The tin box that solved the mystery of San Francisco's McElroy Octagon House

The McElroy Octagon House in San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood is one of two octagon houses in the city — and just a handful of survivors from around the nation.

This story was originally published on March 1, 2020.

Although PG&E bought it in 1924, for decades the McElroy Octagon House remained one of the only homes in San Francisco without electricity.

PG&E wanted the home's Cow Hollow lot for a future substation but, while the plans dawdled, kids and ghosts moved in. Upstairs, a group of runaways from a local youth juvenile hall set up shop. And downstairs, a ghost paced. Every November 24, the neighborhood legend went, a person could be heard creaking up the staircase in the middle of the house. When the entity reached the 20th step, it let out an unearthly scream and a thump resounded through the home, like a body falling to the first floor.

The view of Cow Hollow in the 1870s. The McElroy Octagon House is in foreground.

No one, though, knew who the spirit belonged to. By the 1950s, property records were long lost and it was a city mystery as to who built an eight-sided home, among the rarest in America and just one of two left in San Francisco.

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The McElroy Octagon House in San Francisco's Cow Hollow is a holdover from a very short-lived fad in octagonal house-building.

But all that changed in 1952 when the home was spared from demolition by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in California, a group that seeks to preserve historic buildings. PG&E agreed to sell them the home for $1 — and the savings were much-needed by the NSCDA. The home needed extensive renovations.

The next year, work began. An electrician was brought in to, finally, get lights in the place. And during drilling into an upstairs wall, he hit a tin box. Inside was a trove of papers that finally answered the question: Who on earth would build a house this strange?

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People collect free clothing at a distribution center outside of the badly damaged McElroy Octagon House after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The octagon house trend was short-lived, and it's not hard to see why.

The original floor plan for the San Francisco home is a mess. You entered the home into a small triangular foyer bordered by doors on all three walls. Through one door, you went into the parlour. Through another was the dining room. Each room was cut off from the others by a series of doors, and the staircase up to the second floor was located, through more doors, in the very center of the house.

July 13, 1952: Floor plan for the two story, cedar shingled tea house on Fallon Place, in San Francisco's Russian Hill. It sat below the Verdier Mansion, at 1001 Vallejo Street, where, according to Herb Caen, Sally Stanford ran her brothel at one time.

The concept was the brainchild of phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, who published "The Octagon House, A Home for All" in 1848. In it, he claimed his octagon homes were cheaper to build and warmer due to their many windows (a real draw in foggy San Francisco). A few thousand homes were built around the nation before people realized its problems. Aside from the ridiculous floor plan, the inexpensive homes were made of lime and concrete, a combination that was apt to crack in freezing weather and collapse entirely in natural disasters.

The promise of octagonal living, though, was still a magical dream for the family who built the home on Gough Street. Inside the tin box found by the electrician was a time capsule left there by the McElroys almost 100 years before.

The McElroy Octagon House in San Francisco was badly damaged by the 1906 earthquake and had to be rebuilt.

A letter, written by William C. McElroy, dated from July 1861. Three dozen newspaper clippings, mostly about the outbreak of the Civil War, were tucked inside, as was a tintype of the McElroy family: husband William and wife Harriet ("a very good Looking old Couple," William jokingly wrote) and daughter Emma.

The Chronicle wrote upon its discovery that McElroy's letter was penned "with pride, self-confidence and a disarming disregard for spelling and syntax." In it, he explained how they came to San Francisco and built their dream home. Harriet came first, moving from Pennsylvania shortly after the start of the Gold Rush. William moved in the 1850s from Virginia, setting up shop as a miller. The pair met and married in 1859, the same year Harriet used her independent wealth to buy a lot on Gough for $2,500 (about $72,000 today).

Enamored with the octagon house phenomenon, they set to work building. Two years later, the home was ready. At the time, it had incredible views stretching in all directions of the burgeoning city. "I do not believe that, the world ever has furnished a parelell [sic] to our progress as a City in the Same time," William wrote.

His letter, in some ways, feels remarkably current. He fretted about labor and real estate costs, marveled at the boom of San Francisco and wrote sadly of the turmoil ripping at the seams of the nation. Ultimately, though, McElroy had faith for the future — and excitement for whoever found the box he was placing in his family's new home.

"Look which ever way you will," he wrote, "and you observe happiness prosperity and wealth."

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The home stayed in the McElroy family for 50 years. After William died in 1869, Harriet and Emma started taking in boarders. The 1880 census shows Harriet and Emma (then 27) living with a 20-year-old doctor and a young laundry worker. Emma, working as a teacher at a school on Broadway between Montgomery and Sansome, married shortly thereafter and moved with her aging mother to her husband's house on Guerrero.

From that time, the Octagon House became a rental. The McElroys rented it to many families, but the most famous was poet and journalist Daniel O’Connell. If his name doesn't sound familiar, his creation will: He was a co-founder of the Bohemian Club.

The decline of the Octagon House began in April 1906 when the earthquake destroyed whole sides of the home. As others had already discovered, the lime-and-cement walls were not built to last. Photos, some of which you can see in the gallery above, show the damage. The house had to be rebuilt — this time with wood walls — before tenants could move back in.

In 1909 Emma died, and the house changed hands a few times over the next 15 years before PG&E scooped it up. When the NSCDA renovated it in the early 1950s, they decided to take out the first-floor walls, opening up the claustrophobic floor plan and moving the central staircase to the back of the house.

Today, fewer than 70 octagon homes still stand in America, and the McElroy Octagon House is among the ones that offer tours. Free docent-led tours are available on the second Sunday and second and fourth Thursdays of each month. You can see the interior, though reconfigured, that the McElroy family loved so dearly.

As for the octagon house ghost, it hasn't been heard from in some time. But the caretakers of the NSCDA had a plan, just in case.

"The State president of the Colonial Dames, Mrs. Lindley Miller of Hillsborough, has heard the ghost story," the Chronicle reported in 1953, "but [she] figures that the society can always close the house on ghost-walking days."