The Edwardian Maid of 2275 Sutter Street
What lurks in the crannies of those old San Francisco houses.
When I turned 18 I moved to San Francisco. It was not very far; I grew up in the East Bay, a fifteen minute drive across the Bay Bridge (at least back in the mid-Eighties, when there was less traffic). I hung out in SF a lot – going to concerts, shopping for vintage clothes, visiting museums. But living there was somehow a big leap. There was something final about being across the bay, with four miles of water between myself and the people I loved. That actually happened when the destruction of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 physically cut me off from the East Bay for a couple of weeks. By that time I was completely ensconced in San Francisco, and no longer cared.
Moving to SF (the natives call it by just the letters) was the natural progression of my life. In my last attempt to be close to my mother after she discarded me at 15, I had been invited back to live rent-free in the in-law apartment located in the basement of her house. That lasted about eight weeks before her psychopathic partner had a violent nervous breakdown and ousted me, throwing all my belongings into the street. I was a freshman at San Francisco State University, and my commute back and forth from the East Bay was too long anyway. The first place I moved, in forced haste, was a roach-infested apartment I shared with four men in the Western Addition. It was a rough neighborhood back then. Sick of the filth and crime, I was soon searching for another place to live. A mutual friend introduced me to Joey, who was looking to share her studio apartment in the Lower Pacific Heights/Japantown area. Sharing a studio is not ideal and takes the right personalities, but Joey matched my energy. She was pretty and smart, had an irreverent sense of humor, and wild, long, dark curly hair similar to mine. We eagerly began co-habiting the studio, which, with two people paying rent, was dirt cheap.
Joey was a few years older than me, but we had tons in common. We loved vintage clothes, movies, and furnishings. We were music fanatics who had lots of friends in bands. We wore 1940s dresses with slashes of red lipstick. Joey gave me her expired driver’s license for a fake ID, and although we didn’t look exactly alike, it worked because of the hair. We partied a lot.
We adjusted to the lack of privacy. The studio was L-shaped, and Joey had her bed in the short corner of the L. My bed was located in a loft, around the corner and above the kitchenette. The loft was deeply set below the high ceiling, and may have been a storage cupboard in a former life.
As much as Joey and I enjoyed living together, there were concerns in the building. A couple living on our floor were in a domestic violence relationship. We sometimes heard yelling through our walls, and big thuds, like someone being thrown to the floor. The neighbor between us and them would scream and call the police. The next day, the abused woman would be spotted on the stairs in big sunglasses, attempting to cover her black eyes. She tried to smile, which I found heartbreakingly sad.
Less upsetting, but really annoying, were the constant emergency sirens. The building was very close to a hospital, and the sirens wailed day and night. I eventually got used to it, but it could create this ambient state of unease.
Twenty-two seventy-five Sutter was an Edwardian building, built post-1906 earthquake. So it was pretty old, even in the 1980s. Like many apartments in SF, it looked like it had once been a grand residence, later divided into about eleven small units. Our apartment was replete with historical details, such as high windows facing the street, and gorgeous moldings with stunning figureheads of a young woman’s face that repeated around our walls, high above the wainscoting.
My loft was on the same level as the upper molding, and I often parted my curtains to study the figureheads from the other side of the room. They represented a young woman, not vastly different looking from myself. Their aura of history and mystery captivated me, but their blank eyes and aloof stares were a little disquieting. It was like staring into the face of a sphinx: what must they have witnessed, having been there so long?
I was watching TV up in my loft a couple of months after I moved in. I spent my long days at college, studying, or working at a movie theater, and I was enjoying some hard-won leisure time while Joey was out. Out of nowhere, cold fingers of air reached out to swirl around my face and body. Within the cold swirling there was the feeling of human emotion; it felt like curiosity, or indeed, wonder, but I was still a little freaked out. As many times as one may have these experiences, they often feel scary and new.
The sensations kept happening when Joey was out and I was alone in the apartment at night. I asked Joey if she had ever felt the swirling air, or the sense of a presence. She had not. But the frequency of the occurrences forced me to take notice. I felt like the presence had something to do with the cartouche moldings; the faces of the women became connected to it in my mind. The presence felt like a young woman also, poking around and getting in my business. Like some kind of hanger-on.
I had been wearing my nana’s embroidered cotton petticoat as a skirt. From the turn of the 20th century, the skirt was the oldest vintage piece I owned, and I coveted it. I left it lying around one day, and when I came home to clean up, I couldn’t find it. I scoured my tiny closet. I interrogated Joey, who knew nothing about it. The antique petticoat had somehow just disappeared.
I told my friend Kim about what I suspected was a ghost in our apartment. She was very intrigued, though I explained it only showed itself when I was home alone. One night after a rock show, Kim and I kicked back in my loft, watching late night TV. Right before we dozed off, the cold, swirling air swept in. I became as still as possible, wondering if the sensation would quickly blow away. I called Kim quietly, shaking her fully awake. “It’s here,” I whispered. Kim lay there, staring into space. “Oh my God. I feel it,” she said, her voice shaking with fear and excitement. “I understand it now.” As soon as she spoke, the cold whirl dissipated with force down the creaky ladder.
The presence never showed up for Joey, or my boyfriend, Thomas. They remained skeptical. It was only Kim’s confidence about what she had also experienced that made the encounter more than a flight of my imagination. But Kim and I shared some crucial traits: we were both young women on our own, who had been mostly jettisoned by our dysfunctional families by our late teens. Something about this state of being was attracting the presence. I began to feel it had been a young woman on her own, like myself. Considering the small size of our top-floor unit, it could well have been the quarters of domestic servants, and I was only about three generations out from that fate myself. While I remained wary of the occurrences, and didn’t like my internal state being hijacked, I began to feel compassion for whoever’s emotional stamp remained.
Forty years later, I still had a connection to 2275 Sutter Street. My good friend and spiritual confidante, Stacey, lived at 2275 Sutter Street ten years after I did. Which is really odd, considering we met on the other side of the continent, as neighbors in an apartment building in Brooklyn, decades later. Twenty-two seventy-five Sutter Street contains only eleven units. Eleven units out of the hundreds of thousands in the city of San Francisco. It is almost like the presence had something to do with the close friendship that Stacey and I share.
I moved out of 2275 Sutter Street after a couple of years for more space, moving to New York City a few years after that to attend graduate school. Joey eventually settled in the East Bay with her husband, in the house she grew up. There is little online information about 2275 Sutter Street, but the Google Maps page shows it still standing, albeit with a much less exciting paint job. Since spirits have a crappy sense of time, I assume she is still there.