as is evidenced by the following words gingerly printed in Pennsylvania newspaper \u003cem>The York Dispatch\u003c/em> in May 1897:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Recently, the newspapers of the whole country have been exploiting stories of airships seen hovering over various towns and country places in districts very far apart. The testimony seems unimpeachable, especially in the face of so many witnesses, but certain details are always lacking to complete the evidence.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, the origins of 1896’s unidentified flying airship were never revealed. Theories posited in the century since have included: a mass media hoax, actual bonafide aliens visiting Earth and delusional witnesses (perhaps inspired by the recent publication of H. G. Wells’ \u003cem>The Time Machine\u003c/em>) confusing the planet Venus for an aircraft. The fact that no one ever took ownership of the aircraft leaves its existence tantalizingly open to interpretation. It all just depends on how much you want to believe.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13957590\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1130px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13957590\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-4.30.03-PM.png\" alt=\"A Victorian illustration of two men watching an airship with wings and spotlights flying near the top of the Capitol building.\" width=\"1130\" height=\"994\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A rendition of the airship seen in the skies above Sacramento, as illustrated in ‘The San Francisco Call and Post’ on Nov. 29, 1896.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the 1890s, Northern California was in flux — living with Victorian sensibilities, but surrounded by remnants of the gold rush. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13912657/gum-girls-midwinter-fair-san-francisco-history-golden-gate-park\">San Francisco’s Midwinter Fair\u003c/a> in 1894 had ushered in an age of electricity-fueled modernity, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13932525/mother-thompson-san-francisco-tavern-owner-bay-area-history\">sailors were still brawling\u003c/a> it out down on the Embarcadero. New-fangled ways to have fun — like the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13909983/victorian-attractions-san-francisco-chutes-gravity-railroad-woodwards-gardens-bonet-tower-auditorium-skating\">Haight Street Chutes\u003c/a> and home \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13924208/uc-santa-barbara-edison-phonograph-audio-cylinder-archive-vaudeville-racism\">phonographs\u003c/a> — were all the rage, but, for most, life revolved around basic necessities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In November 1896, however, the entire region was excited and united by one thing: a mysterious “airship” that was spotted repeatedly in the skies over San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. At the time, airships had been invented but they were flown primarily in Europe and had yet to make a West Coast debut. To see an airship over the Bay Area in 1896 wasn’t just unusual, it was entirely unheard of — and yet, suddenly, hundreds of witnesses began reporting just that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Making these sightings all the more perplexing was the fact that they only happened at night, and the aircraft in question reportedly had wings, making it unlike any airship that existed at the time. Multiple passengers on an Oakland streetcar one November night described the craft hovering over Fruitvale as “resembling a huge bird in its outlines … which seemed to rise and fall in its course.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That night, the streetcar’s conductor said the ship had one powerful headlight and several smaller lights on board. This was a welcome elaboration, as many witnesses around the Bay had reported seeing only bright lights in the sky. The day after the sighting on the streetcar, \u003cem>The San Francisco Call and Post\u003c/em> reported that:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>[The airship] was high in the heavens and appeared to be of huge size. When first seen, it seemed to be floating over San Leandro. It moved rapidly, going at least twenty miles an hour. It shot across the skies in the northwest, then turned quickly and disappeared in the direction of Hayward.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The newspaper was particularly invested in the story, since its very own advertising manager, Samuel Foltz, had seen the craft from his Parnassus Heights home in San Francisco. He wasn’t the only one. Colonel W. H. Menton of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company saw the airship from the Supreme Court building at Larkin and McAllister. “The light was far brighter than any of the electric lights I saw just below, in and about the park,” he also told \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another witness cited in the newspaper that day was Mayor Adolph Sutro, who had several employees who’d seen the craft days before newspapers had even begun reporting the sightings. “I certainly think that some shrewd inventor has solved the problem of aerial navigation,” Sutro said, “and that we will hear all about it within a short time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Here, then, is where the mystery deepens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No such inventor ever came forward. And no winged airship was ever patented and produced. In fact, the first gas-powered Zeppelin didn’t fly until July 1900, and its maiden voyage was in Germany. Airships weren’t even used by the US Army until 1908. So what were so many people seeing in the skies around the Bay in 1896?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13957579\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1598px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13957579\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM.png\" alt=\"A Victorian illustration of a man gazing up at dark skies, astonished to see a clipper ship there.\" width=\"1598\" height=\"1246\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM.png 1598w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-800x624.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-1020x795.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-160x125.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-768x599.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-05-09-at-2.01.52-PM-1536x1198.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1598px) 100vw, 1598px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This cartoon, referencing renowned ship builder and inventor Irving M. Scott, appeared in ‘The San Francisco Call’ in Nov. 1896, during the peak of the UFO sightings. \u003ccite>(The San Francisco Call and Post/ Newspapers.com)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At the time, newspapers swirled with conjecture about whether or not a patent attorney named George Collins knew who the inventor of the mysterious craft was. Collins publicly spoke of being visited by a man who was seeking a patent for a new airship that he claimed had been spotted over Sacramento. Collins told the man he could not provide a patent without first seeing a model of the aircraft. With that, Collins told reporters, the client was gone, never to be seen again. “I know nothing about the airship,” the attorney said. “I do not know what it is made of, what power propels it, nor where its inventor now is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frustrated by Collins’ lack of information, rumors began swirling around San Francisco that the mysterious inventor was a 34-year-old dentist named E. H. Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin had patented a variety of dental equipment through Collins and also acted as his dentist. But when a \u003cem>Call\u003c/em> reporter tracked him down, the dentist simply said: “I only wish I was the inventor. But I am inclined to think I would be afraid to go up in it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>By the end of 1896, Bay Area airship sightings had stopped altogether. The confounding thing is, they quickly started up in other parts of the country — first Nebraska in Feb. 1897, followed by Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. The craft seen in Marshfield, Wisconsin was described as “cone-shaped with glaring headlights,” moving up to 70 mph — very similar to what had been seen in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many newspapers of the era described credible sightings, alongside hoax attempts. Fake photos of a flying airship — made using images of a painted canvas on wires — were reported in Rogers Park, Illinois. Groups of men in Omaha, Nebraska and Burlington, Iowa confessed to sending up huge balloons to confuse people actively looking for the airship. And on April 2, 1897, the K\u003cem>ansas City Journal, \u003c/em>mindful that what it was describing may have been an April Fool’s prank, nevertheless reported a:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flying machine in view for more than an hour … [Witnesses] assert that the floating power seemed to be in a mammoth bag, supposedly filled with gas. To this were attached four light wings of triangular form, two on either side and from the great bag was suspended a cage or car. This car was canoe-shaped and appeared to be from twenty-five to thirty feet long. A few declared that the ship had red lights hung over the edges of the car.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one was quite sure what to believe, as is evidenced by the following words gingerly printed in Pennsylvania newspaper \u003cem>The York Dispatch\u003c/em> in May 1897:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Recently, the newspapers of the whole country have been exploiting stories of airships seen hovering over various towns and country places in districts very far apart. The testimony seems unimpeachable, especially in the face of so many witnesses, but certain details are always lacking to complete the evidence.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, the origins of 1896’s unidentified flying airship were never revealed. Theories posited in the century since have included: a mass media hoax, actual bonafide aliens visiting Earth and delusional witnesses (perhaps inspired by the recent publication of H. G. Wells’ \u003cem>The Time Machine\u003c/em>) confusing the planet Venus for an aircraft. The fact that no one ever took ownership of the aircraft leaves its existence tantalizingly open to interpretation. It all just depends on how much you want to believe.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "sacramento-mothman-tahoe-tessie-antioch-bigfoot-kooki-davis-vampire-halloween",
"title": "5 Real-Life Monsters That Have (Allegedly) Stalked Northern California",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ask Northern Californians what local monsters they think about the most, and invariably you will hear a list of very bad people. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/17396/are-you-a-gentrifier-this-quiz-can-tell-you\">Gentrifiers\u003c/a>! The people who spread lies about San Francisco being \u003cem>The Purge\u003c/em> now! That one guy who hoses down homeless people! Folks who move in next door to music venues, then make noise complaints! Erratic \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11959303/sf-activists-protest-immobilize-driverless-cars-with-traffic-cones\">ghost cars\u003c/a>! You get the gist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s Halloween season at the moment, though, so it’s the perfect time to think beyond the usual suspects and venture into our region’s very real history of dealing with \u003cem>actual\u003c/em> monsters. The mysterious kind. The kind that people laugh at witnesses for reporting in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are five major ones you might not have realized were ever in our midst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935927\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935927\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104.jpg\" alt=\"A mysterious bigfoot figure, walking through a foggy forest and silhouetted against trees.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1277\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-1020x678.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bigfoot, doing his thing. \u003ccite>(David Wall/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Bigfoot in Antioch\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Back in 1869, an unsuspecting hunter wandered back to his campsite in Antioch one evening to find his belongings in disarray. As he tried to make sense of the scene, he noticed something else — enormous footprints that closely resembled the shape of a man’s foot, rather than an animal’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hunter was so confounded that, rather than clean up the mess, he opted to hide out in some bushes 20 yards away and stake out whatever had paid the camp an earlier visit. After two hours, the mysterious beast did indeed come back and the hunter was able to observe a bonafide Bigfoot for about 20 minutes. The hunter later reported that the creature was:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“5 feet high and disproportionately broad and square at the shoulders with arms of great length. The legs were very short and the body long. The head was small compared to the rest of the creature and appeared to be set upon his shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon-colored hair.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So… a tall Ewok then? (Sign me up!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13904911']The hunter hung around long enough to see Overgrown Wicket meet up with another Bigfoot that was “unmistakenly female.” (That means boobs, probably?) To his surprise, after telling other hunters in the area what he had witnessed, the Bigfoot-spotter found that almost no one was surprised. Most other folks reported seeing the signature giant footprints and at least one other man had seen the furry fam as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rupert Matthews, author of \u003cem>Bigfoot: True-Life Encounters With Legendary Ape-Men\u003c/em> notes that: “This acceptance of the reality of the creatures by those who spent a lot time in the forested hills is a feature of early cases [of Bigfoot sightings] that surfaces again and again. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935928\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935928\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253.jpg\" alt=\"A gorgeous blue lake surrounded by green pine trees. A small green island sits in the center of the water.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1253\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-800x522.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-1020x666.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-768x501.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-1536x1002.