In honor of Halloween – a haunted house.
Gertrude Francis Horn was born in San Francisco in 1857. Her parents separated when she was two and Gertrude was raised by her mother and maternal grandfather. They moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where Gertrude would meet George HB Atherton, who happened to be courting Gertrude’s mother. When her mother refused to marry him, Atherton turned his attention to Gertrude, who finally agreed to elope with him in 1876 after six proposals. They moved to the San Francisco peninsula to live with George’s parents. The Athertons were a wealthy couple with an estate in a town that would eventually be named after them. When George’s father died in 1882, his mother Dominica built a mansion at the corner of California and Octavia that came to be known as the Atherton House. Dominica, George and Gertrude, and their son and daughter lived there. The Atherton House is an standard Queen Anne house with gables and a tower.
Gertrude’s son died of diphtheria, and George died unexpectedly at the age of 35 from kidney stone complications on a ship bound for Chile. Not knowing how to preserve the body for the journey back to San Francisco, the captain made the decision to stuff the body in a barrel of rum. He unloaded his cargo onto another ship bound for the City, and the captain of that ship kept the body a secret for fear of spooking the crew. George’s body traveled from Tahiti to San Francisco in the rum barrel hidden beneath a shipment of coconuts. A notification was sent ahead to Gertrude informing her of her husband’s death and the return of his body, but the barrel arrived before the letter, only to be opened by an unsuspecting butler. Soon after George’s burial, both women moved out of Atherton House: Dominica and Gertrude’s daughter returned to the Atherton estate in the South Bay and Gertrude, taking the inheritance originally intended for her son, moved to New York, then London, then Paris. She wrote many short stories, essays and articles for both magazines and newspapers.
She returned to San Francisco in 1890 when her mother-in-law died, taking custodial charge of her daughter. The Atherton House was sold. Gertrude wrote a weekly column for Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner[1]. In 1892 she moved to New York to write for the New York World but she hated New York and moved back to London where she began to write novels, mostly historical fiction about the birth of California. She returned to the United States in 1899.
In 1923 she published the book “Black Oxen”, a semi-autobiographical novel about an aging woman who miraculously becomes young again after glandular surgery. It was a cautionary tale about the risks of seeking eternal youth and vitality. It was made into a silent movie by the same name that same year.
In her later years, Gertrude wrote psychological horror and ghost stories. She died on June 14, 1948 in San Francisco at the age of 90. She was buried at Cypress Lawn in Colma.
The Atherton House was first sold to Edgar Mills, then George Chauncey Boardman, then Charles Rousseau, who in 1923 converted the house into 13 apartments. Carrie Rousseau, Charles’ widow, would remain in Apartments 12 and 13 until her death at the age of 93 in 1974. Apartment 12 was the old ballroom and Carrie’s apartment. Apartment 13 was the old banquet hall and housed Carrie’s fifty cats. Rumor has it that the house, after Carrie’s death, has been haunted by four ghosts: George, Dominica, Gertrude, and Carrie. Tenants have reported hearing knocks and experiencing cold spots or rushes of cold air. Atherton House is included in every San Francisco ghost tour. Haunted or not, the house is a good representation of San Francisco 19th century architecture and was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1979.
[1] San Francisco Examiner: see story coming June 6th
