How could I resist? True tales of mysterious Petaluma ripped straight from the historical headlines. Stories that transcend time and go beyond the grave. Ghostly visitations, strange sightings, dark crimes, and deadly dealings in a frontier town . . .
Photo: Frances Rivetti — left to right Agatha Haslam as Clara Travers, Skye Bailey as Adele Wiese Baylis and Binky Thorsson as Nora Ann Barry
I stepped out on a sunny but crisp Sunday afternoon to join this spirited trio and a captivated crowd of 20 on the last of the first season of Petalumans of Yesteryear's inaugural Ghost Walks around historic downtown Petaluma.
Photo: Frances Rivetti – Nora Ann Barry was born in Ireland and, following her wedding as a young woman, she traveled with her husband to the New World and overland to California in the 1870s, settling in early Petaluma.
Petaluma pioneer woman Nora Barry's Irish beauty was not diminished by she and her husband's escape from the treacherous potato famine, despite the enormous ordeal of travel to the New World and across the continent to seek their fortune in the wild, lawless west.
And yet her life was cut tragically short of its promise when she jumped from a beam and hung herself in a chicken coop behind her home in Petaluma. It was her ghostly apparition, inhabited in remarkably good spirits for the afternoon by Petaluman of Yesteryear Binky Thorsson, who shared this sad story of old. Nora's husband purchased the California Woolen Mills Factory on Hopper and Jefferson Streets, which was eventually destroyed by an arson fire in 1898. The family was in such debt, their life savings were wiped out when the sheriff's department ultimately held an auction.
Life in the Victorian era was brutal for many. Such was Nora's distress and misery, the couple had only been in business for six months when she first tried, unsuccessfully as it turned out that time to drown herself in the well on their property. It was one thing for women especially, to survive the journey out west and another entirely to maintain the sheer physical and mental strength that was a necessity for survival in a rough and ready, ruthless frontier town.
Clara Travers and Adele Wiese Bayliss shared not un-similar sad stories. Yet there is something about historical characters coming back to life if only for a ghost tour that honors initial hopes and dreams and struggles in an era when life expectancy wasn't great at best odds. It's much easier to picture the lives of women in early Petaluma over a couple of hours of strolling through the historic downtown riverfront district in which they made their home.
To put the Gold Rush era into context, it was 1843 when British novelist Charles Dickens gripped the pre-television-age English-speaking world with his ghostly tale A Christmas Carol. Nights were long and cold in Victorian winter time and ghost stories proved stellar fireside entertainment.
"Winter is the time when the veil between the world of the living and the dead is thinner," announced the spirited souls that welcomed walkers to the steps of the Petaluma Historic Museum and Library — not in a Halloween-way, but in a decidedly bleak January-mode of considering the possibilities of an afterlife.
Their ethereal white gowns and cloaks certainly stopped traffic and passersby!
The Victorian era was dangerous wherever you were in the world. Explosive unregulated inventions such as gas stoves and lighting, lead-based toys and paint, childbirth and bacteria-filled baby bottles and prolonged corset-wearing to name but a few of the more common domestic perils. The Petaluma river was described as a stinking cesspit. Young mothers such as Adele Wiese Baylis, who lived in her husband's Pioneer Hotel that stood by the bridge at Water Street, would've hand washed cloth diapers of her brood of three in those very waters on a daily basis. It was that same waterway where she met her demise. She had married Petaluma Pioneer Captain Thomas Baylis (30) at just 17 years old, after arriving in Petaluma during the Gold Rush, accompanied by her two brothers, all the way from Germany. Insanity or fever from childbirth was given as the cause of death at age 22. One can only imagine she was exhausted, mentally and physically from the rigors of birthing three babies in five years in the stark early conditions of the town.
Baylis married his dead partner's wife soon after. Slim pickings from other overlanders would make for fast match-making in those days.
First stop on the ghost walk was Tomasini's Rex Hardware on B Street. This landmark spot has burned down three times in its history, the last time (and hopefully never again) in June 2006, which resulted in the modern rebuild we see and shop at today. The first structure on the site was first a blacksmith shop, forging horseshoes, the metal parts in horse wagons and carriages, farm tools, candlesticks, all the many iron and steel objects made with fire, hammers, tongs and anvils that were absolutely essential to an early frontier community. There is a pair of horseshoe designs and anvils still visible in the sidewalk in front of the store.
Photo: Frances Rivetti
There's a good deal of palpable historic energy in this space due to the pounding of the wheelwrights and the fires that ripped through the original structure that would become a hardware store in the 1900s. The wheelwright was one of the most important businessmen in town back in the early days and the pressure on those who worked in this location would have been intense. Next door to the blacksmith shop was a Chinese Market and on the other side, a frontier saloon which housed a steady stream of saloon girls, mostly widows and young women with no other means of support. It was not uncommon for these so-called "Soiled Doves" to be thrown out of upstairs windows, according to Nora and Adele's gruesome telling.