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe: May or may not be home to a giant serpent monster. \u003ccite>(Anjelika Gretskaia/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Tahoe Tessie\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It sounds like a bad joke set-up: Two nuns, a couple of cops, one optometrist and 10 USPS workers walk into the countryside… yadda-yadda-yadda… punchline about a sea serpent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Except, that is the actual list of people who reported seeing some kind of aquatic monster in the waters of Lake Tahoe in the mid-1980s. One of the cops, Reno’s Kris Beebe, said the creature — nicknamed “Tahoe Tessie” for funsies — was “dark gray or black” and “a minimum of 10 feet long.” The other witnesses described a featureless body that was “fast-moving and undulating, but strangely devoid of identifying attributes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Noting that nothing of that size had ever been proven to live in the 1,590-foot-deep lake, fishing guide Mickey Daniels told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner:\u003c/em> “I think there’s something there. I’ve talked to about a hundred people who’ve seen it. What do I do — call them liars?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935929\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935929\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Female, red vampire lips with dripping blood, viewed in close-up.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1491\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-800x466.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1020x594.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-160x93.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-768x447.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1536x894.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-2048x1193.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1920x1118.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In 1978, a Daly City resident named Kooki Davis claimed publicly to be a full-fledged vampire. \u003ccite>(Remains/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Vampires in Daly City\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1978, the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> dedicated a story to Kooki Davis, a Daly City-dwelling hair stylist from Trinidad, who was living full-time as a vampire. “She has long fangs, razor-sharp fingernails and blood dripping from her lips,” the paper reported, like that was perfectly normal. “She speaks with a Transylvania twang and her ‘come hither’ stare sends icy fingers up and down your spine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13904118']In the story, Davis explained that she’d become a “certified” vampire five years ago. And if you’re wondering what \u003cem>that\u003c/em> exam involves, she elaborated: “To become a vampire, you have to be bitten by a vampire. Once bitten, you become a victim. Victims have to serve an apprenticeship to learn the ropes … There’s a lot of activity in San Francisco, so you can earn your merit badges pretty fast — as opposed to Dubuque or Wichita.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(This is the value of newspapers, friends. Movies never tell anyone that in order to rid oneself of a vampire problem, moving to Iowa or Kansas will solve it, but here we are.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of her interactions with the general public, Davis noted that at work, at the end of each haircut, her “trademark” was to give each of her customers a “gentle bite” on the neck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Man, that salon must have had amazing insurance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935930\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935930\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911.jpg\" alt=\"A man looks up at a flying mothman figure in the sky that's silhouetted against the moon at night.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Someone spotted this guy on top of Sacramento’s Tower Bridge. Not cool, Mothman. Not cool. \u003ccite>(David Wall/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Sacramento Mothman\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>As all good cryptid nerds know, Mothman primarily enjoys hanging out in West Virginia. (Probably because 80% of the state is forested, and also because approximately 80% of people who don’t live in West Virginia assume that everyone who does is crazy.) For decades there, witnesses have been describing a 7-foot-tall man with red eyes and wings, with a wingspan between 10 and 15 feet wide, who can fly at speeds too fast to catch on camera.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, Mothman must have had himself a little Californian vacation in 2009, because a photographer named Lamont Greer claims to have seen the humanoid hanging around on top of Sacramento’s Tower Bridge one night. Greer had been taking photos of the bridge at the time and was stunned by what he saw.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13933318']“I had just finished filming the back side of the bridge so I was bent down putting my camera back in my camera bag,” Greer told The History Channel’s \u003cem>MonsterQuest\u003c/em>, “and I kind of felt something looking at me. When I first saw it, I didn’t know what it was … but then my eyes kind of focused on it a bit better. It spread wings and then started flying off. It wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a bird. It was absolutely strange and unique. If it wanted to come down and hurt someone — attack — it absolutely could cause damage.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacramento sighting is not the only time Mothman has showed up in a city. In 2017, a bunch of people reported seeing him hanging around Chicago — including at the airport. A moth’s gotta vacation, you guys. A moth’s gotta vacation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935936\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935936\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739.jpg\" alt=\"Two slender sea monsters with long tails and small fins make turns in the ocean as light streams through from the sky.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1382\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-800x576.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-1020x734.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-768x553.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-1536x1106.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Multiple fishermen in Santa Cruz and Monterey used to report a sea serpent lurking in the water. They nicknamed it ‘The Old Man of Monterey Bay’ and also, for some reason, ‘Bobo.’ \u003ccite>( Victor Habbick Visions/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Old Man of Monterey Bay\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>About a hundred years ago, the fishermen of Monterey Bay and the Santa Cruz waterfront started reporting seeing an alarming dragon-like creature circling their boats. Some witnesses said the strange beast had a very large head, extremely long tail and a series of pointed spines along its back. A Monterey man named Dominic Costanza said the creature was about four feet in width and had “what looked like the face of a very old man or a monkey … with two eyes the size of breakfast buns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Never mind the creature — what the hell is a breakfast bun?