Arctic Club Hotel

History

Most Seattleites know the Arctic Building, at Third Avenue and Cherry Street, as “the one with the walrus tusks,” says HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington history. The nickname comes from the terra-cotta walrus heads on its third level. The building went up in 1916 as the home of the Arctic Club, a social club that grew out of Seattle’s trade with Alaska. Many of its members were businessmen or steamship captains who lived in Alaska or did business there. Part of the building was rented out as offices. The club stayed until 1971. The City of Seattle, a tenant for decades, later bought the building. In 2006, the city sold it to developers who restored it as a hotel.

In 1936, Marion Zioncheck, a two-term congressman from Seattle, had his office on the fifth floor. The building was also his headquarters as he ran for reelection. His antics and drinking had made headlines, and in the month before his death, he spent time in a Maryland mental hospital. On the evening of August 7, Zioncheck fell from his office window. His wife was in a parked car on the street below. The next day, the Seattle Times reported that doctors and people close to him blamed his death on “mental illness brought on by overwork” and on his fear of going back to a sanitarium. His death was ruled a suicide, but some of his relatives insisted he had been pushed.

Hauntings & Lore

The Arctic Club’s ghost stories gather on the fifth floor, where Zioncheck had his office.

The Zioncheck Ghost

Neil Low, a Seattle police captain, once ran the police department’s domestic violence and sexual assault unit out of the Arctic Building. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which told his story in 2011, put him “in the very office Zioncheck supposedly jumped from.” Now and then, Low heard the elevator come up to the fifth floor when nobody had called it, and nobody stepped out. He asked whether it was broken. He was told the lift came to that floor “all by itself, because of ‘the Zioncheck ghost.’”

The Files That Weren’t There

Low went looking for the old case files. There were none. Because the death had been ruled a suicide, everything on it had been shredded after five years. “Are you kidding me?” Low remembered thinking. “This was a U.S. congressman.”

Zioncheck’s brother-in-law, William Nadeau, had been with him on the fifth floor the evening he died. He told the Post-Intelligencer the next day, “I only missed him by a foot when I grabbed for him as he jumped.” Low, a former homicide commander, found Nadeau’s story hard to believe. It had too many details, he said, for someone who had just watched such a thing happen. “Nadeau would have some explaining to do,” Low said. “This is just me being suspicious,” he added. Still, from a cop’s point of view, he thought it “stinks to high heaven.”

Footsteps on the Fifth Floor

Other tellers add to the story. The Ticket, the Seattle Times’ entertainment guide, says elevator doors on the fifth floor “open and close on their own” and “footsteps resound in empty halls.” It also reports “sounds of pacing and a freezing breeze” in “the room where it happened,” which it gives as Room 517. Seattle Terrors, a Seattle ghost tour company, says the elevator “often randomly stops on the fifth floor of the building, as if inviting guests to take a walk.” The company adds that cold spots are common on that floor.

Ask for Room 517, or any room on the fifth floor.