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The Witches of the Black Diamond Mines

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Guarding the old mining community, these ghosts of these two women have been dubbed witches by the locals, feared as well as revered in their lives. Who were The White Witches of the Black Diamond Mines?

Before the place in the San Francisco Bay area used to be a bustling mining community at the turn of the century. The coal mines was operating until 1945. Now the mines are closed and the place forgotten, but the remains can still be reached an hour away from San Francisco. 

Although named the Diamond mines, there was no sparkling diamonds to be found in the mines. Instead it was coal, the black type of diamonds. It is here the legend of the white witches started to take hold of the mining community.

Overview

Type of Haunting:Female Ghost, Witches
Place:USA, North America
Other:Haunted Cemetery
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The Contra Costa County is ranked as the scariest place in California because of legends like the Black Diamond Mines and the White Witches that are said to be haunting the place.

The White Witch in Rose Hill Cemetery

Sara Norton worked as a midwife to the people living in the small towns across the bay area and she delivered over 600 babies in her time. She was a widow to Noah Norton that even got the town Nortonville named after himself. 

She died however in 1879 at the age of 68. She was on call at her midwife duties when she was thrown from a carriage to make a delivery in Clayton and was killed in the accident. 

According to the legend, Sarah was not a religious person and told her own kids that she didn’t want a church funeral. However, when she died that was exactly what they gave her and her spirit became enraged. On the day of the funeral a storm crashed their plan and they decided to go through with the funeral the next day. The next day however, another storm came crashing and ruined their plans. The townspeople took the hint and skipped the formalities and buried her in the Rosehill Cemetery. 

From then on the spirit of Sarah has been spotted in the old mining towns as well as floating around the tombstones in the graveyard. 

Mary the Wailing Witch in the Black Diamond Mines

Another lady that is haunting the place is Mary, who history forgot her last name. She was working as a nanny in the 1870s, but in contrast to Sarah that brought life into this world, her legacy tells that she put life out. 

All of her children that she cared for died of illness and it was not soon before she was accused of witchcraft after some local townspeople allegedly found evidence of her dark rituals that resulted in the death of their children. 

In some variations of the legend, she worked as a school teacher, not a nanny. And with the diseases of the times, it is not unlikely diseases went through the community, striking the kids at the same time. So was it a tragedy or witchcraft? The townspeople certainly was of the belief that it was and set out to punish her.

The legend differs from how Mary met her death. Although the evidence is lost to us, it supposedly was enough to hang her for her crimes in some versions of the story. In other version her dead body was found in the mines under strange circumstances. But it was not enough to bring her out of this world. 

To this day she is spotted guarding the mines wearing all white and seeking revenge for her murder. But there is also another side to her hauntings. It is said that it is mostly children that see her, and she pushes them out from the dangerous mines that are filled with harmful gasses and unstable tunnels. 

So the question remains, is she remaining in the world as a resentful witch, or as a protector of children that she wasn’t able to be alive?

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References

Haunted? Why East Bay’s Black Diamond Mines Are So Spooky To Some | Concord, CA Patch

Black Diamond Mines is Most Haunted Cave Near San Franciscoi

Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve | East Bay Parks

Spooky Trails and Tall Tales California: Hiking the Golden State’s Legends, Hauntings, and History by Tom Ogden

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The Westerfeld House — The House of The Occult

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All that jazz and rock’n roll with witchcraft and satanic rituals clearly took its toll on the Victorian house known as the Westerfeld House. But is it still a hint of paranormal presence lingering there? Or has the restoration brought it back to its original sweet glory?

In the beautiful city of San Francisco there is a house that catches the eye of those passing by. Gothic, beautiful, bold and old as many of the surrounding houses are. But perhaps none other than this house has acted like a magnet for its peculiar tenants over the years. 

Old House: 1198 Fulton Street has a history of occult and strange tenants almost since it was first built in 1889.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/wikimedia

The William Westerfeld House, or simply the Westerfeld house is an historic building right by Alamo Square. The picturesque Victorian Italian styled villa at 1198 Fulton Street is today steeped in history, some more haunting than others, as well as some are more true than others.

