October 2025 edition · Arts & culture
My Ceiling Is the Shape of a Coffin and Other Writings on the Wall
A reflection on living above the site of a 1981 murder in a Lower Haight apartment.
warning: this piece discusses a murder in the 80s “I must be an angel,” I said to my landlady. It immediately occurred to me that the very woman I was speaking to was indeed one such person who I imagined would object to this statement of my virtuosity, not to mention my parents, my best friend I hadn’t texted back in two weeks and at least one ex. My landlady laughed. “And you must be a comedian,” she responded. I shrugged.
She had just finished telling me about the time in 1981 when the water heater broke in my building. My landlady, carrying her then-baby on her hip and accompanied by the PG&E guy, walked to the downstairs unit and found her tenant rolled up in a rug, stabbed to death.
Sure, while she was telling me this, I was splayed out on the shared stoop stairs blocking her doorway while soaking up some sun in my pajamas and a full leg brace, but I am very much alive and still paying rent on time. Ergo, angel. You agree now, too, don’t you? Because a dead tenant is a nightmare and something rather satanic had been occupying the house.
The nightmare continued. The apartment was destroyed and eerie paintings smeared the walls. She called the police and they arrived, guns blazing at the news of a possible homicide. She was still holding her baby.
“Put your guns down,” she barked at them.
At this point in her storytelling, I wanted to ask if she was traumatized by all this, but good journalists don’t waste their questions on ones they know the answer to. (I’m not a journalist and it’s actually really important to ask questions you think you know the answer to.)
The tenant at the time was a 23-year-old named Karen, the unfortunate first known victim of serial killers Michael Bear Carson and Suzan Carson, also known as the “San Francisco Witch Killers.”
I live right above where she was murdered. And my landlady lives right above me. In a moment of ennui (there are many), I once looked up at my ceiling (her floor) and realized it was the shape of a coffin. (Were we next?)
It was the Haight in the ‘80s and the city was coming down from the counter culty acid trip of the 70s, but not everyone made it out of the drug induced haze alive.
This is the printed excerpt. Read the complete story.