Dead French gigolo is a pest
• Spooky Nonsense: Ghosts & Hauntings
Another entrepreneur with a ghostly problem that might prove an attraction.
PAULA, ARE you out there? Francois lives to find you. Sort of. He searches the faces of everyone who comes into the Cafe Van Kleef in downtown Oakland, just in case. Asks about you all the time, although no one listens. Knocks things over and turns off the stereo system, just because he can. He's not melancholy, which is odd considering he's a former lady-loving, party-happy, live-life-to-the-wee-hours French gigolo who's now got no body -- seeing as how he's dead and all. Yes, Francois supposedly soiree-ed a little too hardee one night and keeled over from a drug overdose more than a decade ago when he lived on the fifth floor of 1621 Telegraph Ave. So now he's stuck -- haunting the hallways, the first-floor cafe and its art gallery. Ooh, and especially the creepy elevator. "Once you get in the elevator, it hesitates, then goes -- unless somebody has pushed the button outside to get on ... "
Angela Hill, Oakland Tribune: Restaurateur says his place is haunted