Outcast Earth: Of Myth and Mist, Part II

" />

SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2008: BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

RUNE: An Unexpected Discovery in Picturesque Berkeley
The five of us had our first experience riding the Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) system on Saturday as we decided to spend some time in Berkeley. Although most of us are generally unfamiliar with the San Francisco area, BART was easy to ride and our GPS-equipped iPhones helped with our foot tour of the area surrounding the University of California campus. Perhaps no visit to San Francisco would be complete without a trip to Berkeley, an American mecca for higher learning, liberal idealism and political activism. We wandered the area around the campus, ate fresh sushi, perused the alternative music and book shops, and listened to the impromptu folk music played by a group of twenty or so fellow wanderers who had set up camp in a local park. Afterwards, we strolled over to the UC Berkeley campus just to see if there were any political demonstrations or hackey-sack competitions worth watching.

Berkeley is the oldest University of California campus in the state and its venerable reputation is reflected in its grounds and architecture. Most of the buildings seem more like something you would expect to see on an Ivy League campus, with beautiful red brick facades, Corinthian columns, ornate cornices and stately staircases. And sometimes that’s just the dormitories! At the center of it all, both figuratively and literally, is the Sather Tower, a three-hundred and seven foot bell and clock tower. Such a structure is usually known as a campanile (my first vocabularly-building word of the day) and apparently this is the largest such campanile in the United States. The tower houses an impressive array of bells of varying size and tone known as a carillion (my second vocabularly-building word of the day) which can be heard all over the Berkeley area and an observation deck on the eighth floor which is supposed to give you one of the best views of the Bay area. Naturally, we had to see it.

The five of us rode the elevator to the observation deck and spent about forty-five minutes enjoying the views and the chilly breeze that swirled around us. Even Polaris, who is very uncomfortable around heights, was able to be coaxed to the balcony’s edge. Fortunately, tall iron bars sealed us in and helped give Polaris a little piece of mind should unknown forces somehow fling him toward the windows. When we descended back to earth, Ash said that he wanted to stroll around the base of the tower so we obediently followed him. On one side he stopped to watch a squirrel playing on the bricked courtyard between the campanile and a classroom building. He suddenly looked very pensive.

He turned to the rest of us and said, “Someone died here.”

John Patterson All of us have learned to give great weight to Ash’s feelings on matters like this. As he’s aged and matured, he has become even more skilled at understanding some of his more intuitive feelings and expressing them to the rest of us. Like prospectors, we suddenly felt like one of us had struck gold. Polaris, Meridan, Cipher and I sat down and let him walk around the area alone. After about ten minutes, he came back to us and reconfirmed his feelings.

“Someone died here, at the bottom of the tower,” he said.

“Right here?” Polaris asked.

“In this area,” Ash responded, gesturing to the courtyard where the squirrel was still frollicking.

“Tell us what you can,” Meridian said, jotting down notes on her iPhone.

Ash’s impressions were scant on details, but he felt that the death had occurred more than twenty-five years earlier and was very sudden. He described the death as “violent but quick” and our minds immediately went to a homicide. Cipher suggested that someone might have jumped from the tower since it was the tallest building on campus, but since the observation deck was secured by the iron bars that seemed unlikely at the time. Ash was not able to tell us definitively if the victim was male or female, but said that the spirit of the victim had lingered here for some time after the death. We took lots of photos of the area and then continued our walking tour of the campus.

Tower's east side It wasn’t until we returned home and Googled “Sather Tower deaths” that we discovered that two men had committed suicide by throwing themselves off the observation deck in the late 1950s and early 60s. Their names were Richard Saphir and John Patterson. Both men landed on the east side between the tower and Birge Hall, which is the physics building. This is the same area where Ash had his psychic impression.

Although there have been no recent suicide attempts at the tower, memory of these past tragedies appears to vex the student body. We heard that many of the students believe the campanile is haunted and there are a few published accounts of coeds claiming to be followed by a ghost (presumably that of the last jumper) along the nearby promenade. Another published account claimed that some unidentified photographer snapped a picture of a ghostly hand rising out of the grass at the tower’s base. As with other famous “ghost photos” we’ve read accounts of, however, [See our feature on the Haunted Toys R Us in Sunnyvale], the actual photograph is elusive.

Still, Ash’s impression was enough for us to look into the Sather Tower deaths more. Additional information will be posted by my colleagues soon.

