The Headmistress of Room 410: San Francisco’s Queen Anne Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Set on Sutter Street in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, the Queen Anne Hotel is a Victorian mansion from 1890 that has been a girls’ boarding school, a lodging house, a religious property and finally a boutique hotel. It is also one of the more persistently ghost-storied addresses in California, and almost all of the stories point to a single room on the fourth floor.

The building takes its name from its architecture: it was built in the Queen Anne style and painted in the multi-colour scheme San Franciscans call a painted lady. That much is a matter of record. The rest, the tucked-in blankets and the headmistress who never left, belongs to the guests who report it.

A Boarding School That Lasted Six Years

The house went up in 1890 and opened as Mary Lake’s School for Girls, a boarding school for young women named for the woman who envisioned it. Its life as an educational institution was short, ending in 1896, and the building passed through a succession of other uses afterwards, serving variously as boarding houses and as religious premises before its conversion to a hotel.

That pattern of reuse is what saved it. Plenty of comparable San Francisco mansions were subdivided beyond recognition or lost outright, and this one came close to joining them: the building narrowly survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the disaster that erased so much of the city’s nineteenth-century housing stock. What stands on Sutter Street today is genuine 1890 fabric, not a reconstruction, which is a large part of why the interiors read the way they do.

Mary Lake and Room 410

The central legend is straightforward and unusually consistent. Mary Lake, headmistress of the former finishing school, is said to haunt her old office. That office is now guest Room 410, and it is the room ghost hunters ask for by number.

It is worth being clear about the division here. That the school existed and that Lake ran it is history. That she is still in the building is legend, sustained by guest accounts rather than by anything documentary. No verified death, incident or tragedy in the building underpins the story; what underpins it is a long tail of reported experiences, which is a different thing and should be treated as one.

What Guests Say Happens Here

The reported phenomena at the Queen Anne are notably gentle, which sets the hotel apart from most places with a paranormal reputation. Guests describe waking to find blankets tucked in around them, belongings moved or neatly rearranged, and the sensation of a light touch. Others report the sound of children’s voices carrying along the corridors, an echo, in the telling, of the building’s schoolroom years.

Apparitions attributed to Mary Lake herself are reported occasionally, most often in and around Room 410. Taken together, the accounts describe something closer to a caretaker than a haunting, and that reading, a headmistress still looking after the people sleeping under her roof, is the one the hotel’s folklore has settled on.

The hotel is a popular site for ghost hunting, and its paranormal reputation has had television attention: the building’s alleged hauntings were the subject of an episode of the series Haunted Hotels. Media coverage of this kind tends to standardise a location’s ghost stories over time, so expect the accounts you hear on site to align closely with the ones broadcast.

Staying at the Queen Anne Hotel

This is a working hotel, so access is simple: book a room. Room 410 is the one associated with Mary Lake, and anyone visiting specifically for the story should request it directly and well ahead, since it is the room paranormal enthusiasts chase.

Visitors with no interest in ghosts still get something out of the trip. The public rooms and guest rooms are furnished in period style, and the building is a survivor of pre-earthquake San Francisco standing in a neighbourhood full of Victorian architecture. Approach it as a night in an 1890 mansion with a good story attached, rather than as a guaranteed encounter, and it holds up either way.

Sources

• The Ghost Detectives' Guide to Haunted San Francisco
• Luxury Hotel in San Francisco | Queen Anne Hotel
• GeoHack – Queen Anne Hotel
• Wikipedia: Queen Anne Hotel

Address: 1590 Sutter Street

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