(No. 5, a ±09 minute read)
Happy Halloween. Don’t expect this to be an annual deal, I don’t have enough ghost stories for that and of those this is the only one I’m telling. The others are too fraught.
Yes, a ghost. On the day before Halloween, some thirty years after it happened, a ghost story that when I conjure it still plays in my mind as if it were yesterday. I am not a superstitious type; I don’t have any activity-specific rituals I indulge in, I am agnostic at best, and have never visited a medium to commune with the dead. That said, I grew up in Honolulu, a city on an island rife with spirits and ghost stories.
We knew as kids to fall to the ground prostrate if we heard the drums of the huaka‘i pō, night marchers escorting the most powerful of leaders or gods as they transited O‘ahu—and not to open or raise our eyes lest we risk being struck dead. We checked out the spooky spot where babies cry, heard something, and figured it was birds. Skeptics. The old Pali Road was something else though, more recently murdered spirits and old Hawaiian tales of warriors driven over the cliff to their deaths wandering together—best to just not walk that after dark. And of course there was the entirety of this place itself, Hawai‘i, full of history, legends, spirits, bones.
In elementary school a friend and I played in a cave with a smoke-blackened roof and a walled up rear ante-room. We didn’t dare pull any stones or even hang out back there too long. It wasn’t our place. Our time was spent in the front half of the cave exploring and pretending as kids still in single digits do. For all of this rich environment for encounters with the mysterious my childhood remained free of specters or haunts. Any inhabitants of adjacent worlds didn’t care to bother with kids busy exploring the ocean and the mountains of their home. We lived wholly in the earthly world around us and found our wonder there, rather than with the supernatural.
Nothing otherworldly happened through getting my degree, I heard an experience of encountering the San Francisco Art Institute’s tower ghost, firsthand, from the last person who I would have believed would have succumbed to an arcane visitor. The encounter kept my source on their toes, disinclined to spend any longer than necessary in the school’s entry courtyard after dark or before dawn, or so it was confessed. There was no threat implied in the encounter, just SFAI’s ghost in her nineteenth century garb, someone we living didn’t need to spend time with. I was sworn never to reveal this confession’s source, and even as they themselves are no longer among the living, I won’t.
SFAI and its diverse tendrils led me many places, among them was one of the few jobs I’ve had working for others. I was only a year or so out of school and I needed a consistent check to finance my new South of Market live-work space’s rent and renovation. An SFAI graduate somewhere closer to my parents age than mine was co-owner of a contracting firm looking to hire. I had just finished working on the studio construction of another, still older SFAI graduate, a painter, and he gave me a number. His friend needed a carpenter.
Kirk was hip, the hippest person I’d ever seen in construction. He exuded a cross-generational cool not common among people I’d met his age—he’d take a chance on me. I’d be the youngest hire at his company and the only white one. His was a Black-owned firm out of Berkeley working state contracts that offered preferential bidding to minority-owned firms. He needed someone on a project on Sacramento St. in the city. Work began at seven a.m., was I able to deal with that? Sure.
The building was a four story, seven-unit apartment building held in receivership by the state, its owner allowed the Edwardian to achieve such a state of disrepair that it qualified to be wrested from his control and renovated by a state manager. This mechanism of renovation existed to protect California’s housing stock of multi-unit rentals from falling off the market. Notably upset with the situation, the owner once dropped in waving a pistol and ordering everybody out which did not go over well. And there I was, the college kid; always an enviable position on a construction crew. Pretty quickly the foreman on the site was fired for padding his hours and I was inexplicably made foreman—a twenty-four year old white manager in an all Black company. Uncomfortable, but nobody seemed to care but me.
A couple of months after that the site was slowed down for another project that needed hands. It was left to me and occasionally Paul, another carpenter with fifteen years on me and my boss’s partner’s brother. He was a sweet man, haven’t seen him in decades. He warned me though, in passing, when I arrived at Sacramento Street. There were sometimes footfalls that echoed in the empty building. He looked once, didn’t find anything and gave it a shrug from then on out. I probably said that was weird or something equally insightful. Paul was the last called to the company’s labor-short project, a new building on a site in the East Bay hills that had been incinerated by the Tunnel Fire.
The Sacramento Street building had just had its foundation replaced when I started and among my first tasks there involved installing bolted hardware to tie the frame to the new concrete. It was slab on grade mostly, but the rear quarter was elevated over a crawlspace just tall enough, if I recall, for me to bang my head. Paul sent me into the tight spots and suffered elsewhere beneath the building drilling inch wide holes in the new concrete footings and tightening bolts. When Paul was pulled away I was left to finish all the pick-up framing on the ground floor: dividing rooms, dropping ceilings, building chases, framing windows and doors. Just me and Sacramento Street.
After I finished the plumbers would follow and start their rough-in, cutting apart my work for waste, gas, and water piping the way only a plumber can ruin new framing. Once they arrived I’d move up a floor and repeat. I looked forward to that, there’d be light and air upstairs the ground floor didn’t have. Mine would be a basement work tenancy, for all intents and purposes, on the first floor. Up above I had a wall to look forward to reframing — a tree limb had grown through it into a living room. Not everyday you get to do that.