ASH: Why Suicide Can Be Detected By Psychics
As Rune wrote in her journal article, when I had my feeling of a death at the Sather Tower everyone thought it was a murder. I think Dad even thought it might be something like a rape-murder as those sort of things seem to happen on college campuses. At the time, I didn’t really know what it was, only that it was sudden and violent. Thinking about it more, I wonder if suicide might actually be just as easy for psychics to detect as a murder would be. You have the same types of emotions, but I think it’s all concentrated in one person and that makes it even more intense. When we found out about the two men who killed themselves at the Sather Tower, Rune wanted us to imagine how much pain you would have to be in to take any life, including your own. Dad told us that he had a [high school friend] who killed himself when he was 22 by shooting himself in the head in a park. That made me really sad to hear because when you are that young you should have your whole life ahead of you. No one knew that my dad’s friend was suicidal, although looking back there were probably some signs that no one saw. I think when a suicidal person actually takes their life, there’s a burst of emotion and energy that is released into the environment. Because of the pain involved, that emotion is very strong and easier for people to pick up on even years later.

CIPHER: Come to San Francisco... And Kill Yourself
After visiting the Golden Gate Bridge and Park, and touring around the quaint hippy conurbation of Berkeley, I’ve started to believe that one of the major past times of San Franciscans must be throwing themselves off tall structures. After all, over 1,500 have flung themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, and a handful more from the Sather Tower which we visited yesterday. Granted, there are plenty of tall structures from which to fling yourself here, but still I had to wonder if there was something about the city itself that seemed to encourage suicide. In researching it a bit, I found a report from late 2007 which found that the Bay Area had a much higher rate of suicide among young adults than anywhere else in California. So much so that the city was one of the first in the nation to implement a help-on-call suicide hotline and regularly suicide-proofs many of the buildings.

On the Sather Tower for example, the University of California / Berkeley first posted guards and then installed large panes of glass to contain the observation deck and keep coeds from throwing themselves over the edge. The glass was removed in 1979 so the campus visitors and students could better hear the tower’s newly upgraded carillon. In 1981, the university installed thirteen-foot “decorative anti-suicide” bars all around the observation deck instead. (Just for the record, I didn’t find them very decorative.) These precautions may have, in fact, saved lives. According to one report I found, it was estimated that there was as many as one attempted suicide per day among the UC Berkeley student body during the 1960s when the campus was a hotbed of political activism. Maybe suicide was still preferable to being flambéed in the Vietnam jungles by “Charlie?” Or maybe the student body just looked at the turmoil around them – war, civil unrest, social injustice – and were overwhelmed by it? Despite these disturbing stats, only two men have successfully killed themselves from the campanille, and both of those were before then glass panes were installed. The first was a 67-year old lawyer named Richard Saphir who died in 1958, after apparently a long and unsuccessful battle with depression. He was followed three years later by a university sophomore named John Patterson. Patterson apparently made a close inspection of all the views before choosing to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Richard Saphir, and leaping from the east side. No one really knows why both men chose to leap from the east, but interestingly it was the east side of the tower where Ash first verbalized his feelings that someone had died there.

[Webmaster’s Note: Curiously, statistics gathered at the Golden Gate Bridge also noted that most jumpers leapt from the east side of that structure as well. The reason is not known, although some speculate that its due to the superior view of the city from that side.]

The Golden Gate is used so often for suicide jumps that it has the dubious distinction of being a “suicide bridge” and ranks as one of the most popular (if not the most popular) structure in the world for this purpose. The bridge could almost be called a destination point for suicide, as there are plenty of cases where a person drove over several other bridges in the bay area just to get to the Golden Gate and fling himself from there. Of course, the San Francisco community has tried for years to stem the tide of deaths at the structure. There are “suicide hotline” telephones scattered about so the despondent will hopefully call for help rather than hurling themselves into the cold waters below. Plus, the city government employs teams of bicycle and motor patrols to try and intercept jumpers before gravity kicks in. Most recently, the government began to implement planning on a suicide prevention barrier that would cover the entire span of the bridge. This barrier would basically be a tall fence, specially designed to keep folk from climbing over the railing. They have a website on it which can be seen at www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org.

I’m still not sure why San Francisco inspires such a high suicide rate. It’s a beautiful, cultured place and one I’m enjoying thoroughly. Maybe it’s the cold, the wind and the fog. Who knows.

MERIDIAN: College Urban Legends
After reading Cipher’s dissertation on suicide in San Francisco and on the UC-Berkeley campus, I recalled hearing several suicide urban legends when I was in university myself. Our local legend was vague, but generally consisted of whispers about a female ghost who haunted the second floor of the Social Sciences building. Apparently the young woman had flung herself out of a window, despondent about failing grades. At the time, I really didn’t believe the tale because a) she only fell from a second story window when there were many higher and equally accessible venues from which to jump; and b) because the story had all the traditional trappings of an urban legend. Years later, a friend of mine (who was nine years my junior) told me a tale about a coed hanging herself in his dorm building due to pressure over failing grades. “It’s an urban legend,” I told him, but he insisted he had proof. “There’s a stain on the floor from where all her blood pooled,” he said. “You can still see it today. I saw it with my own eyes.”