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By March 1940, the creature had two nicknames — “The Old Man of Monterey Bay” or “Bobo,” depending on your preference — and it had prompted around 30 fishing captains to make reports to the \u003cem>Santa Cruz Sentinel\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Geoffrey Dunn — a man whose family had been in Santa Cruz for generations — wrote in \u003cem>Santa Cruz Style\u003c/em> that:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Several of my uncles and cousins reportedly encountered the monster while fishing in their small, double-ended fishing vessels … My late uncle Mario Stagnaro once recounted for me the afternoon that a badly shaken fisherman, Bill Totten, returned to the docks following a day of fishing in June of 1941. ‘I saw that serpent or monster out there!’ he screamed. ‘Get me out of here!’\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Totten apparently did not return to the wharf for some time. Play nice, Bobo!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Be careful out there, folks — and have a happy Halloween.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"headline": "5 Real-Life Monsters That Have (Allegedly) Stalked Northern California",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ask Northern Californians what local monsters they think about the most, and invariably you will hear a list of very bad people. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/pop/17396/are-you-a-gentrifier-this-quiz-can-tell-you\">Gentrifiers\u003c/a>! The people who spread lies about San Francisco being \u003cem>The Purge\u003c/em> now! That one guy who hoses down homeless people! Folks who move in next door to music venues, then make noise complaints! Erratic \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11959303/sf-activists-protest-immobilize-driverless-cars-with-traffic-cones\">ghost cars\u003c/a>! You get the gist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s Halloween season at the moment, though, so it’s the perfect time to think beyond the usual suspects and venture into our region’s very real history of dealing with \u003cem>actual\u003c/em> monsters. The mysterious kind. The kind that people laugh at witnesses for reporting in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are five major ones you might not have realized were ever in our midst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935927\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935927\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104.jpg\" alt=\"A mysterious bigfoot figure, walking through a foggy forest and silhouetted against trees.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1277\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-1020x678.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1319248043-scaled-e1696541239104-1536x1022.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bigfoot, doing his thing. \u003ccite>(David Wall/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Bigfoot in Antioch\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Back in 1869, an unsuspecting hunter wandered back to his campsite in Antioch one evening to find his belongings in disarray. As he tried to make sense of the scene, he noticed something else — enormous footprints that closely resembled the shape of a man’s foot, rather than an animal’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hunter was so confounded that, rather than clean up the mess, he opted to hide out in some bushes 20 yards away and stake out whatever had paid the camp an earlier visit. After two hours, the mysterious beast did indeed come back and the hunter was able to observe a bonafide Bigfoot for about 20 minutes. The hunter later reported that the creature was:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“5 feet high and disproportionately broad and square at the shoulders with arms of great length. The legs were very short and the body long. The head was small compared to the rest of the creature and appeared to be set upon his shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon-colored hair.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So… a tall Ewok then? (Sign me up!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The hunter hung around long enough to see Overgrown Wicket meet up with another Bigfoot that was “unmistakenly female.” (That means boobs, probably?) To his surprise, after telling other hunters in the area what he had witnessed, the Bigfoot-spotter found that almost no one was surprised. Most other folks reported seeing the signature giant footprints and at least one other man had seen the furry fam as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rupert Matthews, author of \u003cem>Bigfoot: True-Life Encounters With Legendary Ape-Men\u003c/em> notes that: “This acceptance of the reality of the creatures by those who spent a lot time in the forested hills is a feature of early cases [of Bigfoot sightings] that surfaces again and again. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935928\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935928\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253.jpg\" alt=\"A gorgeous blue lake surrounded by green pine trees. A small green island sits in the center of the water.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1253\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-800x522.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-1020x666.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-768x501.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1251586077-scaled-e1696542414253-1536x1002.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe: May or may not be home to a giant serpent monster. \u003ccite>(Anjelika Gretskaia/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Tahoe Tessie\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It sounds like a bad joke set-up: Two nuns, a couple of cops, one optometrist and 10 USPS workers walk into the countryside… yadda-yadda-yadda… punchline about a sea serpent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Except, that is the actual list of people who reported seeing some kind of aquatic monster in the waters of Lake Tahoe in the mid-1980s. One of the cops, Reno’s Kris Beebe, said the creature — nicknamed “Tahoe Tessie” for funsies — was “dark gray or black” and “a minimum of 10 feet long.” The other witnesses described a featureless body that was “fast-moving and undulating, but strangely devoid of identifying attributes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Noting that nothing of that size had ever been proven to live in the 1,590-foot-deep lake, fishing guide Mickey Daniels told the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner:\u003c/em> “I think there’s something there. I’ve talked to about a hundred people who’ve seen it. What do I do — call them liars?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935929\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935929\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Female, red vampire lips with dripping blood, viewed in close-up.\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1491\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-800x466.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1020x594.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-160x93.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-768x447.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1536x894.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-2048x1193.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-491791494-1920x1118.