HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
San Francisco apartment where a 1967 tarot curse on socialite Pat Montandon's home was followed by a string of documented tragedies including a fatal 1969 fire
1000 Lombard St, San Francisco, CA 94133
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Exterior drive-by or sidewalk view only. Private residential property — do not trespass or disturb residents.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Lombard Street hill; steep in places. The block near 1000 Lombard is the Russian Hill residential section, less steep than the famous crooked block farther east.
Equipment
Photos OK
1967 Documented Curse Account · 1969 Fatal Fire (Mary Lou Ward) · Pat Montandon 'The Intruders' Memoir · Multi-Decade Journalistic Investigation
Pat Montandon was a San Francisco socialite, television personality, and later a peace activist who lived at 1000 Lombard Street in the late 1960s. In April 1967 she hosted an astrology party at the apartment. Among the guests was a tarot card reader whose interaction with another attendee became acrimonious. Multiple accounts of the evening — drawn primarily from Montandon's own 1975 memoir and from journalism published decades later — describe the tarot reader pronouncing a curse on the home before leaving.
Montandon recorded a sequence of events following the party that she attributed to the curse: persistent personal difficulties, illness, the dissolution of relationships, and a generalized sense of deterioration in the household. The most concrete and documented event came in 1969, when a fire broke out in the apartment and killed Mary Lou Ward, Montandon's former secretary who was staying there at the time. Ward died in the fire.
Montandon published 'The Intruders' in 1975, her account of the curse and subsequent events. She moved out of the apartment and eventually left San Francisco. KQED's arts coverage and The Real Deal, a real estate publication, both investigated the property's subsequent history in the 2020s, interviewing later owners and tenants who described continuing patterns of personal hardship — divorces, illnesses, financial reversals — at the same address. Neither publication asserted that a curse was operative; both documented that the property had an unusual concentration of difficult events among its occupants over a 50-year period.
The building at 1000 Lombard Street has remained a private residential property throughout. The address sits in the Russian Hill neighborhood, near the intersection of Lombard and Hyde Streets.
Sources
The 1000 Lombard Street case occupies an unusual position in California's paranormal geography: the fatal element — the 1969 fire and the death of Mary Lou Ward — is not a piece of contested or folkloric testimony. Ward died in a fire in the apartment. Montandon documented it in her memoir, and it is the concrete anchor for a narrative that otherwise involves interpretation.
What is contested, or at least interpretive, is the causal claim: that a tarot reader's curse in 1967 produced or accelerated the tragedies that followed. Montandon believed it and wrote about it at length. KQED and The Real Deal, reporting on the property decades later, did not endorse the curse narrative but found that subsequent occupants continued to experience concentrated misfortune — enough that real estate agents and neighbors regarded the address with a degree of wariness.
The curse-as-explanation sits outside what journalism or historical research can confirm. What the case offers, documented across multiple independent sources and over a half-century, is a property with a specific, named initiating event (the 1967 party and the tarot reader's departure), a specific fatal casualty (Ward, 1969), and a documented pattern of occupant hardship that two separate publications found worth investigating.
Montandon, who died in 2021, spent the later part of her life as a peace activist and was candid about the 1000 Lombard events in interviews throughout her career. Her account is the foundation of the record; the journalism is the corroboration.
The apartment building at 1000 Lombard Street is a private residence. The exterior can be viewed from the sidewalk. This is a historically documented address in two separate journalistic investigations (KQED, The Real Deal) covering the 1967 curse event and subsequent tragedies, making it a legitimate dark tourism site accessible from public space only.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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