I don’t think people who hanging themselves usually bleed... or at least not enough to form a pool... but I didn’t want to argue with him. (Plus, there are plenty of activities that go on in college dorms that could leave a dark stain on a wooden floor, but I won’t bother to list them here.) You cannot argue with the allure of the urban legend!

Although the suicides of Richard Saphir and John Patterson at the Sather Tower are documented facts, I was impressed how the latter tragedy had many of the trappings of the “depressed college student commits suicide” urban legend. Perhaps the Patterson death even influenced decades of these stories, although I have nothing to base that assertion on? How the student decides to die can change from version to version, although the mode is typically awful. The deaths are almost always motivated by slumping grades, the prospect of not graduating or by the student not meeting his or her personal standards of excellence. Lost love appears to be a close runner-up. Hanging or jumping to one’s death appear to be the most popular suicide techniques in these stories, although a new one I found had the stricken student shoving a pen or pencil up a nostril and into his brain. In many cases, the suicide is followed closely by a haunting, as was the case at both my university and that of my friend.

Now consider the details surrounding the John Patterson death, as documented in the magazine Hermenaut in an article called “Campanile Free Fall” by John Marr.

Fast forward to January 14th, 1961 and John Patterson, a sophomore majoring in engineering. And not without success; he’d made an honor society the previous year. One “academic associate” later described him as an outstanding physics student. Bt his roommate told a different story, of a young man whose grades never seemed high enough. Patterson left no note, and the entire story was never told. We only know that mid-term grades were coming out, and that around Patterson’s residence hall the running joke response to adversity was: “I can always jump off the tower.” His roommate later speculated, “He might have gotten a C or something...”

As Rune noted in her article, the Patterson death was followed by a haunting legend. Curiously, the Saphir death was not, maybe because Saphir was not a student or faculty member of UC Berkeley and therefore his death did not have the same allure to the college population. Still, legends persist of a ghost wandering about the base of the Sather Tower and along the campanile esplanade nearby. Most seem to think the spirit is that of John Patterson, apparently still in turmoil over his terminally average mid-term grades.

MAY 7, 2008: THE DISCOVERY OF MY MISSING STEPFATHER... AND THE FATE OF MY MOTHER, PART VIII

Sunken bayou house Click here for previous journal entry relating to this topic | For additional information, visit the RETURN TO THE BAYOU feature

TRESPASS: You guys won’t believe this shit. After Ash sent me that email about his dream where he was in a bar that was surrounded by alligators, I just couldn’t get it off my mind. I kept racking my brain about where Patrick could have hidden my mom’s body. Agent Ritchie really seemed to think that it had to be someplace easy because the hurricane would have been in full force so it would have been really impossible to dig a grave. We all felt he would’ve done something to hide her and the murder. (I’m sorry, but he murdered her. I don’t buy any of his bullshit that this was an “accident.”) So I’m thinking about Ash’s dream and his uncanny ability to figure shit out, and it occurs to me that Patrick put my mom’s body in the swamp with the gators. Those big dinosaurs love rotting shit, so they would have totally gone for a dead body. Then it occurred to me that the there was only one place that he could quickly stick a body and be certain that the gators would get it. That place was his grandparents’ old sunken house.

I was pretty surprised that Agent Ritchie didn’t think I was a total ass for suggesting it. She even got some FBI scuba divers to come along. So yesterday we drove back out to Dry Tree for the fourth time and this time took boats to the old house. There used to be a big gator we called “Big Jack” who hung out in here, so we spent a lot of time making sure he wasn’t around before the divers went in. Jack was still alive and well when Rune and I were here in 2006, but we didn’t see a single scale of him this time. The divers told us that the water was very murky and hard to see through, but after about 45 minutes they began to find a bunch of bones. By the time they got done, they had pulled up like three bags of remains, but no one knew at first if they are human or animal. But then the divers pull up a piece of jawbone and there’s no doubt that it’s human. So they are digging around down there for about another hour and then it’s decided that we need to come back for another day.

So on day number 5, more scuba diving and more bones. On the day before, I was pretty sure that the jawbone they found had to be Mom’s. But then the next day they find three human skulls! Three! So now Agent Ritchie is wondering what actually happened to Patrick’s grandparents, the ones who owned the house before it sunk. The mystery deepens, huh?

MAY 16, 2008: EMBARCADERO AND WATERFRONT AREA, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

CIPHER: Is The Promise of Some Hot Ass At Sea Worth a Decapitation? There are a number of published accounts about the headless body of a man that washed up on San Francisco’s eastern waterway, which is known as the Embarcadero. The dates for this incident change from book to book, as do the details leading up to this incident. One source said this grisly discovery happened in 1884 and another stated 1890. Regardless, it appears that the victim was a sailor assigned to the Norwegian clipper known as the Squando. One source names this man as First Mate Lars Gunderson.

