It’s a cool autumn evening in San Francisco and I’m following a drag queen around the Union Square district, listening to notorious tales of the infamous Zodiac Killer and Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult. Mary Vice is leading an evening ghost-walk tour for Wild SF Walking Tours. Standing in the lobby of the imposing Westin St Francis Hotel, the suitably goth-looking Mary tells our small group about an aspiring actress who died under suspicious circumstances attending a party with silent-film legend Fatty Arbuckle in 1921, and about the ghosts rumoured to haunt this grand old establishment.
That San Francisco has more than its fair share of murder stories is not surprising. The city has acted as a magnet for drifters, the displaced, and those who simply felt different, for decades. This has famously included millions of LGBTQ people.