Next to the Chinese Market on the lot being eyed for a new, modern corner hotel, a coffin-maker's enterprise was positioned on the corner of B and Petaluma Boulevard (then Main St). Nearby, a Chinese Mission School and dwelling was destroyed by fire one terrible night in 1887. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one of several discriminatory U.S. laws that banned Chinese laborers from entering the country for 10 years. It also placed stifling new restrictions on Chinese already in the country. Racial prejudice and hostility raged and most of the surviving hardworking Chinese community in Petaluma fled.
If that wasn't all chilling enough as the January afternoon temperature started to drop, we crossed the boulevard toward the river, pausing by the side of the Great Petaluma Mill. It was there that we heard tell of a body that hung form the scaffolding over an artesian well by the parking lot next to Peet's Coffee. The towns people were judge and jury back then, when an unsigned will was found in the pocket of the departed, an assumed suicide, one Mr. Ragman, as he was known.
It took days sometimes to travel up the slough to Petaluma from San Francisco, picks and shovels were required to clear the waterway through its 88 bends. The Petaluma and Haystack Railroad, the third in the state, linked Petaluma's early Main Street with a landing to the south. Minturn's Locomotive, a disastrous steam engine passenger train designed by a Mr. Charles Minturn, exploded in a plume of smoke at the depot at the Great Mill, in 1848, causing mayhem, mutilation and death amongst its passengers. One of the town's predominant founding fathers, John A. McNear surely counted his blessings after surviving this historic catastrophe. Next time I stop for a coffee by the river, I'll spare a thought for the passengers who never made it onto the boardwalk, at least not intact, on that fateful day.
Fifteen-year-old Clara Travers was called to Petaluma by her sister-spirits to join their intrepid trio from her Northern Californian resting place. Brought chillingly back to life by Agatha Haslam, her story was all the more unsettling, given her age. Clara was studying to be a milliner. She informed her landlady that she would be taking a trip to visit her parents after stopping in at the drug store to purchase rat poisoning. It's not known what happened to her in her limited years to cause her to take her own life, but one can only imagine the horrors such a young woman may have encountered away from home at such time in frontier land. Needless to say, her landlady found her, upstairs that night, in convulsions that proved fatal.
I often think of those who walked the familiar downtown blocks of Petaluma before me. History feels within reach. It's not that long ago that the pioneer folk who settled on and in Petaluma figured they'd create a city in which anything was possible. What they didn't bank on was how easy it was to stumble. And how fast. There was little to no regulation on what went into medicines and tinctures and other even more dubious treatments for life's worries, pains and woes.
After hearing of Captain Thompson's steam boat that exploded, with horrific impact to its passengers, both human and animal, on the banks of the glorified creek that was Petaluma River in 1866, it was hard to look away from the waterway where mangled bodies and limbs floated on the tide.
Not yet having had enough of the grizzly-goings on of early Petaluma, we followed our ghostly guides through Putnam Plaza, which was home to the thrice-burned-down and long-gone American Hotel (1873 to 1966). In the vicinity around downtown, there were 40 bars and six churches in the area soon built up around the estuary. Mostly men inhabited this frontier community, many having left women and children behind during the Gold Rush. Looking skyward to upper windows above the historic ironfront stores and businesses, these were the abodes of bachelors largely. It was not uncommon for neighbors to discover bodies in bed days after their personages were last seen. Laudanum, a tincture of opium containing around 10% of powdered opium was prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy in alcohol. Bitter and reddish-brown in color it contained several opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine. It was considered a modern wonder-drug by doctors at the time, injected by syringe to speedily relieve asthma, pain, headaches, alcoholics’ delirium tremens, gastrointestinal diseases and menstrual cramps. It was the opiate-addiction of choice of the 19th Century, unregulated and quite frequently, deadly by accidental overdose.
Bachelor funerals were described locally as cheerless, melancholy affairs, with no one to shed a tear.
American Alley's allure of yesteryear is palpable to anyone passing through. If I close my eyes and step to the side I can easily envision teams of horses and wagons, deliveries and drop-offs into the back of bakeries and cabinet-makers, the hotel, all manner of early commerce supplying a new, western community. At the far end of American Alley to the north, a view of what is now Penry Park appears. This was the town's original cemetery and there are stories of a little girl who haunts the park, a woman in white who wanders American Alley at night.
I enjoyed walking alongside fellow (living Petalumans) as well as folk from out of town. One gentleman had a IR infrared thermometer gun somewhat discreetly in hand. A quick search online found plentiful paranormal equipment readily available for amateurs seeking evidence of life after death and paranormal research in general. I'm on the fence when it comes to what exactly this subject is all about in reality, except to say I've had several memorable, though brief paranormal experiences in my life and, though in a variety of locations around the world and always at night.
It wasn't as if I was expecting to see anything untoward from the other side on a Sunday afternoon. I didn't ask the chap if he detected anything unusual as he kept himself to himself and I figured, journalistic curiosity aside, this was his own little trip through time! But it did make me think that we tend to assume spooky shenanigans take place mostly at night. That may not be the case at all. A friend I talked to afterwards told me of a number of haunted houses in Petaluma where plentiful reports of sightings have been reported during daylight hours.
