Curious Chapbooks & Hysterical Histories

Introduction and Excerpts

April 18, 1906
 

Earthquake weather---warm and clear. For once, no fogs hugged the Barbary Coast. An early morning bather in the San Francisco Bay noticed an eerie luminescence surrounding him in the waters off Ocean Beach. Suddenly, a ship on the horizon jumped "clear out of the water," as the stylus of the seismograph flew off the graph at the weather bureau on the tenth floor of the Mills Building (Fradkin 53). The San Francisco Earthquake had struck!

By 5:12 a.m., assuming dead clocks are accurate, the bogs and creeks filled in years before gave way underneath the center of the city, and with their erosion downtown San Francisco fell like Lucifer into the depths below. At one time, part of those depths was a burying ground paved over to build City Hall (Morris 23). Now the surface cracked and from those hidden depths crawled forth the cackling ghouls that persist in California legend.

Ghouls, traditionally monsters that feed upon the dead, were the names given to looters who interfered with the necessary relief and rescue work begun that Wednesday afternoon, the first day of the crisis. Certainly there were looters, and no area was harder hit than Chinatown, where the prize loot was its valuable porcelain from the Orient. However, many San Franciscans would not stand for such shameless opportunism. One looter, who bragged to fellow survivors that his two wicker baskets were filled with "the best the Chinese Empire ever sent out in the way of ware," watched helplessly as the entire contents were broken and tossed into the Bay (Fradkin 293).

Looters, the intrepid citizens of San Francisco could face; the cackling, tittering ghouls gnawing on corpses and clinging to severed limbs were another matter entirely. Their story can never be told, for it is beyond human understanding. Instead, what follows is the week of the Earthquake, the fire, and the storm. How the ghouls came and where they went will be left to the reader to decide.

--Ed Sams, 2006
 

"The Chinese in our region were particularly numerous, scared out of their quarters by the approaching flames, which were no often accompanied with the explosions of stores of Chinese fireworks."

--Naomi Osgood Hooker quoted by Fradkin

"I ran down Market Street toward the ferry. A building fell into the thoroughfare so nearly burying me that again I was covered and blinded with dirt and dust . . . . I saw the dead go by, an automobile piled full of crushed and ghastly corpses, then another automobile crowded with painted, half-clad actresses laughing hysterically; then a garbage wagon filled with dead Chinamen."

--Anonymous journalist quoted by Searight

"While I was walking about the streets I saw man after man shot down by troops. Most of these were ghouls. One man made the trooper believe that one of the dead bodies lying on a pile of rocks was his mother, and he was permitted to go up to the body. Apparently overcome by grief, he threw himself across the corpse. In another instant the soldiers discovered that he was chewing the diamond earrings from the ears of the dead woman."

--Charles Morris

For the Whole Story, Order "Ghouls of the San Francisco Earthquake."