Moss Beach Distillery

The Moss Beach Distillery sits on a cliff above a secluded cove on the San Mateo coast, and the woman who's supposed to walk it wears blue. The story goes that she was married, that she fell for the bar's piano player, and that she died on the beach below during the affair. They call her the Blue Lady, and she's the most famous ghost in Northern California.

The building was a speakeasy first. Frank Torres built it in 1927 as Frank's Place, and the clifftop spot earned its keep: rum-runners landed whiskey on the beach below and hauled it up to cars bound for San Francisco. By the account, it was one of the most successful speakeasies of the era, and never once raided. After repeal in 1933, it became a restaurant.

The phenomena pile up from there. Phones that ring with no one on the line. Checkbooks that lift off tables. Weeping in the women's bathroom, a face in the mirror, doors locked from the inside of rooms with no other way in. Women diners lose a single earring at dinner and find it later, grouped with others. In 1992, NBC's *Unsolved Mysteries* recreated the whole legend, and the Distillery has leaned on her ever since.

Here's the turn. When a reporter went looking for where the Blue Lady actually came from, the trail didn't lead back to Prohibition. SFGate's Kate Dowd found no print record of her before a February 1981 newspaper interview — given by the owners who'd taken over the restaurant the year before. The accounts can't even agree on how she died: stabbed on the beach, in some tellings; killed in a car wreck in others. The piano player is never named.

And in 2008, when *Ghost Hunters* investigated, they found "a series of elaborate devices meant to scare people," built right into the walls — a face in the bathroom mirror, a speaker rigged to laugh. A former Disney designer had built the swaying chandeliers and the self-ringing phone. They stopped the investigation when they found them.