Another local friend happened to be on the ghost walk at the same time as me. She shared how her mother had kept it quiet to her when she was a girl how a ghostly fellow would lay down beside her in bed, creating an indenture in the mattress on many a night at their former Victorian home in the heritage neighborhood. She also attested to the well known haunting at The Phoenix Theater, having seen the image of a young woman behind her in the mirror in an otherwise empty upstairs restroom when she herself was a teen. The Theater, originally the Hill Opera House, once hosted famed magician Harry Houdini.
There are many ghost tales around town, not all homeowners are enthusiastic about having their addresses broadcast for obvious reasons. And the nooks and crannies of Victorian homes are picture-perfect for myths and more reliable accounts to take hold.
Séances and spiritualism were huge in the early days of pioneer communities. People truly missed and pined for their families that they'd left behind and the loss of a loved one would make it all the more tempting to dabble in this arena. Buildings on Western Avenue were home to the city's early Séance culture. This was revived in 1964, when Petaluma Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes, along with magicians, Nahman Nissen and Fred Daniels revisited the quest to contact the late Houdini. Sonoma County’s Harry Houdini Memorial Séance was an annual Halloween event that lasted almost 40 years in various notable locations.
It's interesting that Houdini himself was not a believer in the after life. He and his wife set up a code in case he was wrong, but, after he died first, despite her attempts over a decade or so to reach him, she reportedly never did.
The 1876 Lan Mart Building on Fourth Street is as discombobulated as it gets. An old elevator, creaking stairs, a secret corridor, tiny doors built into random corners, odd crawl spaces and locked gates, ceiling fans that turn on and off to their own accord, to know this mysterious building is to love it and stalwart businesses stay for the long haul despite its haunted reputation and number of first hand accounts of apparitions and other chilling presence.
This space started out as the New York Hotel and later the 46 bedroom Cosmopolitan Hotel with a barber, cobbler, saloon, dining room and Centennial Library Stable next door. It was constructed during the tense and troubled period of Chinese Exclusion, further pushing out a burgeoning China Town from developing Main Street. Walking through the brick partition opening that links a small parking lot for merchants on Fourth St to more parking on Petaluma Blvd between the Lan Mart Building and McNear's Saloon & Dining House today, the still-visible doorway to the left, for decades provided private access to a brothel above the stables. All of this was enclosed in a facade after the 1907 earthquake and the iron stars that decorate the exterior brick provided structural protection. The Lan Mart Building and its neighboring building on Kentucky Street became the quirky, personality-filled shopping arcade we know today in the 1960s.
Last mention as we made our way back along Fourth Street toward the museum steps, late afternoon, was the legendary tale of Black Bart. American outlaw, Charles Boles, born in Norfolk, England, was renown for his well-mannered stage coach robberies and the poems he left in his wake. He robbed at least 28 Wells Fargo stage coaches in Northern California during the years 1875 to 1873 and would surely have passed through and probably stayed overnight in Petaluma on numerous occasions between 1875 and 1883 when he was finally caught by a Wells Fargo detective and sentenced to San Quentin Prison for six years.
Boles had been wounded and forced to flee on his final bust, when he left behind several personal items, his eyeglasses, some food and a handkerchief, with a laundry mark F.X.O.7. Detective Hume and another Detective, curiously named Morse (interesting to PBS Masterpiece Theatre Fans!) contacted over 90 laundry services in the Bay Area before tracking the handkerchief down to Ferguson & Bigg's California Laundry on Bush Street. The handkerchief belonged to a man who lived in a modest boarding house, traveling frequently as a 'mining engineer'.
He was described in a police report, after eventually confessing, as "a person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances, and was extremely proper and polite in behavior. Eschews profanity."
"So here I've stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a-sobbin,
And risked my life for that box,
That wasn't worth the robbin."
Black Bart, Nov 1888
Interestingly, Black Bart was terrified of horses, so he walked everywhere. He served four years and was released on good behavior before being reputed to having become a pharmacist in Marysville, CA.
The City of Petaluma's most beloved fire horse was a 17 hand Bay draft named Black Bart, after the outlaw. The city's first paid professional fire fighter James Mott, also served as the city's ambulance driver, jailor and he and his horse Black Bart had a unique bond. Black Bart's final duty was to drive his master's funeral cart after Mott died of injuries sustained in an explosion in the line of duty in 1912. Afterwards, the horse was retired to stud and the fire department moved toward modern mechanization.
Although Petalumans of Yesteryear have wrapped up this first season of Ghost Walks until next Winter, the group is ready to launch into an all new Tales of Spurned Love, a Valentine's Special also with Adele Baylis, Nora Barry and Captain Baylis along for the Feb walks, Saturday and Sunday Feb 11 and 12 from 3-5pm. Click here for tickets.
