Wes and I bought a fixer-upper in the gay Castro/Twin Peaks area of San Francisco in 1980. This neighborhood is one of the highest points of the city with magnificent views of the Bay and downtown, and also the best weather (fog is too heavy and settled below the neighborhood). When San Francisco was destroyed by the fires after the 1906 earthquake, much of the surviving population camped out on Twin Peaks, which then was open space and had a few small dairy farms.
Our house was built in 1945 (the third house on that exact site), a mere infant by San Francisco standards of building age. Like most homes in San Francisco, the house was actually a row house, with communal walls on each side, the garage on the first floor with living space on the second floor. We bought the house in an estate sale. An elderly couple had lived there for 35 years until each transitioned. Nothing had ever been modernized. When I touched the curtains, they crumbled into dusty pieces.
We set to work totally gutting the 1940’s kitchen and added a family room on the ground floor facing the large backyard garden.
However, I always felt a sense of being watched, and a sense of foreboding in that humble little house. The first strange event was probably totally my own doing. The backyard was huge and had some classic Italian statuary, including an almost life size copy of Michelangelo’s statue of David. I began moving it by pivoting it from one side of the thin pedestal to the other. Then inexplicably, it landed fully on my big toe and broke it! My trip to the ER resulted in giggles and laughter as word spread throughout the nursing staff that a gay guy had broken his big toe after dancing with a naked life size statue of David! I probably received more attention than most gun shot victims.
Then REAL strange things began to happen that did not involve dancing with Biblical characters. . The first peculiar event occurred as Wes and I sat on the living room couch, looking down the hallway. Suddenly, the door knob of the guest bedroom turned, and the door opened fully. Then the door closed all by itself. We looked at each other in disbelief.
From this preliminary event, strange things began to escalate. We were both woken one night by the sound of our bedroom door being opened and closed. In walked a man! The man was a shadowy figure wearing very unspooky looking farmer’s overalls, a plaid shirt and a wide brim hat. The figure walked to the foot of the bed and starred at us. Wes sat up in bed and said “Who are you?” At that remark, the figure seemed to become startled. Get ready for high strangeness. Instead of disappearing or just floating away, the figure climbed invisible stair steps, disappearing head first through the ceiling!
Frankly, I was terrified of the figure, while Wes found his presence a bit fascinating. So naturally, the figure enjoyed manifesting when I was in the house alone, perhaps feeding off my fear to gather strength (just a theory).
This figure did not like a grandfather clock my parents gave me in our dining room. I would routinely eat breakfast in the dining room and find the glass door open and the pendulum stopped, as if the figure did not like the passing of time. One day I was eating cereal in the dining room and noted that the clock was running just fine. Then I got up to get some coffee off the stove. When I returned, the glass door was open and the pendulum had again been stopped.
On several occasions I would see the figure nonchalantly walking across our living room, disappearing through the wall. We would also often hear footsteps stomping up the staircase leading from the garage to the living quarters.
Since there must be humor in everything (somewhere….), we nicknamed the figure Fred in honor of Fred Mertz from the I LOVE LUCY show. The figure resembled that TV character. He also bore a frightening resemblance to a minor character in an MTV Police video at that time for a song called EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE. This video (available on YOUTUBE) includes a shadow of a slightly portly man cleaning a window in the background as the group (Police) perform the song. This video creeped me out at the time.
The house was built in an Edwardian style, which means that all rooms were off a main hallway. I liked the house to be bright and cheerful, so I would open all the doors before leaving for work. When I came home, all the doors were closed. I suppose you could rationalize that this was due to drafts. However, I planned a little test. I got some heavy bricks from the backyard and propped each door open with a load of heavy bricks. Then I went to work. When I came home, all the bricks were in a big pile in the hallway and all the doors were slammed shut again. Only a hurricane could do this! Only later did a friend suggest I not antagonize Fred, since he could have thrown a brick at me as I climbed the steps from the garage to the living quarters hallway.
With time, Fred’s antics seemed either more juvenile or sinister (depending on your outlook). . On several occasions, I came into the kitchen to find all 4 blue flamed gas stove burners flowing at maximum.(Tangent note: I cannot imagine why San Francisco allows gas stoves considering that the entire city burned to the ground because of broken gas pipes).
As a gay couple, we slept together, but were quite discreet about this when Wes’ 10 year old daughter came to visit. I would always lock our bedroom door. Wes’ daughter would wake up earlier than us and go into the living room to watch Saturday cartoons. One time Wes and I had no covers on and were naked since it was a rare warm spell in San Francisco. Suddenly, I watched as the locked door unlocked itself and swung open. I hurriedly jumped out of bed naked and shut the door. If I can guess at motives, I would say that Fred hoped Wes’ little daughter would see us laying in bed together naked. Not nice. As it is, Fred may have told Wes’ daughter the score in another way. I had given Wes a birthday card that I had hastily thrown atop a bookcase when Wes’ daughter came over. She said later that as she sat on the couch, the birthday card floated down onto her head. She read it and realized that we were not just friends. This was very upsetting for her and we did not see her again for 6 years.
When we added the family room, Fred evidently felt he had to investigate the strange contraptions we call light switches. After installing electric power to the new room, we were awoken that first night by the light switches being turned on and off, casting a reflection of light on the garden walls. Wes went down to the family room and told Fred to knock it off so we could sleep, and he did.
One sunny afternoon Wes and I were sitting in a gazebo we had constructed in the back of the garden. Fred walked out of our back door as if he owned the place and proceeded to walk up the pathway leading to the gazebo. Every hair on my body was standing on end. In the sunshine, Fred was semi- transparent, looking somewhat like an old fashioned photograph negative. Happily, Fred paused before reaching the gazebo. He stopped at the foot of an ancient tree that must have been older than the house, and froze starring at the foot of the tree. After a half hour, we got the courage to run past Fred.
Now many people have asked “Why didn’t you dig where Fred was standing?” All I can say is that this would have meant destroying a lovely tree, and I really did not want to find a corpse (and probably have city officials breathing down our necks). Of course, others have said that perhaps there was a buried treasure of gold at the base of the tree. Yeah, perhaps Amelia Earhart was buried there along with Jimmy Hoffa.
After a year and 11 months, I just could not take it any longer. Wes agreed that the stress was becoming too much for me (since I was Fred’s favorite) and we sold the house to a young couple. California law recognizes the reality of such manifestations and required us to disclose our experiences to the buyers, but they laughed them off as superstition. Ten years later we learned that they had both died in the house. But that is part of another installment of my paranormal life.
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