THE STORY
Reported Haunting
San Francisco's historic Cliff House is associated with apparitions around the surrounding cliffs and firsthand employee reports of unexplained lights, sound equipment operating by itself and other activity inside the building.
The Cliff House has stood above Ocean Beach in several forms since 1863 and is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Local ghost lore traditionally includes a sorrowful female apparition seen near the rocks below the building. More recently, a former night groundskeeper described unexplained activity inside the Cliff House itself while preparing a banquet room alone: the lights reportedly switched off and back on without assistance and music playing through the room's sound system independently stopped and restarted. The employee said a longtime coworker subsequently told him that he and others had experienced multiple ghost sightings and other unexplained incidents in the building. These building-specific reports distinguish the Cliff House haunting from the neighboring Sutro Baths ghost tradition.