The origin of the house however is a sweet tale as the building was built for the German confectioner William Westerfeld in 1889. By this time he had already established a chain of bakeries and built this 28 room mansion. Business was good for Westerfeld, however, he died only a few years after the house was built in 1895 and since then, sweet turned darker to pitch black. 

It was bought by John Mahoney and the building’s cultural reputation started to take place where strange occurrences happened. He loved to entertain his guests with spectacular shows, and among others, Harry Houdini himself tried to send telepathic messages to his wife across the Bay. So the experimental and spiritual part of the house started early on. However, no one could have guessed just how dark it would get. 

Czarist Night Club And All That Jazz

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After the Westerfeld House had served as a home to Mahoney, it fell into the hands of many different people with different purposes. A group of Czarist Russians turned it into a nightclub called Dark Eyes in the roaring 20s. It was informally known as the Russian embassy because of all the meetings taking place on the upper floor. 

After the second world war the home was converted into apartment buildings, mostly rented out to African-American jazz musicians playing in the nearby jazz clubs during the Beat area. This house jazz area lasted until the 60s, when jazz was replaced with rock and the political and philosophical beatnik area morphed into the wild and spiritual 60s. 

The Occultists In the Westerfeld House

In the 60s the Westerfeld House was used as different types of collectives, and one of those who set a mark on the house as well as recorded it, was occult filmmaker, Kenneth Anger who lived there from 1966 to 1967. During those times it was a rather rough area in the city and the people frequenting there, darker and rougher than many.  

It is here the story of the Westerfeld House turns from strange to occult. At best, the time Anger and his peculiar guests spent in the house was a terrible nuisance to all the neighbors with all the acid being taken and satanic rituals being held. At worst, they stirred up the rumours of paranormal activity to the house as well as opened the gate to hell. 

Satanic Rituals: Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey started frequenting the house, holding black masses in the Westerfeld house. Here from the movie, ‘Invocation of my demon brother’, made by Kenneth Anger.
Photo: Invocation of my demon brother/IMDB

“Up at Fulton and Scott is a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking decayed giant, known as The Russian Embassy.”

This is how the writer Tom Wolfe talks about the Westerfeld House when he introduces it in his book: ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’, chronologizing his time spent there with a group of hippies.

Anger himself was an occultist and drew much of his elements in his films from Thelema, a pagan oriented religion founded by perhaps the most well known occultist, Aleister Crowley.

Another notorious person that stayed under the roof was Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil lived here for a while before he joined the cult of the Manson called, the Family. Beausoleil was chosen by Anger to inhabit the role of Lucifer in a movie he was working on. Together they spent their nights in the tower, trying to look for UFOs. And according to Anger, he did indeed have a “a couple of very good flying saucer sightings.” Here it is important to note just how important taking acid was to Anger. 

Allegedly, Beausoleil stole reels of Angers film: Lucifer Rising and took off with them being on bad terms. Manson himself made frequent visits to this house, and according to caretaker, Kelly Edwards, it was here that Beausoleil were drawn into the cult that eventually was behind the Helter Skelter murders. 

Black Masses of the Church of Satan

Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey also spent time in this very tower as shown when Anger shot the movie ‘Invocation of my demon brother’ where we in this psychedelic experimental movie can see LaVey, aka, ‘The Black Pope’ himself holding a black mass. According to Anger, the film was assembled from scraps of the first version of Lucifer Rising. It includes clips of the cast smoking out of a skull, and the publicly filmed Satanic funeral ceremony for a pet cat.

But he did not look after UFO’s as Anger did on his acid trips. Instead, he spent his time practicing witchcraft, as well as worshipping Satan with around 500 candles in this wooden building. This tower used to have a large pentagram etched into the floorboards to keep the wiccan and satanic rituals more permanent. He also owned a lion cub as he used to be a lion tamer before starting the Church of Satan. You can see proof of that very lion because of the scratches in the wooden paneling, even to this day.  

