Golden Gate Xpress | San Francisco’s unintentional feminist ghost tour

The streets of Pacific Heights on a Tuesday night are not a typical setting for a history lesson. The teacher, who cosplayed a cross between a Victorian gentleman and a performer from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, does little to make this any less weird.
When Christian Cagigal, owner of SF Ghost Hunt and sole tour guide, told the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant – an abolitionist dubbed the “Mother of Civil Rights in California” – the 32 tour participants seemed to be attached to his every word.
Cagigal could look like a steampunker from the context of the tour. His night uniform consists of a black caban, a pink bow tie and a black top hat with an outwardly curved brim. He said his Victorian style outfit is common among spirit guides. He was armed with an old fashioned lantern to complete the look.
“I think we’re all just trying to mimic the Haunted Mansion archetypes,” Cagigal said in a pre-tour interview.
Cagigal started SF Ghost Hunt with his then business partner Jim Fassbinder in 1998 and made it the first ghost tour in town. At the time, Cagigal was studying theater at SF State. The two already knew each other from San Francisco’s amateur wizarding scene; he said Fassbinder initially got in touch because of his penchant for mixing storytelling and magic.
In front of the Healing Arts Building on Bush Street, Cagigal begins the tour about an African-American capitalist with three contradicting biographies during the SF Ghost Tour on October 26, 2021. (Cameron Lee / Golden Gate Xpress) (Cameron Lee)
When Fassbinder retired in 2016, Cagigal took over. Since then, he said he has made a few updates, mostly on social justice and feminism topics. The latter was initially a coincidence, he said.
“It’s a very women-friendly program,” said Cagigal. “I didn’t try to do the feminist ghost tour. It’s just what happened. “
Pleasant, the subject of the tour’s first stop in front of today’s Healing Arts Building on Bush Street, is an enigmatic figure in San Francisco history. As an African-American capitalist and millionaire in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, she has published three different biographies in her lifetime – each contradicting the last.
For her part, Cagigal said Pleasant did little to clear up the rumors about her. When it became the talk of the town that she was practicing voodoo, she began to carry a crystal ball in the palm of her hand.
According to some, she was a freed slave with ties to the famous abolitionist John Brown. For others, she was a voodoo priestess who learned her trade from Marie Laveau, the “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans”.
Cagigal said that it was clear to the people on the tour that his version of the story was just one of many. In fact, at the end of the tour, he said he would send an email with links to two other books on Pleasant that delve into two other potential life stories.
“It was important for me to try what I could to represent them better,” said Cagigal.
Since her death, he has said that the spirit of Pleasant continues to haunt the property where her mansion once stood. Dogs have been known to bark unprovoked when passing by. Another time a crow shot from above and landed on the head of a local restaurant owner, and the tall eucalyptus trees Pleasant himself planted have been known for throwing their seeds at passers-by with unusual precision.
Almost all of the ghosts seen on the tour are women – and strong ones, according to Cagigal.
“If there is some kind of demonization that happens to them in the story, I try to tone it down with the context so people understand why this person or that person may have done whatever they did,” he said.
Since leaving Fassbinder, he has been running the tour several nights a week until the pandemic broke out, forcing him to cease operations except for a few virtual tours last October. Cagigal said he re-launched personal tours last June, starting three evenings a week with 20 people. That was less than his average of 30 or 40 people per tour before the pandemic.
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People just die for something. You want out. “
– Christian Cagigal
To his surprise, these tours sold out, so he increased the number to 25 people and added an extra night just to run out of tickets again. Cagigal said it was one of the best October the company has ever had, in part with people’s pent-up boredom about the pandemic.
“People just die for something. They want out, ”he said, adding that the fact that the tour was outdoors and required masking for non-vaccinated participants helped customers feel safe.
Tina Robinette and Andrew Chapman, both from Alameda, said they signed up for Ghost Hunt because they were fans of ghost tours. Robinette estimated she had done about 10 tours across the country, while Chapman said he had done between 20 or 30 tours.
Since the two had recently moved to the bay this year, Robinette added that they realized that ghost tours are a unique way to learn about an area and mentioned that they have been to New Orleans, Canada, Washington on other tours DC and across California.
“It’s really fun to explore a city,” she said. “This is the first tour we’ve been on since moving to San Francisco.”
With tour participants around him, Cagigal tells the story of a female spirit. one of many to be seen on the tour on October 26, 2021. “It’s a very women-friendly program,” said Cagigal. (Cameron Lee / Golden Gate Xpress) (Cameron Lee)
Chapman said Cagigal had a fun vibe compared to some of the other tour hosts he’s dealt with in the past. He said his lively personality helped.
“He wasn’t trying to be super creepy all along,” Chapman said. “Once in a while [ghost tours] Really go overboard if you’re trying to be scary or really overboard if you’re trying to be cheesy. He had a nice combo of ‘Here are the facts as I know them, here is what is not explained, here is what is explained’ and that was pretty cool. “
For someone in the business of the paranormal, Cagigal still has a certain skepticism about what he is open and honest on his tours. Whenever he tells one of his stories, he describes a sudden and mysterious death before throwing in, rather sarcastically, that the death could have been due to a number of things.
“It was in the 19th century, all deaths were sudden and mysterious,” he said.
Despite his own skepticism, Cagigal said he wanted to believe in ghosts. According to him, his favorite moments on tour don’t come when he’s teaching, but when he can’t find an explanation for them.
“I love these moments,” he said. “When I’m in a little mysterious place, ‘Maybe there was a ghost, who knows.'”