Gunderson had served on the Squando since it first set sail from Oslo as a newly-commissioned vessel. But even before it hit the open sea, the boat was said to be cursed. Apparently several men had been killed during the ship’s construction, and one of their widows cursed the ship and everyone who sailed on it... right before she committed suicide. One has to wonder if Gunderson knew these stories or suspected that the curse might ultimately find him too. I know, I know... kind of a melodramatic story but things were about to get worse for Gunderson. For some reason, the ship’s captain, Nels Erikson, decided to take his wife along on the long ocean journey, even though this would have been unheard of during the era and there were specific taboos against having women onboard. Somewhere along the journey, Mrs. Erikson caught the eye of Gunderson and the two started spending an unseemly amount of time together. I’m still not sure what Erikson was thinking. The only woman on a boat load of men? My god, dude, there’s only so much a sailor can do with the cabin boy before his eye starts to wander... and apparently Gunderson’s wandered right over to Mrs. Erikson’s petticoats.

Depending on which source you read, Gunderson and Mrs. Erickson were either having an affair or Gunderson was stalking Mrs. Erikson to the point where she felt in fear for her life. By the time the Squando reached San Francisco bay, Captain Erikson had had enough of his amorous crew-member. The accounts of what happened next differ. In one version, Captain Erikson summons the first mate to his cabin, and with his horrified wife as witness, cuts the man’s head off with a single slash from his cutlass. In the second version, however, the wife conspired with her husband to do Gunderson in. She lures the first mate to the cabin, plies him with vast amounts of rum and presumably the false promise of some spicy Norwegian tail, and once the first mate is drunk, she restrains him while her husband chops off his head with an ax. They throw the headless trunk into the San Francisco bay, but for some inexplicable reason keep the dead man’s head in a bucket beneath the marital bed. It is The Embarcadero today discovered later by the San Francisco police.

After Captain Erikson and his wife were convicted of the crime and subsequently hung, the paranormal phenomenon on the Squando really started to pop. Over the next year, three other captains of the ship met premature ends, one at the hands of mutineers and two others as the result of bizarre accidents. Sailors often reported seeing a headless specter wandering the upper deck of the ship and many would abandon the vessel as soon as they made landfall. According to legend, the psychic disturbances on board the ship eventually became so great, that the owners of the Squando scrapped the vessel. An alternate end states that the Squando started off on a transatlantic voyage in 1901 but never reached its destination, adding one more mystery to all the others that surrounded the ship.

I read about the Squando and discussed the case with Polaris before I started to write this article. I felt kind of bad because I really wasn’t believing the tale, and I didn’t want to write yet another long diatribe debunking a classic ghost story. But Polaris had a good point, I thought. He told me that the purpose of Outcast Earth was to investigate paranormal phenomenon in the hopes of finding “truth.” But the process of “truth finding” also means you have to scrape aside a lot of lies, tall tales and exaggerations. So, heartened by those words, I went looking for the “truth” behind the Squando tale. Here’s what I found:

First, I looked into the existence of the ship itself. The best known vessel with the name Squando was an American monitor-class warship from the Civil War era. It was in service for less than a year, being decommissioned in 1866. Obviously, this is not the ship from the legend. I found several references to another ship(s) of unspecified design called Squando, but I was unable to determine its/their country of origin. The references do list the ship’s captains for the years of 1873 and 1881. Both are men with English names. The name of the ship itself was weird to me, because “Squando” doesn’t sound like a Norwegian word. I consulted several Norwegian dictionaries but could not find the word “squando” at all. However, the word is the name of a famous Native American chief (obviously where the Civil War monitor got its name!) which would indicate to me that any vessel called “Squando” is probably from the United States, not Norway. While we’re talking of names, I also found the names of the principal players in this melodrama highly dubious. Nils Erikson and Lars Gunderson? These are such typical Norwegian names that they seem contrived to me. (If this had been an American ship, I suppose the captain and first mate would have been called John Smith and Bob Jones?)

Regardless, I slogged on through history in search of some veracity in this story. Since the year of the Squando incident changed between accounts, I checked contemporary newspaper reports between the years of 1880 and 1895 for any reports of a murder on board a foreign ship in San Francisco bay that resulted in a headless corpse washing up on the Embarcadero. I did not find anything that fit the details of the Squando story, although there were several accounts of headless bodies and one of a body floating in the bay. What’s interesting is that there were several stories from 1892 which had elements of the Squando story to them.

