San Francisco’s Museum of Witchcraft & Magic made national news when it opened at 235 Jefferson St. at Fisherman’s Wharf in July 1973, gracing headlines from Alaska to Alabama for its blend of authentic relics, scenes of artificial human sacrifice, and its coven of near-naked wax witches. The destination, advertised as the world’s largest collection of occult objects, also boasted a talking crystal ball and well-stocked costume shop.
“It was so popular we opened a second location in Gatlinburg, Tennessee,” said John Corcoran, the director of exhibits at Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the entertainment outfit behind the museum’s operation.
Transporter tunnels connected visitors from one supernatural scene to another, so that museumgoers could voyage from, say, the prehistoric caves of Europe to the jungles of Africa. Trick mirrors and disappearing and reappearing demons lent some otherworldiness to the ambiance. Robert L. Drumm, builder for all the early Ripley museums, was the brainchild behind this monument to the Left Hand Path.
Bob Masterson, who worked at Ripley’s, said that many staff members at the SF museum were Wiccans. He also remembered finding people one night in “various states of undress dancing around in one of the galleries looking at the sky in the middle of the museum.”
On Halloween, people lit up scraps of paper in a wish-burning ceremony.
Woody LaBounty, SF historian and president of the nonprofit SF Heritage, remembers the museum well. He visited it frequently with his father and brother when he was ten years old.
“It was all painted black inside like you were going into a movie theater, and you walked into this fake cave made of paper mache,” he said. “There were mannequins, and they were introducing some salacious stuff.”
The parade of sexual innuendo continued into the gift shop, LaBounty recalled, where racy napkins, gag gifts, masks, and costumes were sold year-round.
Most salacious of all, though, were the naked wax witches, “pretty” figures that became the headline subject of a 1973 San Francisco Chronicle preview of the museum. The article highlighted the witch’s cottage where life-sized sorceresses anointed themselves with oil. Lore had it that the application of certain oils could make you fly, Drumm explained to the newspaper columnist, but it was more likely that the absorption of drugs in said oils created the hallucination of flying.
“I thought it was transforming,” LaBounty said of the witch, “but she was in some sort of weird pose, like she was writhing in ecstasy.”
Video footage of the museum contains nearly everything LaBounty remembered: that black tunnel, the sexy witches, the masks and merch for sale. While the darkness and spooky music overlay make it all seem creepy, the museum wasn’t particularly scary.
The city at that time, however, very much was.
In 1966, Anton LaVey shaved his head and declared it Anno Satanas (Year of Satan). His Church of Satan operated out of his Black House at 6114 California St. and attracted reporters, celebrities, and socialites to the Satanic Masses he hosted in his living room. In 1969, the Zodiac Killer sent his first letter to the San Francisco Examiner, stating via cipher, “I like killing people because it’s so much fun.”
By that point, witchcraft and satanism were pop culture fixtures: the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows ran daily on ABC from 1966 to 1971; Rosemary’s Baby became a cultural touchstone in 1968; and commercials for Man, Myth & Magic (“the most unusual magazine ever published”) ran regularly on television.
LaBounty grew up in the Richmond District where LaVey lived, and he’d see LaVey on the street with his pet lion Togare. “My mother worked at Donut World at 18th and Geary, and he’d come in there sometimes,” LaBounty said.
With a real self-anointed High Priest of Satan walking around and buying doughnuts, San Francisco was a perfect destination for a museum of witchcraft, as Ripley’s vice president in charge of exhibits, Derek Copperthwaite, told the South Wales Argus in 1973: “San Francisco is a hotbed of the occult and freaky ideas.”
Despite its initial popularity, the Museum of Witchcraft & Magic closed in 1975. It reopened around 1980 as the more palatable World of the Unexplained, with less witchcraft and an extra dose of magic. “I think it was the pushback on Satan and the occult,” LaBounty said.
Yet Corcoran claimed it was flagging ticket sales and not fear of the devil that prompted the pivot. “It’s a narrow profile that will buy a ticket to a witchcraft museum,” he speculated. In those first three years, the museum had run through its customer base and needed to expand.
Half a century after the closure, the museum’s collection continues to enchant.
Copperthwaite, along with Charles Bristol, another Ripley’s executive, scored a deal when they purchased Gerald Gardner’s witchcraft collection. Gardner (1884-1964), known as the “King of Witches” and a father of the pagan religion Wicca, died on the Isle of Man off the British Coast, leaving behind his voluminous collection of artifacts to his wife.
“In a great Ripley tale, she offered it for one billion,” Corcoran said of Gardner’s widow. “But Charlie Bristol paid two bottles of Scotch and some tens of thousands.” (Talk about a deal with the devil.)
The collection contained items like earthquake pentacles, horned-head oil lamps, and unpublished manuscripts, Corcoran said. Some of the collection is still on display in various Ripley museums, other pieces were sold to a Wicca aficionado. Other pieces remain in storage, waiting for another Anno Satanas some day.
“We used to be somewhat accommodating about people wanting to look at them but then it got a little creepy,” Corcoran said. “It’s a unique crowd, shall we say.”
