Remembering the bygone Fisherman’s Wharf Haunted Gold Mine

Rainbow kites swooped and soared within the blue sky overhead. Cable automobiles, which had shut down for restoration two years prior, have been again on the turnaround close to the doorway of Fisherman’s Wharf, their unmistakable clang-clang ringing out into the salty air. 

A manufacturing crew was within the space, capturing the James Bond movie “A View to a Kill.”  Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson and Duran Duran have been the artists of the second, and it was powerful to search out somebody who wasn’t carrying a purple leather-based “Thriller” jacket or a feathery Simon le Bon coiffure.

Walsh remembers all of it — a cacophony of sights and sounds that adopted him as he walked to his part-time summer time job on the Shell Cellar. One of the crucial memorable factors of nostalgia was the previous, robotic prospector with a protracted grey beard, taunting passersby from his publish at 145 Jefferson St. as he sang “Oh My Darling, Clementine” in a raspy voice. 

Above the animatronic determine, a wood signal with lopsided letters beckoned individuals to the attraction inside: the Haunted Gold Mine.

“When you have been inside, he’d come up the mine shaft and inform the story of how the mine had been closed for 150 years, however these ghosts simply received’t go away a physique to relaxation. When you may seize the treasure, it was yours to take,” mentioned Walsh, laughing. “It was the proper funky, tacky vacationer attraction.”

A California Gold Rush-inspired enjoyable home additionally drawing affect from the likes of Playland-at-the-Beach and Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the Haunted Gold Mine opened in 1979. Run by Thomas Fong, who additionally opened the adjoining Wax Museum in 1963 and the Medieval Dungeon in 1989, the walkthrough attraction price $2 to enter and lasted roughly 12 minutes from begin to end.

Commercials revealed within the Chronicle that yr for the attraction, which price $1 million to construct, enticed company into the “whimsical reveals” with guarantees of “nocturnal, ghostly figures,” “shivering cowboys,” “complicated mazes,” “a corridor of mirrors” and “a thriller home.”  

Ross Plesset, a contract author and theme park historian from Los Angeles who now runs a Fb group dedicated to the Haunted Gold Mine, mentioned he visited for the primary time when he was 11 years previous. 

“It was one-of-a-kind,” he mentioned. “I beloved enjoyable homes as a child, however I’d by no means seen one fairly like this earlier than.” 

Michael Blythe, who grew up in Burlingame and is now the final supervisor on the Vogue Theatre, remembers feeling equally excited to find the Haunted Gold Mine as a toddler.

“The primary time I noticed it was on a visit into the town with my dad, after we had visited the Wax Museum,” he mentioned. “I begged him to purchase us tickets.”

Upon wandering down a flight of stairs and stepping right into a rickety previous elevator, company would “descend” into the mine.

“A small window had shadows of the numerous ‘ranges’ you have been touring down. When the door opened again up, it was even clear to me as a bit of child that we hadn’t traveled wherever,” mentioned Blythe.  

Winding hallways with gold-studded partitions gave strategy to a glass maze with an animated ghost that floated above them. Then, guests cautiously made their method by a tunnel because the prospector guided them to a graveyard populated with red-eyed vultures, finally main them to a close-by outhouse, remembers Plesset. 

A lot to his shock, upon opening the door, he discovered a skeleton ready inside, seated on the bathroom.

“There was a guttural voice that mentioned, ‘What are you doing in right here?’” mentioned Plesset. Although the scene was purported to be humorous, he remembers leaping again in concern. 

“I used to be nonetheless a bit of inclined to being scared,” admitted Plesset. “However I beloved it. As a child, all the results have been so superb to me. In any case these years, I by no means forgot that feeling.” 

Although he wouldn’t go to the attraction for one more 16 years, he all the time thought-about it a “must-do” in San Francisco. When he returned to the town in 1995 on the age of 27, the very first thing he did was head over to Pier 39 to see if the Haunted Gold Mine was nonetheless there. 

It was, however he seen it had undergone a number of modifications, remodeling it from a extra kid-oriented enjoyable home to one thing scarier. 

The maze was a lot darker, with blacklight illuminating among the ugly gags that had been included in later years, like a severed model head that fell from the ceiling behind a pane of glass with a shriek. One other entity bearing an uncanny resemblance to at least one of the ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion in addition to a dragon repurposed from the Enchanted World of Previous San Francisco — a darkish journey created by Sid and Marty Krofft within the constructing that now homes the San Francisco Dungeon — rounded out the newer soar scares, lunging at company as they handed by. 

Then, there was the electric chair. 

In the event that they have been feeling daring, company may sit down within the chair, looking at their reflection in a mirror throughout the room whereas an animatronic executioner ready to drag a change. Then, they’d really feel a vibrating sensation as a loud zapping sound emanated from an unseen speaker, and a jet of air would burst from the seat of the chair. A visible gag on this a part of the attraction additionally altered the unsuspecting visitor’s reflection to seem as that of “a charred corpse,” mentioned Plesset. 

“I bear in mind it making me soar and my dad laughing at my response to it,” mentioned Blythe. “This was positively well worth the ticket worth alone.”

On the finish was a “tilt room,” not in contrast to the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz, with distorted angles and a chandelier that appeared to swing from a sideways angle. 

Nonetheless, by the late Nineties, the Haunted Gold Mine was falling aside, and vacationers have been dropping curiosity. With the attraction now not commercially viable, Fong’s grandson, Rodney, set his sights on transforming the house in a $15 million rebuilding plan throughout the summer time of 1999.

The Haunted Gold Mine would get replaced with one thing newer and shinier: a 30,000-square-foot Rainforest Café with “stay birds, a 60,000-gallon aquarium and a three-story indoor waterfall,” in keeping with a narrative within the Chronicle relaying Fong’s plans.

For practically twenty years, the restaurant maintained a shred, no less than, of the Haunted Gold Mine’s relentless kitsch. It closed in 2017, and the San Francisco Chocolate Retailer stands there right this moment, flanked by a McDonald’s in addition to the San Francisco Dungeon and Madame Tussauds wax museum.

Pictures of the Haunted Gold Mine are few and much between because it largely lives on in distant childhood reminiscences. Over time, Plesset mentioned that his Fb group has offered an area for individuals to share tales concerning the attraction, and he mentioned he’s even met a number of followers who managed to avoid wasting a handful of relics from the Haunted Gold Mine, together with a ghost and the well-known previous prospector, displaying them of their houses for Halloween. 

Plesset believes traces of the forgotten attraction nonetheless stay on in locations like Magowan’s Infinite Mirror Maze on Pier 39 and the retro novelties of the Musée Mécanique. However on a current go to to Fisherman’s Wharf, he couldn’t assist however really feel nostalgic as he walked over to the stretch of pavement the place the previous prospector as soon as stood.

“It’s a bizarre feeling, to be standing on the identical spot the place I used to be in my childhood,” he mentioned. “It’s a way of timelessness.”