One article from March was entitled “A Murderous Wife” and gave a long and lurid account of how a woman in the Spokane murdered her husband with the help of her lover. Not a nautical romance or even in the Frisco area, but the “cheating wife theme” is there. Then in a November edition of the Fresno Morning Republic I found the following:

A MURDER MYSTERY: FINDING THE MUTILATED TRUNK OF A MAN
Leads Stockton to Believe That a Most Atrocious Murder Has Been Committed

Stockton, November 24 [1892]– Further evidence of a shocking crime was discovered today when the mutilated trunk of a man was found in Fremont channel, inside the city limits. The arms and legs had been skillfully removed and the head was missing. The neck and shoulders were burned, and a partly burned shirt covering the trunk also showed marks of fire. The trunk was in a barley sack, which was badly rotted and pulled apart when taken ashore. The arms and legs of the body were found in the channel at different times recently, and at one time it was thought the body had been cut up by a medical student, but now the murder theory is advanced as the headless trunk shows mutilation. Nothing has been found which may lead to identification. It is believed the body has been in the water at least two months.

Again, it’s not really close to the Squando tale other than the elements of a floating headless corpse. In this case, however, the corpse doesn’t wash up on the Embarcadero, but rather is fished out of a canal that I presume fed into the San Francisco bay.

Aside from this account, there was only one other historical reference I found during this time period of a body floating in the bay. This article, entitled “Recovered At Last,” dates from October 1890 and concerns the body of an unknown man that spent several days bobbing around in the bay until it was finally recovered. The article read in part:

“...[the body] has evidently been in the water a month or more and not one particle of flesh remains on the head – nothing but a grinning skull, with a number of teeth firmly planted in the jaws. The man was evidently a stevedore or seaman, for he was dressed in the rough clothes of those who work about he docks, and had no shoes or stockings on his feet. There is nothing by which he may be identified but a pair of light-striped trousers, a chinchilla vest of dark material and a blue jumper...”

This article tentatively identifies the dead man as a sailor, but there’s an obvious problem... He still has his head! But I got to say, that’s no the only problem with this story. Certainly this kind of crime would have made front page news in San Francisco in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first centuries! A foreign ship, a faithless wife, and a jealous husband driven to murder and mutilation. The police found Gunderson’s fucking head in a bucket under Erikson’s bed! That shit’s priceless! But I couldn’t find any historical record of the crime at all, and the books that relay the story today tend to use each other as source material. My god, doesn’t anyone do their own research anymore??

In conclusion, Cipher has to give this ghost story another “two thumbs down.” My guess is that the tale is a work of fiction by some unknown author, perhaps drawing some inspiration from real events in the San Francisco area but giving them a nautical theme. That’s MY guess, of course. But MY guess at least has some research behind it!

RUNE: Walking Chinatown!
First, kudos to Cipher for the most titillating article title yet posted during this San Francisco investigation. Our visit to the Embarcadero, and Cipher’s quest for the elusive Squando, was just part of the larger survey of downtown SF. This is really where you feel the heart of this city, lost here among the skyscrapers and the busy crowds of people. We’ve been sharing our days between looking at famous haunted sites and visiting the museums, landmarks and yes, I will admit it, tourist traps. Since there is little of the nineteenth century waterfront left to see, we walked from the Embarcadero over to Chinatown.

Chinatown is located on the northeastern edge of the pennisula on which downtown San Francisco sits, just west of the Bay Bridge that connects the city to Oakland. I don’t know how many square blocks it occupies, but it’s large enough that we spent about five hours in the place and never really seemed to find the end of it. Apparently everything in the area was leveled during the famous 1906 earthquake, so all the buildings you see today date from the early part of the twentieth century or thereafter. In the wake of the earthquake, anti-Chinese sentiment was at a fevered pitch in San Francisco. Local politicians saw the destruction of the old Chinatown as a perfect excuse to seize all the valuable real estate in the downtown area and move the Chinese as far away as possible. It was only due to the Chinese organizing and becoming more politically active that Chinatown was saved and rebuilt. Their redesign of the area was meant to make it more palatable to whites, so it was constructed largely to appeal to tourists and shoppers. In fact, most of the streets and alleys we wandered were crammed full of stores which were in turn crammed full of merchandise. I think Meridian put it best when she said, upon entering a shop, “I guess we can assume that minimalism is not in the Chinese shopkeeper’s vocabulary?”

In fact, the stores are an interestingly selection of almost everything you can imagine. Many will carry cheap plastic toys right next to very expensive Chinese furniture. Unlike the other businesses in downtown SF which are carefully departmentalized and organized, shopping in Chinatown was kind of like enjoying an endless rummage sale. We didn’t buy much, as our Outcast Earth lifestyle has rendered us non-materialistic by necessity, but Meridian and I found some jewelry we like and Ash purchased a bonsai tree. (I know, Bonsai trees are Japanese in origin... but Chinatown still had them! They were right next to some silver jackets emblazoned with the Oakland Raiders logo!)