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In 1978, a Daly City resident named Kooki Davis claimed publicly to be a full-fledged vampire. \u003ccite>(Remains/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>Vampires in Daly City\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1978, the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner\u003c/em> dedicated a story to Kooki Davis, a Daly City-dwelling hair stylist from Trinidad, who was living full-time as a vampire. “She has long fangs, razor-sharp fingernails and blood dripping from her lips,” the paper reported, like that was perfectly normal. “She speaks with a Transylvania twang and her ‘come hither’ stare sends icy fingers up and down your spine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In the story, Davis explained that she’d become a “certified” vampire five years ago. And if you’re wondering what \u003cem>that\u003c/em> exam involves, she elaborated: “To become a vampire, you have to be bitten by a vampire. Once bitten, you become a victim. Victims have to serve an apprenticeship to learn the ropes … There’s a lot of activity in San Francisco, so you can earn your merit badges pretty fast — as opposed to Dubuque or Wichita.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(This is the value of newspapers, friends. Movies never tell anyone that in order to rid oneself of a vampire problem, moving to Iowa or Kansas will solve it, but here we are.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of her interactions with the general public, Davis noted that at work, at the end of each haircut, her “trademark” was to give each of her customers a “gentle bite” on the neck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Man, that salon must have had amazing insurance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935930\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935930\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911.jpg\" alt=\"A man looks up at a flying mothman figure in the sky that's silhouetted against the moon at night.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1327260846-scaled-e1696543232911-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Someone spotted this guy on top of Sacramento’s Tower Bridge. Not cool, Mothman. Not cool. \u003ccite>(David Wall/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Sacramento Mothman\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>As all good cryptid nerds know, Mothman primarily enjoys hanging out in West Virginia. (Probably because 80% of the state is forested, and also because approximately 80% of people who don’t live in West Virginia assume that everyone who does is crazy.) For decades there, witnesses have been describing a 7-foot-tall man with red eyes and wings, with a wingspan between 10 and 15 feet wide, who can fly at speeds too fast to catch on camera.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, Mothman must have had himself a little Californian vacation in 2009, because a photographer named Lamont Greer claims to have seen the humanoid hanging around on top of Sacramento’s Tower Bridge one night. Greer had been taking photos of the bridge at the time and was stunned by what he saw.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I had just finished filming the back side of the bridge so I was bent down putting my camera back in my camera bag,” Greer told The History Channel’s \u003cem>MonsterQuest\u003c/em>, “and I kind of felt something looking at me. When I first saw it, I didn’t know what it was … but then my eyes kind of focused on it a bit better. It spread wings and then started flying off. It wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a bird. It was absolutely strange and unique. If it wanted to come down and hurt someone — attack — it absolutely could cause damage.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacramento sighting is not the only time Mothman has showed up in a city. In 2017, a bunch of people reported seeing him hanging around Chicago — including at the airport. A moth’s gotta vacation, you guys. A moth’s gotta vacation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13935936\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13935936\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739.jpg\" alt=\"Two slender sea monsters with long tails and small fins make turns in the ocean as light streams through from the sky.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1382\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-800x576.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-1020x734.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-768x553.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-147219986-scaled-e1696546415739-1536x1106.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Multiple fishermen in Santa Cruz and Monterey used to report a sea serpent lurking in the water. They nicknamed it ‘The Old Man of Monterey Bay’ and also, for some reason, ‘Bobo.’ \u003ccite>( Victor Habbick Visions/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Old Man of Monterey Bay\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>About a hundred years ago, the fishermen of Monterey Bay and the Santa Cruz waterfront started reporting seeing an alarming dragon-like creature circling their boats. Some witnesses said the strange beast had a very large head, extremely long tail and a series of pointed spines along its back. A Monterey man named Dominic Costanza said the creature was about four feet in width and had “what looked like the face of a very old man or a monkey … with two eyes the size of breakfast buns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Never mind the creature — what the hell is a breakfast bun?)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By March 1940, the creature had two nicknames — “The Old Man of Monterey Bay” or “Bobo,” depending on your preference — and it had prompted around 30 fishing captains to make reports to the \u003cem>Santa Cruz Sentinel\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, Geoffrey Dunn — a man whose family had been in Santa Cruz for generations — wrote in \u003cem>Santa Cruz Style\u003c/em> that:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Several of my uncles and cousins reportedly encountered the monster while fishing in their small, double-ended fishing vessels … My late uncle Mario Stagnaro once recounted for me the afternoon that a badly shaken fisherman, Bill Totten, returned to the docks following a day of fishing in June of 1941. ‘I saw that serpent or monster out there!’ he screamed. ‘Get me out of here!’\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Totten apparently did not return to the wharf for some time. Play nice, Bobo!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Be careful out there, folks — and have a happy Halloween.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "What Was Your Great-Grandpa's Favorite Toy? Dynamite, Probably",
