The Haunted House...

[birdguy 3,943]

The Haunted House

The haunted house was located across the street from Dante Hospital, on Broadway Street, between Van Ness and Polk.  It was a spooky old Victorian mansion just a block away from Saint Brigid's.  An old man lived there all by himself.  There were many stories about him, all frightening.

We walked by that house every day on our way home from school.  We would always look up and see if the old man was peering out one of the windows.  If he was, one of the boys would start telling one of the stories he'd heard.

One Saturday afternoon Lee and Rich and I were passing the house after going to confession at Saint Brigid's Church.  The old man was sitting on the porch in the sunshine.  He didn't look nearly as ominous as he did when he was peering out the window.

"Hello boys," he said.  
Rich replied, "Hi."
"Nice afternoon for playing, isn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess so," I said.
"Why are you children afraid of me?" he asked.

We stood in silence.  We didn't know really, we'd just heard stories.  "I don't know, we just are," I replied.

He laughed and stood up.  He wasn't at all evil or ominous looking standing there in the sunlight.  He was a rather short, friendly, pleasant old man.
He invited us to sit on the porch with him.  We looked at each other, wondering what we should do.  "We can run faster than he can," I thought.  I nodded yes to Rich, so he swung open the black wrought iron gate, and the three of us climbed to the porch and sat on the top of the stairs.

The old man asked us our names and started telling us about himself.  He was an inventor.  His wife died many years ago and his children were out and about in the world now, living their own lives.  He seldom heard from them.

After fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation he invited us into the house.  Again we looked at each other.  What was in the house?  Were the stories we heard true?  Should we run?

The struggle between fear and curiosity raged furiously.  Lee was younger than Rich and I, and I could see that he was clearly afraid to go into that house.  But Rich and I were curious.  And we had to display some bravado.  We were almost in our teens now.  We were Boy Scouts, and we could take care of ourselves.  After all, there were three of us and only one of him.  Still, we hesitated as we accepted his invitation.

The old man's house turned out to be a magical place.  He had designed and built many of the animated exhibits for the 1939 Worlds Fair at Treasure Island.  Many of them were in his living room and hallways.  Most of them didn't work anymore, but some did.  He demonstrated one for us, a gypsy woman sitting at a table behind a crystal ball.  She looked up and asked if we wanted our fortune told.  It was amazing.  There was a button on the table marked 'YES'.  The old man pushed it and the gypsy woman moved her hand to her lap behind the table and brought it back up.  The old man told us she used to pick up a card with a fortune it.

Our curiosity had overcome our fear, and we discovered the house wasn't really haunted, and the old man who lived there wasn't evil, just lonely.

We never went into the house again, but whenever we passed it we'd look for the old man.  If he was sitting on the porch we'd stop and talk for a while.  If he was peering out the window we'd  wave.  He always smiled and waved back. 

Noel

[philmurfin 73]

Noel,

Thanks for another story, they are always enjoyable and always shared with my friends!

Best....  Phil

[Space Monkey 24]

Thanks for posting this, it was an enjoyable touching story, but could you make your next one about the alien crash site !   lol

 

Cheers Brain

[Waldo Pepper 1,952]

Reminds me of an old BBC tv show I used to love when I was a kid,  "The Secret Life of Machines".   The host was Tim Hunkin and his assistant was Rex Garrod.     

Both of them were inventors.  Every episode they'd cut apart an invention and show how it worked.  The two would always build these automated machines like that Gypsy woman.

Tim recently started remastering the old episodes and posting them to YT.

 

 

[sightseer 895]

Gee, Noel, I was hoping for a real haunted house story.  Ive got several myself.

Sometimes you don't even know a place is haunted until much later.

Enjoyable story nonetheless.  and its sad the way some of us get assumed into the depths of depravity.

"people think Im insane because I am frowning all the time"

"They ask you to explain why you are mad, even if you're not mad"

Edited September 4, 2021 by sightseer

[birdguy 3,943]

12 hours ago, SpaceMonkey said:

but could you make your next one about the alien crash site !

There must already be a million words written about the crash site by people closer to the story than I was.  And in 1946 I was only 13 years old an a thousand miles away.  I can't write about something I know nothing about except to make it fiction.  Sorry Brian.  Read the stories written by those who were close to it.

Noel

[Mike A 338]

12 hours ago, birdguy said:

The haunted house was located across the street from Dante Hospital, on Broadway Street, between Van Ness and Polk.