POLARIS: In Honor of the Greatest Movie Ever Filmed In San Francisco Chinatown
Did anyone else have to stop and catch their breath when we walked through the Chinatown main gate and realized that we were now standing in the place where Big Trouble in Little China, the world’s greatest kung-fu-sorcery-action-adventure-comedic-love-story-with-monsters was filmed?

CIPHER: Dude, I’m pretty sure that the bulk of that movie – as great as it was – was filmed on a sound stage in LA. Although it was kind of cool seeing the main gate, which was in one of the opening shots of the movie! Meridian asked me what Big Trouble in Little China was and I was kind of dumbfounded. No wonder Americans are lagging behind the world in almost every way! Ignorance is everywhere!

MAY 19, 2008: NOB HILL AND SURROUNDING AREAS, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

MERIDIAN: The Atherton Mansion
After many a dubious haunting now investigated [See Toys R Us, Sunnyvale, California | Alcatraz’s Most Restless Spirit... Or Not? | Is The Promise of Some Hot Ass At Sea Worth a Decapitation?] it was a real pleasure to tour Nob Hill and see the historic Atherton Mansion. Faxon Atherton (I swear, that was his name) was the patriarch of this San Francisco dynasty and his name is still a fixture in the city to this day. But this story, or at least this chapter of it, is about the Atherton lady folk.

When the old man died in 1877, his widow Dominga Atherton moved into the city center and proceeded to build a Victorian mansion in the middle of the aristocratic Pacific Heights district. Soon after, her son Jorge H. Bowen Atherton (better known as George) and his wife Gertrude moved in permanently. George and Gertrude had eloped at a young age and from all reports, both quickly realized their mistake. Dominga and Gertrude were both intelligent and cultured women, but George was apparently a consistent embarrassment to both ladies. Boorish and unsophisticated, George frequently found himself being tormented and ridiculed by his relations. George was also easily overshadowed by Gertrude, who was an up-and-comer in the literary world. In fact, Gertrude was once quoted as saying, “The worst trial I had yet been called upon to endure was having a husband continually on my hands.” It was also hinted at (broadly) that the beautiful Gertrude had her choice on male admirers as she was described as a “man’s woman.”

Whether it was his Victorian sense of honor or his need to escape from his domestic situation, George departed San Francisco in 1887 for a long sea journey to Chile. In some sense, George may have been trying to recreate his father’s success, as the elder Atherton had found his fortune early as a trader in Chile. Unfortunately, success was not in the cards for George as he suffered liver failure half-way to South America and died on board ship. A gossip column from the Oakland Tribune recalled George’s death in 1902:

The death of George Atherton, the husband of the lady – she was too wise ever to take another – (in fact, she prides herself on never making the same mistake twice) – was quite opportune. They had practically separated when he went off to South America on a war vessel. During his absence his wife had most uncanny dreams that misfortune had come to him. There was no possibility of a letter and one day a casket arrived at the Atherton home. It was opened and was found to contain alcohol and in the alcohol was the dead body of Geo. Atherton. It was a gruesome thing, but it seemed that the young man had died during the cruise and this was the only way of preserving the body. It was a choice between this or a burial at sea. Nor was there any way to warn the family before the arrival of the body.

The article may have been somewhat polite, as George was not in a casket but rather a cask. Apparently the captain of the ship on which George was traveling understood the power and influence of his family so he did his best to preserve the body and ordered his men to stuff the corpse into a rum-filled barrel. When the ship put into port in Tahiti, the barrel was transferred to another ship headed back to San Francisco and was ultimately delivered to the Atherton mansion. It was Dominga’s butler who made the grisly discovery as no one had informed the family that George had died. Soon after, the two ladies began to report a variety of haunting activity which they ascribed to George’s vindictive spirit. Among the phenomenon reported were nocturnal raps on bedroom doors, traveling cold spots throughout the residence and an persistent sense of dread. Eventually both women moved out and the mansion was sold, but the haunting continued.

Interestingly, being haunted by her late husband didn’t seem to stymie any of Gertrude’s success. If anything, George’s death may have stimulated her. After his pickled corpse was put in the ground, Gertrude went on to be a minor literary celebrity. As the article above noted, she never again married... probably because she never wanted to be shackled to another person again. Being a Victorian widow did seem to give her a certain amount of personal and creative freedom without the stigma of being an unwed woman. You go girl!

Some year’s back, my “old buddy,” Sylvia Browne, held a seance in the mansion and decided that it was being haunted by three ghosts – George, Gertrude and Dominga. Wow. What an amazing pronouncement. No wonder she’s a world-renowned psychic! She can actually enter a historic home with a one-hundred and twenty-five year old haunting legend attached to it and can identify the ghosts as belonging to the three biggest personalities who resided there. Amazing.