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"content": "\u003cp>Today, TikTok is filled to the brim with videos about the unmonitored childhoods that Gen Xers casually endured in the 1980s. Back then, kids were out, roaming the streets, setting off fireworks, cracking their heads on concrete playgrounds, swimming in factory waste and smoking a pack of Camels a day before they’d even turned 12. No small humans were tougher. Or, at least, that’s the popular narrative on social media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet: Step aside, feral mall children of the 1980s, for local news archives tell us that there once existed generations of kids who make Gen X look like absolute wusses. These tiny maniacs grew up in the first half of the 20th century and, let me tell you, they were armed, dangerous and would not — though their lives literally depended on it — stop playing with deadly knickknacks. These kids had actual, bonafide TNT, nitroglycerine and — sure, why not? — teeny tiny weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Did they get injured? Of course! Did anyone learn a lesson? Nope!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Please now allow me to regale you with tales of the toughest Bay Area offspring from last century and, of course, their weapons of choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The dynamite kids\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13931210']Which is worse? Deciding at the age of 12 to “blow up the Berkeley school” with your friends using 12 sticks of stolen dynamite? (This was in 1936 and, thankfully, the Danville boy responsible got busted before his crew could light any fuses.) \u003cem>Or\u003c/em>, heading to school in 1940, aged 13, and “roaming a crowded [Oakland] school playground during recess” waving a stick of dynamite around? It’s hard to say which child was more likely to murder someone, but the fact that Northern California kids like these two just happened to keep stumbling across this very specific type of explosive is even more of a head-scratcher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Chico in 1915, an 11-year-old named George Simpson saved the life of a 10-year-old girl who was about to bash two dynamite sticks on a rock to “play Fourth of July.” In 1922, a 6-year-old and a 3-year from Hayward did themselves serious damage after finding dynamite in one of their dad’s barns and lighting it up. Try not to think too hard on the fact that these kids, according to newspaper reports, were too young to read the “Danger!” warning on the box, but somehow old enough to proficiently light matches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As late as 1959, kids were still in full Wile E. Coyote mode and trying to blow crap up. One dynamite explosion set off by teens in Walnut Creek that year broke a square-mile’s worth of windows, started a two-acre grass fire, blew a three-foot-deep hole in the ground and scared the crap out of people as far as 20 miles away. The dynamite had been stolen from a nearby storehouse. Rebels without a cause, indeed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13934556\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13934556\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-800x637.jpg\" alt=\"A toddler wearing a onesie covered in safety pins stands outside next to a sign that reads Safety First. A woman stands behind the child.\" width=\"800\" height=\"637\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-800x637.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-1020x812.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-160x127.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-768x612.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-1536x1223.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The rare sight of a child in 1935 not actively trying to blow themselves up. \u003ccite>(Daily Mirror/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The ‘toy’ cannon lovers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Unless there’s a game in which actively attempting to hurt one’s playmates and pets is a thing, it’s really hard to figure out how exactly one “plays” with a toy cannon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2013 book \u003cem>Britain’s Secret Treasures \u003c/em>has some clues as to the operations of such items, stating that, back in the day, “Many households would have had musket powder that could be used to fire a toy cannon … Buckshot could have been used for cannonballs, or any household item that could be fashioned into a hard, round projectile … It is doubtful that these little cannon were sold with instructions, so a trial and error approach was required.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13909983']And those errors, friends, could result in some very not good things. In 1903, a 14-year-old Berkeley boy named Will Bass managed to shoot his left index finger off with a toy cannon. (He was in the middle of trying to repair it at the time.) A single edition of the \u003cem>San Francisco Call\u003c/em> newspaper later that year listed two separate incidents of boys getting severe face burns “while trying to find out why a brass cannon did not explode.” (One was an 11-year-old Tenderloin boy. The other was 8 and playing in Golden Gate Park at the time.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also in that issue of \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em>? A 17-year-old Civic Center resident who had injured “the palm of his left hand terribly” after his cannon went off prematurely. (The exact same thing happened to a 14-year-old San Franciscan the following year.) All of which makes even \u003ca href=\"https://www.vintagegaragechicago.com/jarts/\">Jarts — an unhinged “missile game”\u003c/a> from the 1960s and ’70s — look positively tame.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>This one kid who made nitroglycerine\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>I’m not going to be able to say this any better than Herb Caen did in a 1951 column for the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner, \u003c/em>so let’s just use his words:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Bob Zwieg, 15-year-old … made up his mind months ago that he was going to produce the biggest Fourth of July explosion in San Anselmo, where his family has a summer place. ‘Yup, I’m gonna make me some nitroglycerine’ he kept saying, and his mother humored him. ‘You go right ahead, sonny,’ she soothed as he pored over chemistry books and fiddled with laboratory doo-dads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wednesday morning he announced, ‘I’m ready to make the big noise.’ He put the gloop in a pot, began stirring it and — wham! The roar was still fading away while young Bob was being rushed to Ross Hospital with burns, singed eyebrows and slight shock. Anyway, it was the biggest noise in San Anselmo on July Fourth.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>This is what happens when we underestimate the determination of our young people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13934557\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13934557\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-800x528.jpg\" alt=\"Two small boys boxing inside a ring surrounded by middle aged men wearing overcoats and suits.\" width=\"800\" height=\"528\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-800x528.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-1020x673.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-768x507.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-1536x1014.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">At a certain point, it’s fairly impossible to not just blame the adults in the room… \u003ccite>(B Alfieri/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The ‘toy’ gun tinkerers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1903, one Clarence Ito of Grayson St. in West Berkeley found himself with a toy gun that was refusing to fire. He, naturally, responded to this by staring down the barrel of the weapon and pulling the trigger. According to an issue of \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em> at the time, Clarence was left with “a big hole in his cheek, just a little below the eye, and it required the services of a physician and a large amount of thread to sew it together again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thirty-five years later, toy guns and the kids that owned them were still doing each other dirty. A 1938 edition of \u003cem>The Examiner\u003c/em> reported that a 14-year-old Hayward boy had a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his jaw after he and two friends decided to shove the ammo into an air gun and see what would happen. The injured kid’s condition was described as “not serious,” but would \u003cem>you\u003c/em> want a bullet lodged in your jaw? I’m gonna go with nope.