hauntings

The weather has turned crisp as it always does in the Bay Area just in time for Halloween, so it felt like the perfect atmosphere in the Mission tonight for some San Francisco ghost stories.  Aimee joined me on the couch at antique shop Gypsy Honeymoon as Instant City presented a number of local writers with spooky tales to tell, though I think only one of them involved an actual ghost.  I loved Hiya Swanhuyser's piece about a bygone area of the city that used to be a lively home to artists and radicals back in the day, right where the Transamerica Pyramid sits now.  And Kevin Hobson's poem about a woman with a rat in her handbag he encountered on the 14 Mission one recent morning was also brilliant.  Maybe I'm secretly glad most of the stories weren't that scary, as I'll actually be able to turn out the lights when I go to bed tonight.