QUEEN ANNE HOTEL
Hotel — San Francisco, California
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/queen-anne-hotel-san-francisco-california/

Former school associated with headmistress folklore.

The Queen Anne Hotel is an 1890 Victorian mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, originally built as a girls’ finishing school by Senator James Fair. Headmistress Mary Lake—who ran the school for decades and died disappointed after it closed—is the hotel’s resident ghost: guests in room 410 (her former office) report unpacked luggage, tucked-in blankets, and a gentle presence. The building survived the 1906 earthquake and now operates as a boutique hotel that openly markets its hauntings.

The ghost of the Queen Anne Hotel tucks people in. Guests in Room 410 — her old office — report a presence that unpacks suitcases, draws the covers up over half-asleep strangers, and sings at night; a startlingly domestic haunting that the archive notes is unusual for its manners. Visitors request the room by number, which is the San Francisco hotel trade's version of a citation.
The documented woman behind the legend is better than the legend. Mary Lake was a headmistress financed by a senator in what the 1891 Chronicle treated as a scandal — a girls' school built with a silver baron's money, inside one of the city's grandest Queen Anne Victorians, that survived the 1906 earthquake by a margin of blocks.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
Mary Lake, born 1849 in Little Falls, New York, came to San Francisco as a toddler; her father Delos became one of the city's wealthiest lawyers and built the family mansion at Leavenworth and Vallejo. She taught grammar school, then opened the Lake Seminary for girls on Post Street in 1889. A year later the school moved into a brand-new custom building at Sutter and Octavia — thirty-one private bedrooms, a dining room and a well-stocked library in painted-lady Queen Anne splendor — and advertised for pupils in newspapers up and down the Pacific Coast.
The money was Senator James Graham Fair's. The Comstock silver baron — "Slippery Jim," namesake of the Fairmont — had served two terms in the U.S. Senate and just emerged from what was then the most expensive divorce settlement in American history, $4.25 million. Per the architectural record he built the school so his daughters Tessie and Birdie could move from Nevada and live near him, with his alleged mistress installed as headmistress. The Chronicle's 1891 piece "Cupid and Mr. Fair" made the rumored romance a matter of print. The school ran about six years. The building passed through later uses — including a stint as a private club — survived the 1906 earthquake that destroyed the blocks around it, and has operated as a hotel since 1980.

WHAT WITNESSES FILE
Room 410 concentrates the claims: a white figure, cold chills, singing after dark, luggage mysteriously unpacked, bedcovers adjusted over sleeping guests. Mary Lake died in 1904 — two years before the earthquake her school survived — and the lore assigns her the good ghost: benevolent, tidy, still minding the girls. It is a rare haunting whose reported behavior reads like a job description — the headmistress on rounds, checking the dormitory after lights-out.
The hotel does not hedge. It opens its file to television crews, the series Haunted Hotels devoted an episode to the premises, and more than two dozen Yelp reviews mention the haunting — the twenty-first-century register where these claims now get logged, timestamped and rated.

WHAT REMAINS
The Queen Anne still takes guests in a city of survivors, its ten-foot ceilings and antique parlors intact, Room 410 available at prevailing rates and requestable by name. The building itself earned its listing honestly — a documented Queen Anne landmark that outlived a firestorm and two changes of century — and the pink facade on Sutter Street remains among the most photographed in the Western Addition.
The record keeps a senator, a schoolmistress, the country's costliest divorce and a mansion that outlasted the quake. The legend keeps a ghost who tucks in strangers — the politest haunting in the file, and the one visitors most often ask to meet.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: Visit California recounts Mary Lake allegedly tending guests in room 410. The San Francisco hotel's reports are the kind old lodgings accumulate — footsteps after hours, presences in rooms, the house working the night shift. 'California’s Most Haunted Hotels' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. It is the sighting the place is known for, and it hasn't stopped.
  source: California’s Most Haunted Hotels (https://www.visitcalifornia.com/experience/californias-most-haunted-hotels/)
· [Documented legend] named ghost legend: Room 410 guests report a benevolent presence—luggage unpacked, blankets tucked—attributed to Miss Mary Lake. The San Francisco hotel's reports are the kind old lodgings accumulate — footsteps after hours, presences in rooms, the house working the night shift. 'Queen Anne Hotel' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed.
  source: Queen Anne Hotel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne_Hotel)

HISTORY — 2 documented facts
· [1890] Built 1890 as the Mary Lake School for Girls by Senator James Fair; converted to a hotel in the 1980s. The hotel in San Francisco, California has its past on record — this entry belongs to that verified layer. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'Queen Anne Hotel' carry the record. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.
· Mary Lake ran the school for decades; her attachment to the building anchors the haunting legend. Queen Anne Hotel's history is documented rather than told — this entry is part of that spine. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Queen Anne Hotel'. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 2 cited
· California’s Most Haunted Hotels — Visit California
  https://www.visitcalifornia.com/experience/californias-most-haunted-hotels/
· Queen Anne Hotel — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne_Hotel

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