The house is privately owned so we weren’t able to do much but stand on the corner and look at it. It was quite pretty. We couldn’t make any determination about the haunting phenomenon, but considering its long and well-documented history, the Atherton mansion appears to be a much more likely refuge for ghosts than some of the other places we’ve been to recently. Regardless of Sylvia Browne.

CIPHER: More on the Atherton Mansion.
Poor Sylvia Browne once again takes a beating from Meridian’s online fists. I agree that a) Browne’s assertion as to who’s haunting the mansion would be the glaringly obvious choices; and b) that the mansion’s documented history does make it the most likely place for a haunting since we visited the Robert Louis Stevenson house in Monterey. However, I still wonder if any of the haunting activity at the Atherton home is still going on. All the references I found on it are old, and as usual, simple regurgitation of other material. Dennis William Hauck’s book, Haunted Places, appears to be the Bible for the ghost-hunter in many respects. The accounts [in the book] are often repeated verbatim and believed blindly. It’s a great source of raw material, but I still think people should do their own sleuthing! Also, despite Browne’s identification of the spirits, why would either Gertrude or Dominga haunt the place? Apparently they both moved out shortly after George’s body was recovered and neither died there.

POLARIS: The Nob Hill Ghost. Sigh. Roll Eyes.
The legend of the Nob Hill ghost is one of the best known in San Francisco. The phantom is said to be that of girl in her late teens who wanders the vertiginous neighborhood streets in nineteenth century dress. Somewhere along the way, this ghost was identified as Flora Sommerton, the 18-year old daughter of a prominent San Francisco family. Flora was said to have run away in 1876 in order to escape an arranged marriage to a much older man. Her disappearance reportedly made national news and prompted the family to post a $250,000 reward for her recovery. But sadly, Flora was never heard of again... until 1926. In that year, a poor woman named Mrs. Butler was found dead at her residence in Butte, Montana. Mrs. Butler had worked as a maid in a flophouse, so it was with great surprise that her dead body was found in an expensive Paris-made debutante’s dress surrounded by newspaper clippings on the Sommerton disappearance. Once Mrs. Butler was identified as the missing Sommerton daughter, her remains were returned to San Francisco and were interred in a family plot. Her wandering spirit, however, is said to still haunt the streets of Nob Hill.

As with all our investigations, our team did its own research on this alleged haunting. And as was the case with Cipher’s investigation into the Squando ship haunting, we could find no independent or contemporary documentation on the events surrounding this story. Put simply, we could not even establish that Flora Sommerton was a real person, finding no references to her except in ghost guidebooks which repeated the Nob Hill legend ad nauseam.

Not finding any mention of a missing debutante named Flora Sommerton (or even derivatives of that name), we began looking for her family since they were reported to be both rich and prominent. We consulted the available city and social directories for the period of 1863 through 1890, but none even listed a single person with that surname. We found no public records, including contemporary news reports, of a large reward being offered for a missing girl of any name in 1876 or surrounding years. Finally, we decided to search online newspaper archives for an death notice or article related to a “Mrs. Butler” who resided in Butte, Montana, in 1926 or surrounding years. Again, we came up completely empty. So, as near as our research can tell us, no one with the last name of Sommerton ever lived, died, was born, owned property, ran a business, was engage, disappeared, was kidnapped, joined a club or even existed in the San Francisco area between the 1860s and the early twentieth century.

I was feeling a little more hopeful about the Nob Hill Ghost after we were able to establish some authenticity on the Atherton Mansion haunting, or at least the events leading up to it. “Flora Sommerton” has disappointed me, however. Still, as Cipher noted previously, this is a good lesson for all of us. We cannot assume that a story is true because it appears in a published account. If the reality of paranormal phenomenon is to ever be solidly established, then it should be deserving of high scrutiny. For all you ghost hunters out there, I say don’t trust what you read. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

MAY 26, 2008: THE DISCOVERY OF MY MISSING STEPFATHER... AND THE FATE OF MY MOTHER, PART IX

Click here for previous journal entry relating to this topic | For additional information, visit the RETURN TO THE BAYOU feature

TRESPASS: After talking to Polaris about this on the phone, I wanted to write something for the team in general and anyone who visits the website. I have decided for the time being to stay on in Louisiana and not return to the Outcast Earth project. This was a very hard decision for me but frankly and just feel like I need to be here right now and resolve all these issues relating to my mom and [stepfather] Patrick. As you know, the FBI dredged out the sunken house in Dry Tree where Patrick’s grandparents once lived and they found a ton of bones in the mud at the bottom. The house has been occupied by an alligator named “Big Jack” for at least the last twenty-five years, so it wasn’t too surprise to find all those bones. But even on the last day we were there, the divers knew that some of the bones they were recovering were human. So here we are, two weeks later, and the FBI is now telling me that they have found bone pieces of at least four different human beings, one of which is definitely my mom. They figured that out by doing DNA testing off of me. They don’t know who the other three people are yet, although everyone expects that at least two of them are probably Patrick’s grandparents.

