Berkeleyside reports
Owsley Stanley, famed Grateful Dead soundman and the first person to privately manufacture LSD, lived in the Poet’s Corner cottage during the Summer of Love.
Owsley “Bear” Stanley lived in a cottage in Berkeley’s Poet’s Corner neighborhood for just a short while during the Summer of Love. But as the King of Acid knew well, small doses pack a punch.
A sound engineer for the Grateful Dead who made his own LSD and supplied it to everyone from the Merry Pranksters to the Beatles, Stanley moved into the cottage that resembles a Brothers Grimm fairytale in the spring of 1967. In December 1967, narcotics agents raided Stanley’s drug laboratory in Orinda, and he spent much of the next five years in jail.
The cottage, commonly known as the Troll House and located at 2321 Valley St. (north of Channing Way), is for sale and listed at $899,000. With a brick path leading to the front door, stained-glass windows and a cylindrical chimney, the aesthetics still pale in comparison to characters who occupied the two-bed, one-bath dwelling during the counterculture movement.
“Don’t call it the Troll House!” urged Rhoney Gissen Stanley, one of those cottage characters. Rhoney married Stanley “in a hippie sort of way,” she said, and raised their son, Starfinder, while the father served time after the lab bust. “We didn’t call it the Troll House,” she insisted.
Read the full article at https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/05/17/berkeley-troll-house-owsley-stanley
