It’s a gloomy night at UC Berkeley and Ying Liu is about to give a haunted tour of the school. “Before we start, I just have a question,” she says. “How much gore can you handle?”
There’s a brief silence before a woman in our tour group pipes up. “Gore it up! And maybe when I start crying, ratchet it back.”
Liu is dressed all in black, shoes to jacket, and carries an EMF meter to detect energy spikes in the electromagnetic field. She’s a familiar face to anybody who’s watched “The Haunted Bay,” a show she created that ran for three seasons on Amazon Prime in 2020. In the series, Liu and her team of paranormal investigators run around the Bay hunting ghosts: They found one (and showed its face on camera) at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, and have spectrally spelunked at the USS Hornet aircraft carrier in Alameda and Oakland’s historic gay bar, the White Horse Inn.
The Berkeley tours are something that Liu is offering personally this year to fans of intimate, historically based trauma tours. (She also does one in San Francisco.) She’s like a journalist in her methods. She digs through newspaper archives to uncover stories of death and destruction, and also interviews locals – tenants, security guards, janitors – to give her the scoop, and even access to, haunted places. The tour’s motto is: “True ghost stories. Evidence. Scares!”
Tonight we’re taking a 1.7-mile hike around campus and surrounding neighborhood, home to some of the oldest buildings in the city. The journey begins with mild goosebumps but will take a grisly turn at the halfway point, warns Liu. We sign a legal waiver releasing liability for, no doubt, suffering a heart attack from fright.
In our group is Zach Holms from Los Gatos, Ruby Knight from Canada and Helen Knight from Rockridge. “I forced them to come,” Helen says, indicating the other two. “I just can’t not believe (in the paranormal).”
We arrive at the Campanile, a 307-foot clock tower built in 1914 used by the biology department to store hundreds of thousands of prehistoric fossils. It’s rumored pranksters have arranged animal bones so visitors stepping out of the tower elevators get an awful surprise.
At least two people have killed themselves jumping off the tower, Liu says. Anti-suicide bars were then installed in the 1980s. “So people say this place is haunted. In fact, one person said they’ve seen a hand sticking out of the ground,” she says.
Next stop is a gnarled tree that’s grown into a torturous shape. “If you turn your head to the right it looks just like a screaming skull, like something out of ‘Sleepy Hollow.’” Liu notes. “Best tree ever,” Helen says.
We arrive at the Faculty Club where university folks hang out to drink during football games. The ghost of an overworked history professor named Henry Morse Stephens is said to haunt the place. His life’s work on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was reportedly lost in a 1920s fire, he’s “known to recite poetry in there,” Liu says. (This must be one of those fun, doddering old ghosts from the “Harry Potter” universe.)
Inside the club, where it’s quiet and dark as a tomb, Liu whips out her EMF reader and asks if anybody is there. Nothing. “It also depends on if they want to communicate with you,” cautions Liu. “I’m so hurt,” Helen says.
We adjourn to take a bathroom break. Zach carries the meter into the men’s restroom, and it promptly flashes red by the toilet. “I don’t want to be here,” he says.
We’re nearing the halfway point, when things are supposed to get scary. Our party roams through the shadows of the campus forest, redwoods looming overhead, dripping abnormally large spiders, steam seeping from underground tunnels. A freshman walking by says to his phone: “Ugh. This morning I woke up in the shower.”
At a co-op for student housing on Prospect Street, Liu stops and says: “There was a cult that lived here.” In the 1970s, the One World Family Commune moved in and practiced a belief in UFOs and a kind of tantric yoga/group sex called “Natural Selection.” Later, the house was taken over by strict vegetarians known as Lothloriens – named after the elvish land in “The Lord of the Rings.” One of the Lothloriens made headlines in 1984 after murdering his girlfriend, Roberta “Bibi” Lee, in the Oakland Hills.
“They found her body, decomposing, with animals having eaten some of it,” Liu says. “Residents told me that ‘Bibi’ Lee’s ghost had still been haunting the place. It stomped around and targeted angry, young men. They did a ritual to get rid of it, and the stomping went away.”
But “now there’s a spirit that stands in front of people’s doors and watches before they go to sleep,” she adds. That’s just life in the ghost world: You win some battles, you lose some.
Liu is taking a break to talk about the scariest thing that ever happened to her: a nightmare with a dead woman and a “ripper” who pulls out intestines. She is slight and soft-spoken; you have to lean in to hear her, which makes it all the more unnerving when you finally understand what she’s saying. “My dreams are vivid, like full-color horror movies,” she notes.
This is about the point when the tour group decides to leave early, saying they’re freaked out and also tired. “I don’t judge,” she says. “Everyone’s got different fear levels. This is not for the easily scared.”
Still on the night’s docket is a jaunt to the former California School for the Blind, which burned down ages ago; guests at the nearby Claremont Resort & Club report hearing crying and moaning coming from the grounds. There’s also a structure on UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus where the body of a likely homicide victim was discovered in 2023. It was skeletonized, and authorities believe it was a Texas man last seen in 2009.
With all this grimness in her life, what does Liu do for fun?
“I love animals. I rescue hamsters; they’re the little lights of my life,” she says, loading up her TikTok channel full of the derpy creatures. “They’re like little puppies that want to run into my hand and lick me – they’re like little angels.”
Details: Berkeley tours take place every week and are $55 for general admission and $35 for students; tour meets by UC Berkeley and lasts three hours, for details and booking visit thehauntedbay.com