Peninsula ghosts: Some old, some new

The urn discovered 10 years ago was shown earlier this year to a group of middle school children touring the movie house on Broadway. The kids looked on wide-eyed as Schmidt recounted some of the sporadic sightings of “something strange.”

As seen on TV

The newcomer is not as famous as the “Blue Lady” reportedly spotted at the Moss Beach restaurant. The coastal ghost has been featured on the television shows “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Ghost Hunters.”

According the Distillery’s website, the legend goes back more than 70 years and involved an adulterous affair between “the beautiful lady in blue” and “a handsome dangerous man.” The two were attacked “while walking along the beach below the restaurant.” The woman was killed but the man survived.

“It is here at the Distillery you will find her searching for her lover,” said the website. Well, then again, maybe not. Don’t believe a restaurant’s publicity? How about some nuns?

The Kohl Mansion, which has been home to Mercy High School in Burlingame since 1931, hosts one of the Peninsula’s most enduring legends, that of the ghost of Freddie Kohl, who committed suicide in 1921. The Sisters of Mercy bought the red-brick, 63-room Tudor mansion in 1924 and used it as a convent until 1931 when it became the school. The sisters had trouble from the start. In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan, with hoods on, besieged the convent by shouting, honking car horns and, according to some reports, burning a cross on a hill.

It was about this time that some novice nuns started to report a mysterious presence, including loud, disembodied footsteps. In 1927, the nuns conducted a ritual blessing that seemed to work.

Another nuns’ story

Burlingame isn’t the only Peninsula city with a ghost story involving a mansion converted to a convent. Redwood City has a similar story. In 1921 (Yes, 1921, the year of Kohl’s suicide) the Sisters of Notre Dame took over the former mansion of lumber baron Charles Hanson, a huge structure at Brewster Avenue and Arguello Street that has since been demolished and replaced by an office building. I’m not going to be flip or overly skeptical about this yarn because the nuns who reported the incident seemed so sincere.

Sister Ann Maureen King swore the place was haunted, according to a paper she wrote that is in the order’s archives.

She said at least six sisters, including herself, were all in different areas of the mansion in 1932 when each “was called but found herself unable to move. Someone seemed to be blocking her way.”

“The call was a loud ‘sister, sister,’” she continued. “No one was there. The paralysis lasted but a few minutes. Naturally, we were all frightened.” The nuns said some prayers and went about their work, but the “haunting went on.”

The nuns continued to be called. “Sometimes it was a prolonged sighing ‘sister,’” wrote Sister Ann Maureen. “One night we were in bed and the call came along with three knocks, the drapes over the large mirror fell to the floor, but, again, no one was seen,” she said in recounting the most dramatic and almost last of the “incidents.” In the final event, the nun was called by her full name.

“We did not hear or experience any further callings,” Sister Ann Maureen concluded. Sister Ann Maureen, the youngest sister in the convent at the time of the “visits,” died in 2009 after a 50-year teaching career. Despite the experience at the convent, she described her life as “a long blessed journey.” She once said she felt that whatever or whoever was involved “needed our help.”

Perhaps Freddie Kohl got his convents confused.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.