Noel, once again we’ve crossed paths separated by @ 20 years. Back in the 1960s when I was a kid, I was at that block many times. Sometime in the 1950s Dante Hospital became Notre Dame Hospital & a wing was added. My father was a doctor & some of his patients were admitted there. Sometimes I would tag along with him on weekends when he would check in on them. I would wait for him in his car, which was parked in a lot on the south side of Broadway directly opposite the hospital entrance. Is that were your haunted house was, or was it further east on Broadway? Can’t remember if there were homes there at that time, maybe the parking lot was on the spot were the house was. I do remember the back of the lot was up against the back of a fire station that was on Pacific Ave. I would always open the car window so I could hear the signaling bells that would alert a station to respond to a call.

I looked on Google maps street view to check out how this block looks today, as I haven’t been there in 30+ years. I expected change, but the only thing still there is the hospital building, which is now senior housing. Not even the fire station is there (do you remember it?). I couldn’t find anything on line about what happened to it, so I emailed SFFD’s Public Information Officer.  He replied that it was the old location of Station #4, which is now on 3rd St. in the Mission Bay section.

[Antipodeslonghaul 79]

An old Victorian haunted house. For some reason that made me think of a move like this, I remember seeing one when I was a kid.

And I wondered, if the house were in fact haunted, would the ghosts move along with it, or would they remain on the property to haunt the new structure.

 

 

 

 

[sightseer 895]

6 hours ago, Antipodeslonghaul said:

And I wondered, if the house were in fact haunted, would the ghosts move along with it, or would they remain on the property to haunt the new structure.

I believe they would stay with the property.  Theres a number of tales of places being haunted because of what used to be on the property.

and in my own personal case, a ghost seen by me and several friends was apparently unaware that an outhouse he(it?) appeared to be trying to hide in was no longer there.  When the ghost appeared and my friends started running toward it, it first went to hide behind a tree but my friends ran toward the tree so it moved to where an old outhouse had been as if he thought it was still there but then my friends turned and again headed straight for him so he went up around the corner of the building and by the time my friends got there he was gone.  I personally had no desire to 'catch' a ghost.   It was an area that many people had claimed to have had experiences of various kinds. 

One of my friends had taken a door latch from that outhouse.  It was one of those that was two pieces - one a screw eye with a ring and the other a hook with a ring and the two rings were joined together -- or at least they were when he took them from the outhouse.  He said he put the latch in his pocket but when he checked the next day, the pieces had separated.  He showed them to me.  Both were old, painted, rusted -- but neither showed a single mark where someone might have tried to separate them.  very odd.

Edited September 4, 2021 by sightseer

[birdguy 3,943]

15 hours ago, Mike A said:

Noel, once again we’ve crossed paths separated by @ 20 years.

Mike, my youngest daughter took me to San Francisco two summers ago.  She wanted to see the neighborhood where I grew up.  We stayed at Fisherman's Wharf and one morning we took the cable to Pacific Street (One block south of Broadway.)

We walked down to Larkin Street and saw the the neighborhood and the house I grew up in.  Then we walked down Jackson Street to Franklin and saw St Brigid's School where I went from the 3rd to 8th grade.  We walked up Broadway, crossed Van Ness Avenue and walked across the street from the old Dante Hospital.  There's a three story apartment house where our haunted house used to be.  Then we walked down Polk Street to Galileo High School where I did the last half of my junior year.

At that time the Ghiradelli chocolate factory across the street was churning out chocolate and you could smell it.  Now it's a tourist trap with boutiques and espresso stands, 

It was a long walk for an old man in his 80s so we went back to the hotel and I took a nap.

We ate dinner at Scomas and I embarrassed her when I stood up and sang the old Fisherman's Wharf song to the diners.

In an Italian accent I sang...

Allo!  I am a Joe!

I work at Fisherman's Wharf you know.

Alibut, a tuna fish,

Da barracuda she delish.

We catch em fresh at da crack a dawn,

So how about a shrimp...a prawn!

Toot-Toot

Oh here she  come, my heart's delight

She come to visit every night,

The finest ship dat sail da sea

My darling Rosali!

Alibut, a tuna fish

Da barracuda, she delish....

No one ever heard it before but it was popular when I was a boy.  I'm surprised I could still remember it.

Bridget, we gotta do that again some time!

Noel