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The blasting cap hoarders\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For those of you without a working knowledge of the history of demolition, blasting (or dynamite) caps were basically detonators designed to set off small explosions in order to ignite bigger ones. And apparently, in the ’30s and ’40s, they were just lying around willy-nilly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1948, Tony Martin found a box of blasting caps on San Mateo’s Rockaway Beach. He would later tell staff of the Mission Emergency Hospital that he “knew they were dangerous after [he] read about them in the newspaper,” but decided to throw a rock at one anyway. He was treated for burns and shock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13927540']Twelve-year-old Billy Douglas got off a little easier in 1937 after San Francisco cops raided his home to confiscate Billy’s large collection of dynamite caps. They removed the detonators without anyone getting hurt, and Billy was transparent about the fact that he had been planning a large explosion on his street (Geary, incidentally) for Fourth of July celebrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even worse than Billy were the six high school friends who got shaken down by cops in 1947 after it was discovered that they had managed to collect a bunch of dynamite, a box of blasting caps and 10 pounds of blasting powder. The kids — students from Balboa High School and Horace Mann Junior High — had been stashing the explosives in their parents’ basements. No word on what exactly this band of hooligans were planning to do with it all, but the students all got off with warnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take that, Gen X!\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "TikTok says Gen X was the most feral generation. The kids who played with cannons and explosives would like a word.",
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"headline": "What Was Your Great-Grandpa's Favorite Toy? Dynamite, Probably",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Today, TikTok is filled to the brim with videos about the unmonitored childhoods that Gen Xers casually endured in the 1980s. Back then, kids were out, roaming the streets, setting off fireworks, cracking their heads on concrete playgrounds, swimming in factory waste and smoking a pack of Camels a day before they’d even turned 12. No small humans were tougher. Or, at least, that’s the popular narrative on social media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet: Step aside, feral mall children of the 1980s, for local news archives tell us that there once existed generations of kids who make Gen X look like absolute wusses. These tiny maniacs grew up in the first half of the 20th century and, let me tell you, they were armed, dangerous and would not — though their lives literally depended on it — stop playing with deadly knickknacks. These kids had actual, bonafide TNT, nitroglycerine and — sure, why not? — teeny tiny weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Did they get injured? Of course! Did anyone learn a lesson? Nope!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Please now allow me to regale you with tales of the toughest Bay Area offspring from last century and, of course, their weapons of choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The dynamite kids\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Which is worse? Deciding at the age of 12 to “blow up the Berkeley school” with your friends using 12 sticks of stolen dynamite? (This was in 1936 and, thankfully, the Danville boy responsible got busted before his crew could light any fuses.) \u003cem>Or\u003c/em>, heading to school in 1940, aged 13, and “roaming a crowded [Oakland] school playground during recess” waving a stick of dynamite around? It’s hard to say which child was more likely to murder someone, but the fact that Northern California kids like these two just happened to keep stumbling across this very specific type of explosive is even more of a head-scratcher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Chico in 1915, an 11-year-old named George Simpson saved the life of a 10-year-old girl who was about to bash two dynamite sticks on a rock to “play Fourth of July.” In 1922, a 6-year-old and a 3-year from Hayward did themselves serious damage after finding dynamite in one of their dad’s barns and lighting it up. Try not to think too hard on the fact that these kids, according to newspaper reports, were too young to read the “Danger!” warning on the box, but somehow old enough to proficiently light matches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As late as 1959, kids were still in full Wile E. Coyote mode and trying to blow crap up. One dynamite explosion set off by teens in Walnut Creek that year broke a square-mile’s worth of windows, started a two-acre grass fire, blew a three-foot-deep hole in the ground and scared the crap out of people as far as 20 miles away. The dynamite had been stolen from a nearby storehouse. Rebels without a cause, indeed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13934556\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13934556\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-800x637.jpg\" alt=\"A toddler wearing a onesie covered in safety pins stands outside next to a sign that reads Safety First. A woman stands behind the child.\" width=\"800\" height=\"637\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-800x637.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-1020x812.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-160x127.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-768x612.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580-1536x1223.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837772-scaled-e1694206484580.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The rare sight of a child in 1935 not actively trying to blow themselves up. \u003ccite>(Daily Mirror/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The ‘toy’ cannon lovers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Unless there’s a game in which actively attempting to hurt one’s playmates and pets is a thing, it’s really hard to figure out how exactly one “plays” with a toy cannon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2013 book \u003cem>Britain’s Secret Treasures \u003c/em>has some clues as to the operations of such items, stating that, back in the day, “Many households would have had musket powder that could be used to fire a toy cannon … Buckshot could have been used for cannonballs, or any household item that could be fashioned into a hard, round projectile … It is doubtful that these little cannon were sold with instructions, so a trial and error approach was required.