Author Writes about Living in a Bay Area Mortuary

She was 19, pregnant and living inside a haunted South San Francisco mortuary.

When newly occupied coffins would come in, Rebecca Fisher would put makeup on the faces of the deceased, place Kleenex in the viewing room, and make sure the casket lids were open. Or closed, depending on the requirements.

Though it was a place that housed the dead, she says it couldn't have been more alive — especially at night. There were footsteps, unexplained balls of light and shadow figures. Her young husband, studying to be a mortician, even began to change — he turned dark, even abusive.

After three years of marriage, Fisher decided to flee mortuary life with her young daughter. She has written a book based on her experiences, called "All the Wrong Places," available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. People can also order copies from her website.

Fisher lives in Southern California now where she works as a school teacher, but spent much of her childhood in the Bay Area — she has relatives in Pleasanton, Pleasant Hill and Concord. This week, she traversed the Bay Area with her now 13-year-old daughter, visiting with family and reliving moments of her life that are reminiscent of a "Six Feet Under" episode.

"I just took the last 10 to 14 years of my life and put all of it together," she said. "And what I came up with was this book."

Fisher grew up in Northridge, attended Christian schools and describes her teenage years as lost. And then she found herself pregnant with her daughter. She and the baby's father married, and shortly after, he told her he wanted to study mortuary science.

The small family moved into a mortuary — she doesn't want to reveal its name, because she respects the family that runs the place and doesn't want to cause negative publicity. At first, she was all for it, maybe even a little excited.

But their apartment was attached to the building, with the front door opening right up into the mortuary — she hadn't known they were going to be living in the mortuary. But she decided to settle into the role of dutiful wife and new mother, and live as normally as possible.

Her husband's workload was heavy, so she would help out vacuuming the office and viewing room and even go into the embalming room to aid with the bodies.

"I had this new baby and I wanted my husband home, so the more I helped, the faster it went. That's when I first started venturing out."

At first, she just had a sense that she wasn't alone. But then things started happening. She said she would catch a glimpse of herself in a hallway mirror with a ball of light behind her. She'd turn to look, and it would be gone.

Once when she was dusting a hearse, she said she saw in the shiny black paint a reflection of a shadow walking behind her.

"The first thing I'd do when things happened was get the heck out of there," she said. "I wasn't the only one to see these things, but other people would just tune it out."

She heard noises outside her apartment all the time, and often, her infant daughter would look right past her into the blank air, smiling and interacting with nothing. Casket lids would open and shut on their own.

She became superstitious. For example, when the fog would roll in, she says the number of newly dead coming in would rise — mostly people from the convalescent homes, she said.

"We used to say that the fog was the hand of death," she said.

She convinced her husband to leave the mortuary with her, and he agreed. They moved down to the Los Angeles area where he got another job in a different mortuary. However, his character continued to change for the worse, she said, and eventually, the couple divorced.

After a long custody battle, working multiple jobs and struggling, Fisher remarried. In a writing class she took on the side, students were asked to write a short story and the first chapter of "All the Wrong Places" just flew out of her, she said.

The story starts with an abused mother named Casey fleeing with her daughter and getting into a car wreck.

"That didn't actually happen to me, but it's symbolic of everything I lived through," she said. "Fleeing with nowhere to go, with everything coming to a head.

A few years later, she sat down to write out the whole story and one day, some of her high school English students asked what she was working on. She sheepishly let them read a few chapters, and they came back wanting more. It was her students who pushed her to finish the book.

This past week, Fisher showed her daughter the South San Francisco mortuary for the first time.

"Just a street sign can bring back so many memories," Fisher said. "It drudged up all these feelings that I didn't know I had — negative feelings because of all the awful things that happened.

"I think, 'Oh my gosh, I lived there,' and remember everything and I shake my head like, 'I can't believe I lived that.'

"But I'm glad I did because it made a really good story," she said. "And if those things hadn't happened, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Though she strayed from religion, she said she has rediscovered it in large part because of living in the mortuary.

"It's very obvious when you see a body that it's empty — it's missing something," she said.

"Obviously the soul is gone and it's an empty shell. And that was the beginning of me questioning if there's no soul left in this body, then where is it?"