That was it, my work life starting everyday at 7:00; opening up the site, turning the power on, setting up the compressor, making sure that no one had squatted the building overnight. A couple of times I arrived to find the portable toilet we had in the entryway overturned, likely by drunk frat boys that caroused Fillmore St. bars. The entryway is gated today. I still hate drunks. That was it though, cutting wood, listening to the compressor cycle once I’d fired enough nails from the gun, the bus idling at the stop sign on the corner, and working alone with my boss stopping by to take lumber orders and say “hi” once a week or so. Getting ready for the plumbers, that was my deal, I didn’t mind it. I played a lot of CDs.
And for a while no footsteps sounded on the floors above. That didn’t last. The first time I heard them I was sure someone must have spent the night in the building, I forgot Paul’s portent. I called out to no response—went upstairs to check the gutted rooms. Nothing. The staircase penthouse on the roof was padlocked. I’d been warned. For a few days after there was nothing but cutting out rotted framing and replacing it, framing door openings to match the door schedule, eating my lunch in the cold site and getting back at it. But, of course, the disembodied footsteps returned. I ditched my nail bags, grabbed my framing hammer and raced up the stairs, the steps echoing on the carriage above me until I got to the last flight, no sound looking up at the door to the roof. Padlocked.
This happened a few times, over weeks turning into months until, like Paul, I gave up. Shrugged. Nobody was crashing in the building overnight. It was always locked tight when I arrived, our job boxes secure, the stair penthouse door padlocked, no barred windows or plywood-covered openings breached. I didn’t believe that there could be a ghost, that seemed a pretty singular a possibility in what had become such an ordinary place. Certainly it had known occupants who might not have made it in the eighty years between its opening and my time contributing to its rebuild, but haunted? I didn’t believe, it was my job site. And if I ignored the walker the noise would stop—it only ever happened in the mornings after I’d arrived and probably not in any longer of a period than maybe my first hour there.
Seven a.m. in a San Francisco winter is dark, night dark. I’m sure any neighbors who heard my nail gun driving sixteen penny nails or my Skilsaw ripping a furring strip at quarter after seven could not have been thrilled. I didn’t much like it either in the dark and chill of January, February. I was near the stairs and close to having the plumbers on site though, just a drop ceiling in the front unit’s living and dining rooms. I’d set all my joist hangers on the property line wall, leveled a line opposite and was pulling my tape across the room, cutting a drop ceiling 2x4 joist, tipping it into the hanger, walking across the room to my ladder, picking up the other end of the joist, walking it up the ladder and setting it with a single nail fired from the nail gun to come back and set all the joist hangers on the transverse wall at once. Every sixteen inches across maybe thirty feet of rooms I repeated this.
Halfway through the first room my compressor cycled on to fill its tanks, and I mounted the ladder to climb the nine or so feet to the ceiling with the nail gun in one hand and lifting the triangle my tipped in 2x4 formed from the ground to its home on the other end of the ceiling. The temperature dropped abruptly and my lined canvas jacket and scarf were no longer enough, the chill cut my legs through my double-fronted blue jeans.
And then the compressor cut off, the traffic noise and voices on the street ceased and something filled the rooms, perhaps flowing through the studs of the framed walls I’d built. I was not quite halfway up my ladder, freezing, the job light strings still lit—the only normalcy. The room had become choked with silence, not quiet but filled with silence, like a heavy cloud, cold—tactile, engulfing me, pressing against me and into me, a presence with no form.
I remember taking another rung of the ladder so that I could rest the 2x4 on the ladder’s top. A twelve foot 2x4 suddenly heavy and not something I any longer wanted to hold. The cold and silence pressed tighter. The cast aluminum of the nail gun was freezing in my hand. I could see people and cars passing on the street silently, as if behind insulated glass even as there were no windows in their apertures. Drawing deeply on my carpenter’s vocabulary I mouthed the word “Fuck,” not trying to speak it audibly, concerned for the consequences of breaking the silence, pushing against what had filled the rooms, and for all I knew the whole of the first floor. Fuck indeed.
It’s hard to accurately judge time now, it wasn’t possible then either. Something less than sixty seconds, and longer than twenty or thirty, that’s my best guess. I stood there on that ladder afraid of what I was experiencing, fearing what might be next. And suddenly, as quickly as my lifting the 2x4 and stepping on to my ladder, the compressor cycled back on and the noise of the street filled the space; a bus, voices on the way to work, city noise.
And then the footfalls ran.
Up the stairs from where I was standing taking the first flight of the grand, building’s wide common staircase. Up the second, the third, the fourth, trailing away but still loud up the last flight to the penthouse above. I’d gone to the landing on the second floor in spite of myself, hammer from its metal hanger on my bags in hand. I stopped. Said, “Fuck,” aloud, my voice audible. Walked downstairs, dropped my bags from my waist, walked out the door and locked it behind me and on to the coffee shop around the corner.
I don’t know what happened that morning but the footfalls ceased. I drank my coffee on the sidewalk, commuters passing on the sidewalk between me and the building as I stared at it, working to muster something—courage? No; resolve, doubt, disbelief.
When I walked back in to finish hanging ceiling joists the sun was shining. I believe I was alone.