Some Oakland Ghost Stories

by Chris Alarie

Ten years ago, while I was a student at California College of the Arts, I lived in the Webster Hall dormitory, which was housed in the top two floors of the Oakland YWCA building. The building itself was beautiful—designed by Julia Morgan and built in 1915. But the building was also home to some supernatural residents. During the year that I lived there, I gathered a number of ghost stories and legends about the building at 1515 Webster Street in Oakland. In honor of the spooky holiday, I thought I'd share a few.

The Basement

The basement of the building was definitely one of the creepier places I've ever been and, unsurprisingly, there are a number of stories about that part of the building. One of my dorm mates worked part time for the YWCA and told me that the employees had frequent problems with the gym located down there. She said that she would close everything down and lock it at night, only to find the doors wide open, the lights turned on, and the radio blaring in the morning. In fact, this was such a consistent problem that the YWCA had invested in a series of increasingly complex locks, as they assumed that a person was sneaking down and opening the gym. Of course, those locks do no good against a ghost and the employees would continue to find the gym open in the mornings.

Similarly mysterious late night happenings would occur elsewhere in the basement. A number of my classmates reported hearing the showers running and seeing steam coming from the locker rooms late at night, long after the building had been closed to the public and at a time of night when it would have made no sense for any of us residents to be using those showers (we had showers of our own up on the 4th and 5th floors).

The laundry room was also located in the basement and became a rather creepy place late at night. There was a locked door in the back of the room that seemed to lead to the back of the elevator shaft. Periodically, a large, blood-like stain would appear from underneath the door. The YWCA employees would clean it but it would reappear within a few days. A friend of mine told me that when she was doing laundry late one night, the handle of the door started shaking and turning violently, as if someone inside was trying to get out. She tried to ignore it and focus on her laundry but the shaking wouldn't stop and she became so disconcerted that she had to leave.

The Upper Floors

I lived up on the fifth floor, in a room that faced inward toward the atrium. I learned that a despondent young woman had hanged herself in the room next to mine in the 1940s. Accordingly, the resident of the room while I lived there told me that a number of strange occurences would happen, including a disembodied voice and a tendency for her windows to unlock and fly open on their own (the windows opened outward, making it unlikely that the wind was the cause).

Windows seemed to be a frequent target of the building's ghosts' activities. Another friend who lived elsewhere on the fifth floor told me that she was alone in her room one night when her window unlocked itself and started opening and closing on its own. This was particular unusual as it was a window that opened and closed by sliding up and down. Like my friend in the laundry room, she tried to ignore it until it became too overwhelming and she left.

There was a ballroom on the second floor that also seemed to be home to some vague but decidedly creepy energy. There was a beautiful grand piano in the back of the room and occasionally students would go in there to play it. A friend of mine once entered the room with that intention but he noticed that the lights would dim the closer that he got to the piano. This was particularly disconcerting as the room's lights were not equipped with a dimmer switch. My friend, who is not particularly likely to believe in ghosts or invent supernatural stories, said he felt an undefinable, threatening energy and left the room in a haste. I heard of another student who had a similar experience where he bolted up from the piano and ran out of the room when he noticed a figure looming over him from behind the room's curtains.

The Pool

Without question, the creepiest place in the building was the abandoned pool in the basement. The pool was visible through windows along the building's main staircase and I would often find myself peeking out at it while walking up to my room. The room was always dark and foreboding, with the pool itself a dark, empty hole in the middle of the room. The story that I heard was that the pool had been closed some three decades earlier when two young boys—in some versions of the story, they were brothers—drowned and the YWCA had to close the pool when they could not afford the raised insurance premiums. 

I met a number of students from over the years who insisted that they had either seen or heard the boys' ghosts running around in and around the pool. One student had even come face to face with them after she had gone into the pool, with the YWCA's permission, to take some photos for a project. Needless to say, she did not stay in the pool to finish the project as intended.

Ultimately, these may not be the most exciting or frightening ghost stories. But having lived in the Oakland YWCA building and having heard many of these stories directly from the people who experienced them, I can say that the building is hella haunted. I'm sure other students who have lived there in the ten years since I moved out could add stories of their own. Happy Halloween.

Chris Alarie is Senior Ghost-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.