Est. 1907 · Barbary Coast History · Shanghaiing Era · San Francisco Labor History · Intact Victorian Interior
San Francisco's Barbary Coast ran roughly from Broadway to Clay Street along the waterfront, and at its peak in the 1870s and 1880s it was the most openly criminal district in the United States. The neighborhood was built on Gold Rush transience — tens of thousands of men arrived in the city expecting to get rich quickly and some never left. Crimps, the local term for shanghaiing operators, ran boarding houses, saloons, and employment agencies that funneled men onto ships against their will. The mechanics were documented in newspapers and court records: a drink was drugged, a man woke belowdecks on a vessel already at sea, and he completed the voyage whether he chose to or not. Victims ranged from recent immigrants to off-duty police officers.
The saloon at 155 Columbus Avenue opened in 1907, two years after the 1906 earthquake leveled most of the district. Established as the Andromeda Saloon, it was one of dozens of bars rebuilding in the immediate aftermath. The Barbary Coast district was finally suppressed in 1917 following a reform campaign backed by the Red Light Abatement Act, which criminalized the maintenance of vice property and emptied the district over a period of roughly four months.
The Columbus Avenue building survived subsequent decades of demolition and redevelopment when most of the surrounding Barbary Coast architecture did not. The 18-foot mahogany bar, the Victorian punkah ceiling fans, and the original back bar are intact. The saloon was renamed the Comstock in a later era — a reference to the Nevada silver rush that drove much of San Francisco's 19th-century prosperity — and has operated continuously since its 1907 founding, making it the oldest continuously operating bar in the city and the last physical remnant of the Barbary Coast drinking trade.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Saloon
- https://www.realsanfranciscotours.com/crime-seen-san-franciscos-barbary-coast/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Coast,_San_Francisco
Cold spotsPhantom presenceObjects moving
The Comstock's haunted reputation is less organized than that of the city's more publicized paranormal venues. What circulates is atmospheric rather than specific: accounts from bar staff of unexpected cold at the north end of the original bar, a sense of someone standing in the hallway behind the service area, and — reported by multiple patrons independently — glasses moving slightly on the bar top without explanation.
The historical substrate for these accounts is substantial. The Barbary Coast's shanghaiing operations were documented to involve deaths, not merely kidnappings. Men drowned during botched transfers to ships in the bay; men who resisted were beaten; some who escaped returned to find the crimps immune to prosecution through bribed officials. That history is embedded in the block the saloon occupies, even if no specific incident is documented at this address.
No formal paranormal investigation of the Comstock is on record. The accounts that circulate are bar-stool tradition rather than organized documentation — which is consistent with a working bar that has never traded on its ghost reputation. Whether the cold spots and the watched feeling at the back hallway are attributable to anything specific is an open question the building keeps to itself.