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>And those errors, friends, could result in some very not good things. In 1903, a 14-year-old Berkeley boy named Will Bass managed to shoot his left index finger off with a toy cannon. (He was in the middle of trying to repair it at the time.) A single edition of the \u003cem>San Francisco Call\u003c/em> newspaper later that year listed two separate incidents of boys getting severe face burns “while trying to find out why a brass cannon did not explode.” (One was an 11-year-old Tenderloin boy. The other was 8 and playing in Golden Gate Park at the time.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also in that issue of \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em>? A 17-year-old Civic Center resident who had injured “the palm of his left hand terribly” after his cannon went off prematurely. (The exact same thing happened to a 14-year-old San Franciscan the following year.) All of which makes even \u003ca href=\"https://www.vintagegaragechicago.com/jarts/\">Jarts — an unhinged “missile game”\u003c/a> from the 1960s and ’70s — look positively tame.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>This one kid who made nitroglycerine\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>I’m not going to be able to say this any better than Herb Caen did in a 1951 column for the \u003cem>San Francisco Examiner, \u003c/em>so let’s just use his words:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Bob Zwieg, 15-year-old … made up his mind months ago that he was going to produce the biggest Fourth of July explosion in San Anselmo, where his family has a summer place. ‘Yup, I’m gonna make me some nitroglycerine’ he kept saying, and his mother humored him. ‘You go right ahead, sonny,’ she soothed as he pored over chemistry books and fiddled with laboratory doo-dads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wednesday morning he announced, ‘I’m ready to make the big noise.’ He put the gloop in a pot, began stirring it and — wham! The roar was still fading away while young Bob was being rushed to Ross Hospital with burns, singed eyebrows and slight shock. Anyway, it was the biggest noise in San Anselmo on July Fourth.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>This is what happens when we underestimate the determination of our young people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13934557\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13934557\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-800x528.jpg\" alt=\"Two small boys boxing inside a ring surrounded by middle aged men wearing overcoats and suits.\" width=\"800\" height=\"528\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-800x528.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-1020x673.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-768x507.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260-1536x1014.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/09/GettyImages-1450837708-scaled-e1694207054260.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">At a certain point, it’s fairly impossible to not just blame the adults in the room… \u003ccite>(B Alfieri/ Mirrorpix via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The ‘toy’ gun tinkerers\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1903, one Clarence Ito of Grayson St. in West Berkeley found himself with a toy gun that was refusing to fire. He, naturally, responded to this by staring down the barrel of the weapon and pulling the trigger. According to an issue of \u003cem>The Call\u003c/em> at the time, Clarence was left with “a big hole in his cheek, just a little below the eye, and it required the services of a physician and a large amount of thread to sew it together again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thirty-five years later, toy guns and the kids that owned them were still doing each other dirty. A 1938 edition of \u003cem>The Examiner\u003c/em> reported that a 14-year-old Hayward boy had a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his jaw after he and two friends decided to shove the ammo into an air gun and see what would happen. The injured kid’s condition was described as “not serious,” but would \u003cem>you\u003c/em> want a bullet lodged in your jaw? I’m gonna go with nope.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The blasting cap hoarders\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For those of you without a working knowledge of the history of demolition, blasting (or dynamite) caps were basically detonators designed to set off small explosions in order to ignite bigger ones. And apparently, in the ’30s and ’40s, they were just lying around willy-nilly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1948, Tony Martin found a box of blasting caps on San Mateo’s Rockaway Beach. He would later tell staff of the Mission Emergency Hospital that he “knew they were dangerous after [he] read about them in the newspaper,” but decided to throw a rock at one anyway. He was treated for burns and shock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Twelve-year-old Billy Douglas got off a little easier in 1937 after San Francisco cops raided his home to confiscate Billy’s large collection of dynamite caps. They removed the detonators without anyone getting hurt, and Billy was transparent about the fact that he had been planning a large explosion on his street (Geary, incidentally) for Fourth of July celebrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even worse than Billy were the six high school friends who got shaken down by cops in 1947 after it was discovered that they had managed to collect a bunch of dynamite, a box of blasting caps and 10 pounds of blasting powder. The kids — students from Balboa High School and Horace Mann Junior High — had been stashing the explosives in their parents’ basements. No word on what exactly this band of hooligans were planning to do with it all, but the students all got off with warnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Take that, Gen X!\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "American Suburb: The Podcast",
"tagline": "The flip side of gentrification, told through one town",
"info": "Gentrification is changing cities across America, forcing people from neighborhoods they have long called home. Call them the displaced. Now those priced out of the Bay Area are looking for a better life in an unlikely place. American Suburb follows this migration to one California town along the Delta, 45 miles from San Francisco. But is this once sleepy suburb ready for them?",
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},
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"tagline": "Exploring the Bay Area, one question at a time",
"info": "KQED’s new podcast, Bay Curious, gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity. And we’ll do it with your help! You ask the questions. You decide what Bay Curious investigates. And you join us on the journey to find the answers.",
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},
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},
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"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"order": 8
},
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},
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},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"order": 1
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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},
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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},
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
},
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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