The Blue Lady

With all its history, it’s easy to get lost in the ghost stories that haunt the San Francisco [1]. Yet two of the most famous Bay Area hauntings aren’t anywhere close to Chinatown [2] or Nob Hill [3]. Instead, strange stories and creepy occurrences perch nearer to the perilous cliffs of the Pacific Coast, and lurk in the Santa Cruz Mountain forests.

Just north of Half Moon Bay [4], the Moss Beach Distillery [5] has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries and written up in countless publications. Not for its food, but for its famous ghost: the Blue Lady.

Rumor has it that a beautiful young woman walked the cliffs of Moss Beach from her home to the coastside speakeasy (now the Distillery) to meet her lover, a handsome piano player who worked in the bar. The Lady, whose name has never been discovered, perished one night on the cliffs under suspicious circumstances.

Some say that her lover had left her, and she threw herself down onto the rocks out of grief; others claim that her seafaring husband came home, discovered his wife’s infidelity, and shoved her to eternity.

However it happened, in the middle of the 20th century, odd things started occurring at the Distillery. A storage room with only one door and a barred-over window became stuck from the inside. Eventually, several men bashed it open, only to discover several heavy cases of spirits that had been shoved up against the door to keep it closed. But by whom? No one was in the room, and no one could have gotten out.

Many years and a major reconstruction later (the building sits on a slowly eroding cliff that will eventually lie beneath the ocean), an accountant was working late one night in the restaurant’s offices. She was startled to hear her printer turn itself on…startled because she was in another office using a different computer and was alone in the building. Upon examination, the printer yielded a single piece of paper with a tiny heart printed on it. The accountant believes this means the ghost likes her.

Today, the Distillery is a favorite with ghost-hunting groups, who often come to spend the night in an old building that gets decidedly creepy after the lights go out. Restaurant patrons rarely have ghostly experiences, unless you count those created by the owner for the entertainment of his customers.