As well as spending time in the tower, he also performed satanic rituals in the ballroom on the ground level of the house. 

Rock n Roll

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After Angers departure from the Westerfeld House, the occult was turned into rock’n roll as the likes of Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Tom Wolfe and Jerry Garcia among many others passed through the halls, either as tenants, or holding concerts at the Avalon Ballroom. It continued to be used as an underground rock scene until the 70s, when the first attempts to rehabilitate the much used building began. 

And although the owner that took over in 1986 had no occult interest, he also wanted to be on the safe side when initiating the old house with a particularly rocky history. The new owner of the Westerfeld House, Jimmy Siegel told hoodline that: 

“I was always attracted to the architecture of the building,” he told us. “The occult happenings in the house were of little interest to me but to be on the safe side I had the monks from the Hartford Street Zen Center do a cleansing and a blessing for the house when I bought it in 1986. I have never experienced any darkness or paranormal activity in the house.”

The Addams Family House

Siegel bought the Westerfeld House because it looked like something the Addams family could have lived in and he had always loved the architecture and design from the Addams family. And under a LSD trip in his teens, his dreams of owning this particular house started to take hold. 

Siegel turned his drug induced dream and turned it into his life mission. He spent his time restoring the Westerfeld House that had long been neglected. And with it, he also preserved the history of it. 

Today the rooms in the Westerfeld House are rented out to various people and as movie sets. According to reports, none of them have complained of any malevolent activity or remains of satanic activity. But they have reported about ‘overwhelming emotions’ as well as a physical presence in their home, with nightmares being a common trait of the tenants. Paranormal activity of psychological manifestation of knowing the house history?

Even Siegel himself mentioned he had what he called a paranormal experience in the house to SFGATE:

“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.”

So what is it Siegel? Was the Westerfeld House haunted or not?

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References

National Register #89000197: Westerfeld House in San Francisco, California

William Westerfeld House

The Spooky History Of The Westerfeld House

Invocation of my Demon Brother & Lucifer Rising – Kenneth Anger

This Alamo Square Victorian holds 100 years of SF counterculture history 

Visiting the Westerfeld House and Its Haunted Past. — Eric J. Kuhns 

Westerfeld House – [2021 

The Westerfeld House: San Francisco’s most storied Victorian

podcast, Review

Occult Podcasts to Recommend

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Occult Confession

A chatty and inspired podcast of all occult. Everything from the Illuminati, secret societies and black magic. It is superbly researched and manages to rely the dry historic research in a witty way together with the alchemic actors, breaking into songs, taking unexpected side roads in the conversations.

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Witch Wave

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Butter smooth voice taking you on a journey with the witches and a peep behind the curtain as how to live the witch life in the modern era. The host is a great interviewer and a great and optimistic view on the occult, even the most skeptics can respect and appreciate.

Find them:
Podcast
Twitter

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Into the Dark

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A sort of roadhouse bar playing stomping rock and metal, talking with practitioners of several types of magic, occult traditions. And even though the host, Cooper Wilhelm is a practitioner himself he really lets his guest take the place and comes off as an interested and a guy willing to ask questions about anything! Too bad this is a finished podcast, but enjoy the episodes that were made.

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Twitter

Night Tide

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For the more researched based distanced podcast, check out Night Tide. A bi-monthly production, these guys really take their time doing the research, and presenting it in a great way. The host Stacy is super pleasant listening to and is one of the podcast host that manage the balance between music/narrating and the stories are the perfect blend of creative and informative storytelling.

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The Satanic Panic

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Love a niche podcast, and this is it! Satanic panic was raving through the 80’s America, where a numerous cases accusing others for satanical acts. The hosts takes you through what really happened, covering the court cases, rumors, dungeons and dragons and the Church of Satan. Yeah, its great, check them out.

