When news broke in May that the California Clipper was permanently closing, people began to talk. Not just about the circumstances of the bar’s closure—which owner and boutique restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff claimed was due to the financial strain of the pandemic—but about the bar’s history, too.
But then Foss-Ralston started to have experiences: things like hearing phantom knocking and footsteps, even one night losing her garage door opener only to find it placed on her driver seat in the morning. These encounters convinced her it was more than talk, and she’s not the only former employee with such accounts.
Alas, the movie theater chapter of the Clipper’s long life was not actually ended by the flu pandemic. Relative to now, few businesses permanently closed then because the 1918 quarantine only lasted a few weeks, and anything not associated with nightlife (like movie theaters) quickly reopened. Newspaper ads in the Tribune reveal the theater was still showing films early into the 20s. Then in 1927, a for sale ad at 1002 N. California boasted a 300-seat movie theater and a side space for a beauty shop. (Presumably, this is what the false wall was for.) But the persistence of rumors that it closed in 1918 reminds people of the cultural toll pandemics take.
“The woman in white was waiting for her beau who went to war and never returned,” says Jessi Meliza, a long-time patron who ran a trivia night there for a year.
Temperance was born, in part, from women organizing to deal with alcoholism’s impact on their families. If booze wasn’t so readily available, they contended, their husbands wouldn’t undermine their security by, say, losing their jobs or becoming violent. In this light, it makes sense why people might perceive or imagine a female ghost scaring off drunks with her perfume.
That stories of imbibing persist as threatening marriage or performing idealized womanhood might be the scariest part of all.
