This Alamo Square Victorian holds 100 years of SF counterculture history

Standing proud in one corner of Alamo Square, the 12-bedroom William Westerfeld House (Russian Embassy for friends and close acquaintances) inscrutably overlooks the entire city from its famous tower. Its story had begun many years before it made an appearance in Wolfe's book, though — in 1889, to be precise. Built by Henry Geilfuss at the request of German confectioner William Westerfeld, it would change hands multiple times over the decades, the first a mere six years after its construction: The buyer was John Mahony of the Mahony Brothers, who would play an important role in the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

Throughout the following years, the William Westerfeld House witnessed myriad events that gradually imprinted it with a Mecca-like status for counterculture lovers and ghost story enthusiasts alike. From the Beat era to the far-out '60s, and a much less turbulent present, the house's extraordinary story eventually led to its recognition as cultural patrimony by the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.

It was precisely during Mahony's ownership that the house's cultural reputation began to take shape: "[He] loved to entertain celebrities as guests," house enthusiast Eric J. Kuhns recounts in a post on his blog. "The list includes radio pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi, who reportedly used one of the top rooms to transmit the very first radio signals on the west coast ... [and] Harry Houdini, who experimented in the same room by attempting to send telepathic messages to his wife across the Bay."

Following his death in 1918, Mahony's descendants kept the house for about a decade, after which it became a community center for Russian émigrés — the source of its informal nickname, "Russian Embassy." Until its closure in the late 1930s, the center also contributed a fair share to the house's legend: "A Russian colonel was allegedly murdered in one of the house’s many rooms, supposedly during a fight over a woman," a visitor was told in 2018. A scrapbook of the era, now in possession of the Museum of Russian Culture on Sutter Street, contains a few snapshots of the interior, including the ballroom (which was known as the "Dark Eyes" nightclub) that was subsequently converted into apartments.

For the next two decades, these apartments were rented to African-American musicians playing the San Francisco jazz clubs. Among them were Art Lewis, Jimmy Lovelace, and John Handy — who despite later denying having ever lived there seems to refer to the neighborhood's bebop days in this interview.

But the turning point for the house's legend was yet to come. If the Victorian era had been crucial to instigate a broader interest in the occult, this fin de siècle trend would find an interesting parallel in a period that brought back Victoriana not only through a revived obsession with the supernatural, but in its clothes, artwork and philosophy: the '60s.

In 1965, the house was acquired by Charles Fracchia, one of the original investors in Rolling Stone magazine — and for the next four dizzying years, it embodied the counterculture's zeitgeist. But being in the right place at the right time (Haight-Ashbury was only a few blocks away) might not have seemed as exciting for Fracchia as it was for those celebrating the dawn of the age of Aquarius: "I bought it and was going to redo it, but at the time, it was a very rough neighborhood," he later declared. "My wife said, ‘I’m not going to live there,’ so I leased it out to a guy named Kenneth Anger."

Quite possibly the house's most famous tenant, filmmaker Anger was working on his next big project while entertaining a crowd of esoteric visitors who would add to the building's haunted legend. It's interesting to note that the "Magick" references in Anger's work draw heavily from pagan religion Thelema, founded by English occultist Aleister Crowley during the Victorian era — so it's safe to say the Westerfeld House never strayed away from its spiritual pathos, with a very specific fingerprint emerging through its unique energy. Anger filmed several scenes there, notably for "Invocation of My Demon Brother" (1969), an experimental psychedelic short Mick Jagger provided the soundtrack for; many corners of the house are shown in the movie, including its famous staircase (which still has satanic symbols carved into the floor, albeit under new carpet) and the main room where satanist Anton LaVey can be seen conducting a Black Mass.

Yet the wickedest events of the era would not be tied to LaVey himself, but to another protégé of Anger's: A musician in his own right (he played with Love's Arthur Lee and later formed The Orkustra), Bobby Beausoleil had been invited to compose the soundtrack to Anger's forthcoming "Lucifer Rising"; but a quarrel between the two led to Beausoleil escaping with the reels in a theft that Michel Lancelot describes as "baffling" in his 1968 book "Je Veux Regarder Dieu En Face." According to Gary Lachman, the reels were buried in the desert by none other than Charles Manson, who demanded $10,000 from Anger for their return.

This is the episode that often associates Manson with the house, although he was never a tenant. Manson allegedly dropped by occasionally while on the hunt for Family members before heading to Los Angeles; Beausoleil later joined him, eventually precipitating personal disgrace with the Hinman murder that served as a prelude to the Tate/La Bianca case.

But these were also the golden years of what was then known as the Avalon Ballroom, with many music-related guests like the Grateful Dead or Big Brother & the Holding Company paying regular visits. Members of Chet Helms' promotion company Family Dog occupied the premises until 1969, when Fracchia sold the house to Daniel Ducos and William von Weiland, marking the end of an era. Although no major reconstruction work was initiated by the two new owners, this sale proved important to prevent the house from suffering the sad fate many Victorian buildings were encountering at a time when urban renewal practices didn't seem to care much for architectural history.

The person who ended up actually saving the William Westerfeld House was its current owner, Jim Siegel, who bought it in 1986 and has conducted a labor of love ever since, restoring it to the tiniest detail using salvaged material from Victorians in the Fillmore that had been torn down. Admitting an obsession that has been present throughout his life, Siegel says he always knew he'd one day purchase it; and despite knowing it's now worth millions, he reaffirms his intention to protect it during his lifetime: "It was never about the money. It has always been about the house, and my love for it.” Even though he had "the monks from the Hartford Street Zen Center do a cleansing and a blessing for the house" when he bought it, Siegel confirms he once had a paranormal experience there: "I was in bed watching TV and my bed violently shook. I assumed we were having an earthquake only nothing else was moving. Then I felt someone get into bed with me even though I was alone. It was quite unnerving."

It seems fitting that the house's mysterious legacy almost became the subject of a documentary, "House of Legends," which was seeking crowdfunding a couple of years ago. The project's IMDb page shows no updates to the "filming" status, and the failure to meet their goal when the story is so utterly fascinating further adds to a certain mystic aura coronating the building.

The William Westerfeld House emerges as one of those places that attract people and situations like magnets, concentrating an unusual amount of energy that increasingly leaves an imperceptible electric trace — a bit like what Hallorann tells Danny about the hotel in "The Shining." The house eventually claimed a rightful owner, since it was Siegel's dedication that allowed San Francisco to keep one of its most phenomenal landmarks. After all, the Russian Embassy couldn't have asked for a better caretaker.

Ana Leorne is a music and culture writer based in Paris. Formerly associate editor at The 405, she writes regularly for Beats Per Minute, Recording Academy/The Grammys, Bandcamp, and more. She's the author of "Dear Dr. Freud" for "David Bowie: Critical Perspectives." Email: ana.leorne@gmail.com | Twitter: @analeorne