Sutro Baths

Sutro Baths opened on March 14, 1896, built by former mayor Adolph Sutro at the edge of the Pacific and billed as the world's largest indoor swimming pool establishment, with six saltwater pools and one freshwater pool and room for about 10,000 people. A fire destroyed the building in June 1966 while it was being demolished. Investigators ruled it arson. The concrete ruins have been part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area since 1973.

The ghost stories here are mostly legend. KQED reports that local lore puts the spirits of a drowned woman and an older man in the tunnel that once carried seawater to the pools, and says a lit candle left there is thrown into the ocean. The same article says unnamed visitors have described Victorian women with parasols on the beach and turn-of-the-century bathers near the old pools, and that the Paranormal Ghost Society reported picking up weeping on its instruments. Another rumored spirit is Frank Denvin, said to have died in 1896 at 16 after falling from a water-slide ladder into an empty tank.