Saturday night Harlan and I went on a Ghost Tour of San Francisco. I've gone on ones in Gettysburg and New Orleans and loved both of them, the one in New Orleans especially because that place is so atmospheric that after walking around at night, you could pretty much believe most of it. So I figured that a tour would be fun to do in the city because it's old enough to have some history, also kind of atmospheric, and has a well-known and well-deserved history of craziness.

The tour actually wasn't that great for various reasons-- not nearly as good as the other ones I had been on, nor as good as I had thought it would be-- but....

The tour started at the Queen Anne hotel, a restored, hundred year old hotel in Pac Heights well known for being haunted. According to the tour guide, the hotel was known for the usual assortment of visions, random cold spots, and all sorts of weird things such as customers waking up to find themselves tucked in their beds despite not having done so when they went to bad. It was apparently common for guests of the hotel to take pictures of the place in which those mysterious balls of light show up in the photos, something anyone who's watched any number of ghost shows on tv know is supposed to be a ghost.

This was all being explained to us by the tour guide, who told us all of this in the lobby of the fourth four of the hotel, the floor most known for being haunted. Harlan and I were sitting on this tiny, antique chair by the side of the wall, pretty much parallel to the guide, and I was sitting on the left side of the chair, away from the rest of the group that had gathered, right next to a small coffee table.

The guide started telling us about how and why ghosts manifest themselves and said that most people experience them through cold spots and orbs. He then began telling us the history of the hotel. As I was sitting there, I started to feel a cold breeze on my arm, to the left of me, pretty much right over the coffee table. When I moved my head to the left and leaned in, I felt like I was sitting over some sort of vent as there was a stream of cold air rushing up to meet me. When I changed my position and sat up straight, away from the coffee table, I didn't feel anything at all, but whenever I turned to my left, I did.

After the third or fourth time doing this, I started to have this thought to myself somewhere along the lines of "what the heck?" mixed in with thoughts of "no, it couldn't be...." and I told myself it was either a figment of my imagination or a vent. But the more I sat there, the more I felt it and as the guy was going on, I began to wonder more and more what was going on.

Now, you could say I was feeling a bit freaked out right now. Not necessarily because I was spooked, well maybe a little spooked, but because there was something weird going on and I had no idea if it was just me or if it was a vent or for goodness sake a freaking ghost and there was nobody I could really tell at that point and it was killing me. I wanted to say something out loud, along the lines of "OMG, there’s this weird breeze next to me!" but I was not going to say anything out loud because the guy was still talking and there was all these people around and I was in no way, shape or form, going to say something out loud and sound like a total idiot. I wanted to tell Harlan and tried to either whisper something to her and thought about having us switch seats so she could feel it and confirm that there was something going on, but once again, I didn’t do anything because I didn’t want to cause a distraction.

So I sat there through the entire talk leaning to my left every few seconds to see if I could still feel something and that it wasn’t my imagination all the while trying not to look too freaked out about all this. At one point, the cold spot or whatever it was, was so strong I took a deep breath in and felt the cold air go through my lungs.

Finally, the guy stopped his bit and told us we could wander around the hotel and check things out and take photos. Almost the second he was done, I told Harlan we had to switch seats and after some cajoling, mainly because I couldn’t quite explain why I wanted her to, she finally did. Once she had moved, I stood up, went to the other side of the hallway, facing the chair, and took a photo just to see if something would appear.

Something did.

To the left of Harlan, were three noticeable orbs of light, dancing in the air, just like in all those photos of ghosts. There could be absolutely no doubt they were there.

Okay, NOW I was freaking out. I mean, it’s one thing to feel some waft of air because that could have been anything but it’s another thing to feel that draft of air and then see some friggin’ orbs of light in a photo. It couldn’t be…nah…..

After I had picked my jaw up from the ground, I ran over to Harlan and showed the photo to her. Now she’s really skeptical about ghosts, even more so than me (like most things in life, I’m agnostic about it-- I know there really can’t possibly be ghosts but want to keep an open mind about it because it would be freakin’ cool if there were). Whenever we talk about it, she would dismiss all of it by saying that whenever you go online and search for photos of ghosts, you only see those stupid orbs and those stupid orbs could be anything. But now I had just taken a photo of those stupid orbs and when she looked at the photo, she was a little taken aback. When I showed her the photo, she also said that she did indeed feel a cold spot to the left of her, by her leg.

The crowd dispersed, running around to check out the doors to the supposedly haunted rooms and to look around what is a really beautiful hotel. Still stunned, I went up to the guide, completely butted myself into a conversation he was having with somebody else, and showed him the picture in my camera and. without even batting an eye, he just took a look at it and said “yep, that’s it.” “If you blow the picture up,” he added, “you might even see a face” and then he went back to his conversation as if it was no big thing that I took a photo of would be classified as a ghost right after a ten minute discussion of one.

After that, I went back to the spot where I had taken the photo and took another one. Nothing. I then went around the hotel, taking the occasional photo but again, nothing. After about ten minutes of wandering around, the tour group met down in the lobby of the hotel to start the tour and I overheard a group of people say they took a photo of orbs too. I asked to see what they had and saw a photo of the stairwell with three or four orbs dancing around.

And so I say, once again “it couldn’t be….nah….”

The moment I got home, I downloaded the pictures to my computer. Sadly, the orbs aren’t as apparent after being downloaded as they were when looking at them on my computer. But they’re still there, faded a bit, but still visible.

So what to make out of all of this? Nothing? Something? Should I just wrap it all up to my imagination and make nothing of it? Was I just a little spooked and excited by all the ghost stories the guide had told? Or had, I, ahem, JUST ACTUALLY SEEN A GHOST.

I mean, ghosts aren’t real and the orbs could just be the camera playing tricks with the light and the cold spot could have been a vent, But, on the other hand, OH MY FUCKING GOD.

A day later, I still have no idea of what the hell happened but , well, it couldn’t be….nah….