Murder mysteries and lost voices abound in its narrow nighttime alleys, but the strongest features of America’s oldest Chinatown are the ghosts of its history, exposed in a one-woman tour now running in San Francisco.

Three years ago Cynthia Yee started giving walking tours around her neighborhood, spanning from Washington to Sacramento streets with Grant and Jackson streets closing the box. Through the tour she tells tales that reveal the tapestry of lives behind blistered brick buildings and pagoda roofs, through closed doors and down dead-end alleys.

“Some people come on the tour and expect a Disneyland ride,” Yee said. “But there are no ghosts that pop out and scream at you. This is about our culture. People usually come to Chinatown to go to a gift shop or get a meal, and there’s so much more here.”

With 18 women trailing behind her on last Saturday's tour, all of them from a local social group called The Red Hat Society, Yee pointed out the First Baptist Church on Grant Street. The church’s outer brick walls are bubbled like lava rock, and were rebuilt from bricks found in the rubble of Chinatown’s terrible fires after the 1906 earthquake.

She led the group into a shopping bazaar with a huge dragon hanging from the ceiling on wires. She explained that as the only mythic creature in the Chinese zodiac, the dragon is made up from elements of all the other animals on it –– the face of the horse, the claws of the rooster, and so on, resulting in layered, complex personalities for those born in the Year of the Dragon.

The tour continued down Ross Alley, which contains a gap between two buildings recognized as the narrowest alley in the city, one of many escape routes often taken by immigrant refugees fleeing the police since the early 1900s, Yee said.

She pointed to the ground, to what looked like a sewer grate.

“When they were first building our community, they built a whole maze of tunnels down there,” Yee said. “That was the home of the opium dens, and when people were running from immigration police, they could slip down in there and get away.”

The grates have all been soldered shut now, she said, and they are falsely labeled “Danger: High Voltage” to keep the curious from prying them open.

“We all take it for granted when we just whiz by all the places on our routine shopping runs and never stop to notice anything,” said Judy Yee, who took the tour. “Chinatown will never be the same for me anymore when I pass by buildings. I will feel all the stories that [she] told us.”

In another alley, the tour guide confided that every building along the block was home to a gambling house for mahjong, a traditional Chinese game of luck and skill along the lines of dominos or poker. The clicking of tiles, muffled through closed doorways sunk halfway into the ground, filled the air with a constant rattling din.

Yee pointed to one such house and told of a local crook in the 1950s who nightly auctioned off each of his four illegal taxi cab medallions, using the money to court a beautiful uptown hooker named Mei Li. One day he picked her up, and noticing she was crying, let her into the back seat. An impatient man for upset women, he avoided conversation while driving her to the Fairmont Hotel, glancing in the rear view mirror as her despair grew more and more dramatic.

Arriving at the hotel, he pulled to the curb and opened the door. The back seat was empty. Distressed and confused, he rushed home, to find the evening newspaper at his doorstep with the front-page story that a beautiful young prostitute had been found dead in the streets.

What became of the crook, Yee did not say.

Her tours are ongoing, and available by appointment through her Web site at www.chinatownghosttours.com.

She will be performing at SF State on April 2, as part of a graduation fundraiser called Grant Street Follies. She will perform with a group of former nightclub dancers who worked the city in the 1950s and ‘60s.