An S.F. ghost tour with history and haunts

Christian Cagigal has always known that San Francisco is haunted.

That’s not a downside for him. The 49-year-old SF-born magician has always possessed a mutual interest in both his hometown and the spirit world.

As a student at San Francisco State University, his interests caught the attention of established SF magician Jim Fassbinder. The elder took the younger magician under his wing, just as Fassbinder was about to combine his talents into a new tourist attraction.

“I helped [Jim] create the tour back in 1998,” says Cagigal. “I was already known in that community as the kid who mixed magic, storytelling and theater. So, he wanted my help creating the tour.”

The result was the San Francisco Ghost Hunt, a 90-minute evening-based walk from Japantown to Pacific Heights that combines local history with staged effects to highlight the literal and figurative spirits of the city.

It covers deceased figures like Mary Ellen Pleasant and Gertrude Atherton, as well as the historic Majestic Hotel, where the tour usually ends. Some of this year’s October tours conclude with a walkthrough of the Majestic’s infamous Room 407, purported home of the specter “Lady Lisa”.

“Said to be a family member of the original founders of the hotel, Lady Lisa continues to haunt the room that was her residence for the past one hundred years,” Cagigal explains. “She’s been known to shake the four-post bed, cause leaks that were never there, and appear in guests’ dreams.”

Fassbinder hosted the tour — wearing his trademark black top hat, matching black coat, and holding a Victorian-style lantern — before time began to take its toll.

After 17 years, he retired, selling ownership of the tour to Cagigal, who kept the top-hat-and-lantern aesthetic. He also initially kept the year-round schedule before shortening it to an annual spring/summer offering, followed by its annual October run.

“In the past, sales and attendance were driven by women ages 25-45 who were quite often dragging a reluctant or annoyed boyfriend or husband who doesn’t believe in ghosts,” he recalls. Now, he said, pop culture of true crime, TV shows and podcasts has made the paranormal cool for believers and non-believers alike. 

“The people who drive attendance to my tour are now both the girlfriend and the boyfriend; the 10-year-old boy who made the whole family pick the ghost tour; goths, tech people, nerds, normies, everyone,” he said. 

Though the magician delights in giving tourists a Halloween thrill, he insists his scares are harmless. He’s reluctant to talk about the time one guest had to bow out from fear, but he’s facetious when asked about what one should expect on a hunt.

“Depends on the night!” he says. “Sometimes I rip off my face, worms poke out, and demon clowns grab the guests, and take them back to demon clown land. … Or, you might just get little me in a top hat telling you stories. You never know!”

He also says that, despite the regular presence of strangers walking up and down the blocks of their neighborhood, local residents have never complained. 

“I started back up in summer 2021,” he says, recalling the tour’s absence in 2020, only to return with widespread vaccinations the following year. 

“As the tour returned, many took it as a hopeful sign.” 

Ultimately, the goal of the tour is to add contemporary context to the city’s complex history. The Ghost Hunt dips into the bureaucratic dealings that led to the creation of the city’s various districts.

Though he doesn’t spoil tour details, he does recognize parallels to contemporary controversial proposals. Still, he tries to keep overt judgment to a minimum.

“People are complicated in life and in the afterlife,” he says. “No one ghost is particularly condemnable on our tour route. One figure was demonized for a long time, but seen through a modern lens, one can see that she did what she had to do help others and survive.”

As both a student of history and an American citizen, Cagigal acknowledges that daily headlines have provided more scares over the past 10 months than most of what he tells during the Ghost Hunt.

With his SF Ghost Hunt providing a controlled environment, Cagigal says there’s only one thing we should truly fear: “Always be scared of the history we have forgotten or ignored, because it will haunt us, and in its worst cases, rise from the dead again.”

The San Francisco Ghost Hunt runs Tuesday to Sunday evenings through Oct. 31, beginning at an undisclosed location in Japantown. Tickets are $39.99.