I remembered from when I lived in Dry Tree that [my stepsister] Meryl showed me her great-grandparents grave in the local cemetery. [For more information on Meryl, click here.] This was the same cemetery she was buried in 2003, but when Hurricane Katrina hit it was pretty much ruined and all the gravestones were scattered. Of course, thinking back on it, there was no way of knowing for sure that the gravesite of her great-grandparents even contained any bodies and I never heard how they died. But then again, I never asked. I just figured they were old and died. Anyway, the FBI is pulling DNA off of Patrick to try and match the bones to him somehow. He’s still denying everything of course and insists that my mom’s death was an accident. As Agent Ritchie said to me though, “If you accidentally killed your wife, your grief would not lead you to feeding her body to the local swamp monster. You only do that if you don’t want any trace of her to be found again.”

More Trespass In retrospect, I think the dream Ash had about the honkytonk bar filled with alligators may have been prophetic [See April 26, 2008: The Discovery of My Missing Stepfather... And the Fate of My Mother, Part VII.] I think the bar represented the swamp and the loud honkytonk band was the hurricane. The alligators lying all over the floor weren’t noticed in all the noise and hubbub, so they would grab and eat poepole and no one would even notice. It was almost like the dream was tapping into Patrick’s thought process as he was trying to escape the storm and hide the murder at the same time. I think after he killed her, he took her body out in a boat to the sunken house, pushed her through the window and let “Big Jack” take care of the rest. Then he took off and ended up in Florida living under an assumed name.

In any case, this entire experience has compelled me to resolve this part of my life’s story. When I joined OCE in 2004, I was running away from some really traumatic episodes in my life. The last four years with the team have really helped me to focus myself and have really built my confidence. A huge part of that has been my friendships with all of you. When I left Louisiana, I didn’t feel like I had any friends or family. Four years later and after seeing so much of this amazing world, I feel like I have both. I hope to return to OCE once I have this situation resolved and I wanted to write you all this becuase I didn’t want to just vanish like Anvil did without any goodbyes or explanations. I really believe that what OCE is trying to do is amazing, and I have felt that it’s been a great experience for me. I will be in close contact with you all and hopefully we’ll see each other again soon. Until then, I want to thank everyone - including everyone who visits and supports the website - for allowing me this opportunity.

Love, Trespass

RUNE: Wow, I am so stunned and amazed on so many levels I am finding it hard to even express myself. I can’t really envision OCE without you, Trespass. You have been a fixture from day one and I really, and quite selfishly, hope that you come back to us as soon as you feel you can. Naturally, we’ve all been discussing your situation on nearly a daily basis, and everyone is solidly in your corner. We can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you, especially considering the past experiences you had with your stepfather and our own disappointing visit to Dry Tree [See Trespass’s Return to the Bayou for more information.] You are an amazingly adaptive and resilient man and I know you’ll get through this just fine. Please rest assured that we are all pulling for you.
Love, Rune

POLARIS: I just wanted to clarify that Trespass and I decided not to call his departure a resignation. Since all of us hope and anticipate his return, we are calling it a sabatical, ha, ha. Trespass is of course free to return to OCE at any time, regardless of where we may be in our world travels at that moment. We will continue to consider him a member of the team in the interval.

ASH: Dude, this totally sucks. I’m really sad you’re not going to be around but I understand why you need to figure this stuff out too. I hope they send Patrick to prison for a long time. I really liked all the times we played video games together and I don’t even mind all the little pet names you have for me like “R-tard” and “Circus freak.” You have been like a big brother to me, which has been great since I don’t get to see Coyote much. I hope you will email us and text message us. I will email you photos and stuff.

CIPHER: Well, I guess we saw this coming, huh? As the newest member of the team here, I really was beginning to feel like I jinxed this team effort. First, Anvil disappears shortly after I come on board and now Trespass is leaving. It’s not me, is it??? ;-) Seriously, dude, I am really going to miss you. I felt like we really bonded early after almost getting blown up together on Saipan [See Saipan Spirits for details.] It was really cool hanging out with you and acting like idiots together. Now I have to be the lone OCE idiot! What the fuck!? I really hope for the best for you and that you are finally able to put all this shit behind you. Stay in touch, OK?

MERIDIAN: Trespass, I know we didn’t get along really well at first but you’ve definitely grown on me. I think you really taught me a lot about not taking myself so seriously. I know, it’s hard to imagine but I think I’ve improved in that respect thanks to our association. Don’t laugh! I have really come to admire your intelligence and humor. I wish you nothing but success in your endeavors and I hope you will stay in touch with all of us! Best wishes always, Meridian.

BACK TO OF MYTH AND MIST PART I | NEXT EXPEDITION: DARK & DANGEROUS PLACES