Back to Recent Press

Dead and Breakfast
by Antoinette May

Consider the case of San Francisco's Hotel Union Square. Concierge Tom Steele says guests like the hotel so much that some never left.

In 2003, a young Scott, traveling with his grandmother complained to Steele that a woman ghost appeared to him in room 207. "She's friendly - too friendly," he said. "I was up most of the night closing the bathroom door - the re-closing it. She wanted to come out and wake up my grandmother."

Hotelier Yvonne Lembi-Detert avoids 207. "I turn my back and things appear out of nowhere," she says. "Nothing scary - the last object was a Kleenex - but it still spooked me."

On the other hand, many guests request 207. Some connect the mischievous ghost to Lillian Hellman. A boozer, a lover and a fighter, the volatile playwright was not one to go quietly into the night. (She's said to have propositioned a young dinner companion the night before she died - at 79.) Some of Hellman's glamorous and celebrated affair with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett played out at the hotel where Hammett headquartered while writing his Noir classics. (Hellman is thought to have inspired Nora Charles, co-star of the "Thin Man" series. Jack's Grill across the street is the setting for much of Hammett's Maltese Falcon.)

The restaurant and hotel are linked by an underground passage under Ellis Street. Before Prohibition, guests entered the hotel's bar by means of a slide on Powell Street. Lively days - so lively that present day guests report sightings of bodies sleeping it off in the hotel hallways. Of course, on closer investigation... no one's there.

Back to Recent Press