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Witching Hour – 5 Books About Witches

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Witches have been around as long as women have been around. At times, they have been cursed, at times, praised. Depending on the time, it is always about power though, and how to use it among the rest of the human population.

Even if they are after you we are still fascinated by witches, the power within seemingly normal people. And perhaps that is one of the things we are drawn to. Because if people posses this great power within, why not you as well?.

This is a reading list of some of the books containing witches that we love.

Witch Child

By Celia Rees (2009)

This book was one of the books that got this writer into books about witches. More than an adventure of the witch myth and legend it is an exploration about the consequences of it. It is also dealing with a lot of issues just from one story, with women, religion and Native Americans. I also loved the next book, Sorceress

Synopsis: Welcome to the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary’s startling story begins in 1659, the year her beloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch. Mary narrowly escapes a similar fate, only to face intolerance and new danger among the Puritans in the New World. How long can she hide her true identity? Will she ever find a place where her healing powers will not be feared?

Read it here

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The Bear and the Nightingale

By Katherine Arden

This first book of the Winternight Trilogy, was recommended to me by my creative writing lecturer. And, yes, thank you for that. This is sort of fantasy that is rare and witches that claimed their way to the throne so fast.

Synopsis: Beware the evil in the woods. . . In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church. But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . .

Read it here

The Witching Hour

By Ann Rice

She changed the world’s view on vampires, and she didn’t shy away from writing about the witches either. In the series Lives of the Mayfair witches. It centers on a family of witches whose fortunes have been guided for generations by a spirit named Lasher. The series began in 1990 with The Witching Hour, which was followed by the sequels Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). All three novels debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Cool fun fact: Even some of her character cross over to the Vampire universe of hers.

Synopsis: It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. 

As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher… a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.

Read it here

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The House of the Seven Gables

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

A classic one. it more suggest and hint at the supernatural to highlight the drama that enfolds, but nonetheless creates the same atmosphere many horror and supernatural writers strive all their life for.

Synopsis: This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man’s curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in America’s limitless promise. Yet – in part because of blemishes on his own family history – he also saw the darker side of the young nation. Like his twentieth-century heirs William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne peered behind propriety’s facade and exposed the true human condition.

Read it here

Witch of Portobello

By Paulo Coelho

A Paulo Coelho book is always filled with heart, thoughts and love. But do be careful of reading his work. There is always a danger of becoming “deep”.

Synopsis: How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves-even if we are unsure of who we are?That is the central question of international bestselling author Paulo Coelho’s profound new work, The Witch of Portobello. It is the story of a mysterious woman named Athena, told by the many who knew her well-or hardly at all. Like The Alchemist, The Witch of Portobello is the kind of story that will transform the way readers think about love, passion, joy, and sacrifice.

Read it here

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How the TV-series Penny Dreadful is Influenced by Old Literature

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In honor of the new spin-off series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020), we took a nostalgic look back to the awesome Showtime series that started it all. RIP Original series, you were cancelled all too soon.


Penny Dreadful is a British-American horror drama television series created for Showtime and Sky by John Logan. It ran for three seasons from 2014-2016.

Iconic Vanessa Ives (Eva Green).
An original character and
also some of the most well crafted ones.

Penny Dreadful is an old term used during the nineteenth century to refer to cheap popular serial literature. Sort of like pulp fiction. It was also called penny blood, penny awful, or penny horrible. It means a story published in weekly parts, with the cost of one (old) penny. The main plot of these stories were typically sensational, focusing on the adventures of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities.

This is exactly what Penny Dreadful was, and what it payed homage to. So we found some old stuff the series borrowed or was inspired by. And there is A LOT. So get your cigarette on a stick and let’s go on some vampiric monster hunt with out pals.

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Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley (1797–1851) that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a hideous sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. 

Harry Treadaway played Victor Frankenstein, an arrogant, reclusive young doctor whose ambition and research involve transcending the barrier between life and death. In this show, Dr. Victor Frankenstein likes to quote the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s second wife was Mary Shelley.

