This story is part of our October 2025 issue. To read the print version, click here.
Shannon McCabe peers out from the Delta King, seeing its bow
touched in twilight and gangplank lost in turning shadows. Her
friend Wendy Russell leans over the deck’s edge to watch a dead
emerald tide gliding out towards the sundown. McCabe is widely
known for hosting her eponymous Vampire Ball, a sumptuous
spectacle of Gothic pageantry where acrylic fangs, blood-colored
wine and live music electrify a nocturnal tribute to immortal
wandering.
Her annual fright festival happens this year on Saturday, October
25. But right now, watching dusk draw on the 98-year-old planks
of the mighty paddleboat, that is not what’s on McCabe’s mind.
Her thoughts are drifting back to when she and Russell led ghost
tours through Old Sacramento’s cavernous bones of the frontier.
Back then, the pair organized private walking excursions, though
a few times they procured a black hearse that could drive some
eight attendees into the darker thoroughfares.
“I loved the folklore,” McCabe admits, glancing at the ship’s red
wheel warming in the floodlights. “I loved the stories. I loved
to go around and tell people strange things that have happened to
me and my friends as we walked through these darkened hallways of
the Delta King, or down into the alleys of Old Sac.”
I’m having a glass of wine with McCabe and Russell outside of the
Delta King’s Pilothouse restaurant, the original grand dining
room, now a bar and restaurant adorned in intricate stained-glass
windows depicting life on the Sacramento River. It’s one of the
best vantage points for seasonal festivities along the
waterfront, including the Yuletide boat parade. I ask McCabe and
Russell why the 280-foot vessel from the days of Prohibition is
one of the first hits that comes up whenever Googling “haunted
Sacramento.”
Shannon McCabe, known for her annual Vampire Ball, hangs out at
Honey and the Trap Cat, an underground bar in Old Sacramento
where she once had her own spooky experience.
“There are two apparitions that show up regularly here on the
Delta King,” McCabe says. “One is a girl who’s 8 to 10 years old,
with long blond hair and wearing a full-length cotton dress.
She’s seen running through the halls and hiding and giggling from
guests and workers, usually on the second floor.” Child-size
footprints have also been spotted on the ship’s deck in the
morning dew.
“The other apparition that’s seen is a middle-aged man in a light
button-up shirt with dark pants, who’s wearing a Navy blue cap,”
McCabe notes. “He’s seen in the early morning hours wandering the
lobby and hallways. Sometimes employees have experienced phantom
energy, like hearing a glass break near the mystery theater room,
then finding nothing broken anywhere.”
Such reports show why paranormal tourism has been a steady draw
for Sacramento’s waterfront over the years. Now that McCabe and
Russell are focused on other projects, a newer company called US
Ghost Adventures is offering narrated tours of the same
neighborhood. Its guides usually have their walking groups stop
at the Delta King.
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Sacramento
Between glasses of chardonnay, McCabe asks our waiter if he’s
ever experienced anything bizarre or uncanny at work. The young
man responds that his supervisor refuses to go to the bottom of
the ship alone. In fact, he adds chattily, if his supervisor has
to go anywhere on the Delta King that’s not in its restaurant or
within view of people, she makes another employee follow her. He
says that’s because employees have heard a little girl talking or
singing in parts of the boat that no one has access to.
McCabe and Russell raise their eyebrows at me and smile.
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National Hotel Got a Facelift — but It’s Still as ‘Haunted’ as
Ever
The streets of Old Sacramento have similar tales after
experiencing a steady stream of death. In August of 1850, city
officials and a faction of rebellious settlers were involved in
back-to-back gunfights that killed nine men, including
Sacramento’s first assessor, J.W. Woodward, and its first
sheriff, Joseph McKinney. Then, a few months later on Halloween,
local newspapers warned that “the Blue Death” — cholera — had
arrived on the river docks. More than 800 Sacramentans would die
in the next three months.
Real events are entwined in ghost traditions. I’ve learned by
taking paranormal-themed tours throughout the country and in
Europe that the longer a neighborhood has existed and the more
generations have passed through it, the deeper the strata of
memory baked into its walls and streets. Ghost tourism is really
about treading on the most intense elements of an area’s legacy —
conditions so extreme that we can imagine forlorn and poignant
echoes reverberating from them.
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Inside Sacramento’s Most Immersive Tiki Worlds
McCabe says that one night in 2009, she had her own encounter
with the inexplicable. While prepping for her Vampire Ball in an
Old Sacramento basement bar, a watering hole now called Honey and
the Trapcat, which is at the original street level (Old Sac was
raised 15 feet after a catastrophic flood in 1862), she could
hear someone following her around, even though she knew she was
alone. Others have reported seeing a woman from another time
disappear right in front of them at that same bar.
Now, watching McCabe and Russell sip wine at sunset, it’s clear
that their love affair with the dim shades bending beyond the
boat are cemented by history and possibilities. “All I can think
of is what it was before I walked on those grounds,” Russell
admits. “For me, it’s the fascination of what’s beyond the
present world.”
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