Golden Gate Park Ghost Rider

Some Halloween-ish fare inspired by a “true” ghost story.

— Found in the personal papers of George Haviland Barron, former curator of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, after his death on June 24, 1942. —

August 12, 1912 

I credit myself as a man of science. My lifetime has been punctuated by great achievements of ingenuity and rational application: electric light, the telephone, motion picture cameras, airplanes…yes, even the heavens themselves have been trespassed upon and conquered by the patient application of science.

While in the course of my duties at the museum I have had occasion to handle objects and reliquaries from which the superstitious would quail—mummies, funereal objects, even a purportedly cursed idol. Never beyond a degree of anthropological interest have I given credence to any folk tale, pagan myth, or report of supernatural manifestation.

The events of last Friday night, however, have quite frankly shaken my confidence.

As is my nightly custom, I was reading in my residence behind the museum. I will here preempt any assumption that my choice of material influenced or deluded my senses. In preparation for sleep I always delve into the driest professional periodicals. On this evening I chose a metallurgical analysis of copper antiquities from the Southern Levant—hardly fodder for gothic fancies.

As the hour approached midnight, I decided to take a turn on South Drive before retiring. I often test myself in identifying astronomical phenomena, but had little hope to do so this night. The fog had crept in. Tendrils of mist surrounded me, muffling sight and sound.

I reached the drive, which I might have missed if not for the feel of the macadam road under my feet, and in the gloom I instinctively moved towards the lonely street lamp that stands on that part of the road.

How deathly quiet the park felt at that hour! Even the usual doleful moans of distant foghorns were strangely absent.

No more than a moment after noting the silence, and just as I reached the street lamp, I heard the clattering of horses’ hooves approaching from the east. I turned. Out of the haze of fog yellowed by the wan reach of the lamplight there did burst a large black horse galloping at full speed.

In an instant the beast was passing my startled form. On its back I was surprised to see clinging a young woman wearing a straw hat. Her eyes protruded, her mouth gaped, and her expression was one of strain, if not terror. They were past me in a blink. At the curve in the road west the fog swallowed up the horse and girl and the sound of their manic ride before I had even finished raising my arm to hail the rider.

The twisted countenance of the young girl, the furious lather on the ink-black horse, and the pair’s strange apparition out of the grasping fog made a profound impression upon me.

I at once returned to the residence and called the park police on the telephone. Officer Connolly, one of the oldest members of the force, answered. I told of the speeding horse and girl rider, and asked if any disturbance in the park panhandle explained their mad rush west. Connolly had seen no rider and reported all was calm near the superintendent’s lodge and police station.

He then paused a moment before asking, almost reluctantly, “Did the girl have on a straw hat or bonnet?”

As I had not mentioned the hat in my rush of explanation I now exclaimed, “Yes, she did. Then you have seen her! She seemed in much distress and I think you might send a man to check on her.”

The old officer sighed. “Not to worry, sir. I know what this is about. If you’re free in the morning, I’ll drop by when my shift ends to give you a report.”

We made arrangements to meet at seven. I retired to my bed agitated, but expected the poor girl would be found and returned safely to her family.

The next morning Connolly arrived at the residence in one of the two new automobiles the park commission had recently purchased for the police. A younger officer was driving the machine. Connolly rose from the passenger seat, looking uneasy with the effort and the general state of the world which allowed such mechanized horrors. Nevertheless, his face settled into solicitude as he wished me good morning and asked, “Are you up for a short ride in the Devil’s cabriolet?”

While I held none of Connolly’s prejudice for motorized vehicles, I was puzzled by the offer. “Where are we going?”

“To the beach. That’s where your fair rider headed last night.”

“Is she there now?”

Connolly shrugged. “I’m not sure if she’s anywhere right now, sir.” He saw my confusion and gestured me in. “Have a seat and I’ll tell you what I know on the way.”

The morning fog had a translucent glow and it thinned as we drove west. Connolly turned sideways in his seat to talk to me in the back, but took frequent glances forward to check on his driver’s attentiveness to the road.

“I heard about her before I saw her, probably in my first year. Supposedly it was Michael O’Brien’s horse. He was one of the first park police. As the story goes, he was outside the Three Bells, that old roadhouse that was on the panhandle, a bit before midnight.

“A young woman comes out of the Bells flushed with wine, wearing a straw hat. She gives O’Brien a hard time, just for fun, banters with him, and asks to ride his fine horse a little way down the drive. The girl was young, and O’Brien was young himself, so he does the stupid thing and puts the girl up on the big black horse. No sooner was she in the saddle than the charger bolts into the park.

“They looked the rest of the night, but didn’t find them until the next morning. At the beach.”

We were just passing the Murphy windmill and the fog completely gave up its hold of the earth. Bright sunshine reflected off the ocean breakers. I shook my head at the old officer, whom I knew had been in the park police for almost thirty years. “What do you mean, Connolly? You heard about this woman in your first year on the force? The girl I saw last night couldn't have been older than twenty.”

“Yes, that’s her,” Connolly said as we stopped on the Great Highway. He got out and walked to the eroded bank beside the Beach Chalet. I followed and looked out on the sandy shore to where he pointed. “They found the girl and the horse, both drowned and washed up there on the ocean’s edge. Since then, she does the run every year, a bit before midnight.”

Below us, on the otherwise spotless sand, headed straight west into the fizzling surf, was a line of hoof prints.

(Inspired by a “true” ghost story reported by George Barron in August 1912. Details of the sighting varied in newspaper stories just three days after the night of Barron’s experience, so I felt free to make up my own version.)

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

What is not scary is having a drink with me. Good, upstanding, broad-minded people have donated to the Woody Beer and Coffee Fund just so I can buy yours and we can talk about ectoplasmic phenomena. (Or baseball... your choice.) When are you free?

Sources

“Museum Curator Sees Park Ghost,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 1912, pg. 8.

“Phantom Runaway Scares Barron,” San Francisco Examiner, August 12, 1912, pg. 5.