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Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine’s editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde’s knowledge. It is Wilde’s only novel.

In the series he was played by Reeve Carney. A charismatic man who is ageless and immortal. And this Dorian Gray had a great, but utterly confusing story line. Where his purpose in the show was to throw great balls and parties and have sex with absolutely every character.

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Frankenstein’s bride

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein is tempted by his monster’s proposal to create a female creature so that the monster can have a wife: “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”

In Penny Dreadful, the bride of Frankenstein is Brona Croft (portrayed by Billie Piper), an Irish immigrant with a dark past who dies of tuberculosis at the end of Season 1. In season 2, she is brought back to life with no memory after Frankenstein’s monster demands a bride and given the new name “Lily Frankenstein” by Victor. That last scene of her speech will haunt television forever.

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The creature

Often called John Clare. He was a labour poet in the mid 1800’s England. But if it is a reference to the creature is unclear. What is clear though is that the creature often is called Caliban as well, a character from Shakespear’s The tempes. Half human, half monster. In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, a dwarf or even a tortoise. Another connection from the creature to penny dreadful is Dorian Gray. In the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde muses: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”

In the series he was played with Rory Kinnear, and had long storylines without many of the characters, alone.

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Dracula

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Dracula was a big influence from the start. From Mina being taken by him, the chase after Dracula and several character that appears in the series. Van Helsing included. But the series managed to make a twist of it all, and the influence of Dracula is almost as if just a eerily familiar setting and feeling of the series. He did however show up in series three in the flesh. Christian Camargo as Dracula, the brother of Lucifer who fell to Earth to feed on the blood of the living as the first vampire. In London, he takes the guise of kindly zoologist Alexander Sweet to captivate Vanessa.

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John Seward

In season 3 of TV series Penny Dreadful, Patti LuPone portrays Dr. Florence Seward, a female version of the character. It is originally a character from Dracula, a doctor in the insane asylum, He calls in his mentor, Abraham Van Helsing, to help him with her illness, and he helps Seward to realize that Lucy has been bitten by a vampire and is doomed to become one herself. He was in love with her and proposed to her, but was rejected. After she is officially destroyed and her soul can go to heaven, Seward is determined to destroy Dracula.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1886. It is about a London legal practitioner named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.

Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) as a former classmate of Dr. Frankenstein’s.

Varney the vampire

Abraham Van Helsing gives a copy of Varney the Vampire to Victor Frankenstein, explaining that the story is more truth than fiction and that the mysterious creature the series’ characters are pursuing is a vampire.

Justine

Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue is a 1791 novel by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. Justine is set just before the French Revolution in France and tells the story of a young girl who goes under the name of Thérèse. Her story is recounted to Madame de Lorsagne while defending herself for her crimes, en route to punishment and death.

In Penny Dreadful she is the a homeless, brutalized young prostitute who becomes an acolyte to Lily played by Jessica Barden. In an interview with John Logan from the show, he also said the relationship between Justine and Lily was inspired by th Novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu

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Wolfman

Larry Talbot was the main character in the movie series the Wolfman from 1941 and onward. There are sequels, reboots and several other medias tied into this franchise. He has his own interaction with all the Penny Dreadful characters from Dracula, Frankenstein and so on in his own franchise as well.

In the TV series Penny Dreadful, Ethan Chandler’s real name is revealed to be Ethan Lawrence Talbot, and he suffers from the curse of lycanthropy. This version of the character is played by Josh Hartnett.

Hecate

Hecate Poole is the witch played by Sarah Greene and is Evelyn Pool’s eldest daughter. She is the witch who pursues Ethan Chandler in seasons two and three. She shares her name with the ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft and the moon. Like Ethan’s relationship with the moon and her witchcraft ability as a Nightcomer witch.

The unquiet grave

“The Unquiet Grave” is an English folk song in which a young man mourns his dead love too hard and prevents her from obtaining peace. It is thought to date from 1400. It is heard in the mansion of the Nightcomer witches.

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