History
Seattle started on the wrong beach, built itself on mud and sawdust, and burned before it was 40.
Before the City
People have been crossing the ground under Pioneer Square, where the city of Seattle would begin, for thousands of years. The Duwamish call it Dzidzilalich, Little Crossing-Over Place, and kept a winter village of about eight longhouses on the shore here. Suquamish and Muckleshoot people lived here too, and the settlers who came later depended on them. “Without the labor of Indians, Seattle would have been stillborn,” historian Coll Thrush wrote in his book Native Seattle.
The Founding
The 24 men, women, and children of the Denny Party landed at Alki Point on November 13, 1851. It was an exposed spit with no harbor worth the name. Arthur Denny borrowed his wife’s clothesline, tied a weight to it, and used it to measure the depth of Elliott Bay. Off the eastern shore, deep water came in close to land, deep enough for ships. In the spring of 1852, most of the party crossed the bay and started over there. That shoreline is Pioneer Square.
Skid Road
Elliott Bay’s deep water came with mud. At high tide, 15 feet of water covered the flats, and at low tide the whole thing drained. The city built out over it on trestles, driving logs 65 feet down to find something solid. It filled the lagoon by Maynard’s Point with sawdust, junk, and horse carcasses until it was land. Lower Pioneer Square stands on that. The ground here was made, and it has been remade ever since.
The settlement was first called Duwamps. Doc Maynard talked his neighbors into renaming it for Chief Seattle. In 1852, Henry Yesler built Puget Sound’s first steam-powered sawmill on a pier at the foot of what is now Yesler Way. Maynard and Carson Boren gave him a strip of land running up the hill behind it. It became known as Skid Road, supposedly for the logs skidded down it to the mill on greased timbers. (Most of Yesler’s logs actually came in by raft.) Skid Road turned into a border. North of it was the respectable town. South of it were the saloons, brothels, and gambling halls the city tolerated for decades. Long after the logs stopped, the name stuck to the district, later softening into “skid row.”
The Chinese Expulsion
Chinese workers built the railroads, graded the streets, and worked the mines and logging camps. By 1885, about one Seattleite in 10 was Chinese. Then the work dried up, and the city turned on them. On a Sunday morning, February 7, 1886, men went house to house through Chinatown, some with police beside them, loaded belongings into wagons, and put 196 people aboard a steamer at the Ocean Dock. A man died the next day attacking the guardsmen protecting those still in the city. Martial law ran two weeks. It took the Chinese community here 20 years to recover.
The Great Fire
The city burned in 1889. The fire started on June 6 in a cabinet shop at Front and Madison, where a worker threw water on an overheated glue pot. By sunset, 64 acres of the commercial core and waterfront were ash. Seattle rebuilt in brick and stone and raised the streets while it was at it, which is how the old shopfronts ended up underground.
The Gold Rush
The gold rush began on July 17, 1897, when the steamship Portland tied up from Alaska carrying what the papers called more than a ton of solid gold. Seattle sold itself as the “Gateway to the Gold Fields,” and the money the rush brought through town paid for the blocks where this page’s stories are set. It also flooded the brothels and gambling halls south of Yesler Way. Both were illegal, and the laws were enforced only now and then. Lou Graham, who had arrived in 1888, ran a brothel at Third Avenue and Washington Street whose regulars included the city’s most elite business leaders. Wyatt Earp came up in 1899 and opened a gambling hall, the Union Club. John Considine ran box houses, theaters with gambling and liquor where the waitresses sold more than drinks, and made regular payoffs to the police.
Considine’s feud with the police ended in gunfire. William Meredith had been forced out as acting police chief after Considine accused him of taking bribes. On June 25, 1901, he came looking for Considine outside a Pioneer Square drugstore with a sawed-off shotgun, two revolvers, and a knife. Meredith fired first and missed. Considine’s brother wrestled a gun away from Meredith, and Considine shot Meredith three times, killing him. A jury found Considine not guilty.
Why Is Seattle Haunted?
Seattle has never been good at leaving its dead where it put them. Its ghost stories grow out of cemeteries that kept moving, shopfronts buried under the streets, the water, epidemics, and crime.
Cemeteries
The settlers’ first burying ground sat on what became the grounds of the Denny Hotel, at Second Avenue and Stewart Street. It took bodies from 1853 until about 1860, roughly 20 of them. Then the growing town wanted the land for buildings, and the graves were dug up and carried north to a new city cemetery. In 1898, Arthur Denny, who had buried people there himself, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper that some of the bodies were never found. He expected they were still there.
The Moore Theatre stands on part of that ground now. The TV series Ghost Hunters investigated the theater in 2007, and guides say the smell of cigar smoke clings to one of its balcony chairs, no matter how often it’s cleaned or even reupholstered.
The dead who did make the trip went to the Seattle Cemetery, on land David Denny had originally meant for a park. They didn’t rest there either. In 1884, the city took the land back for the park it was supposed to be, and 223 burials were dug up and moved again. A fire had swept the cemetery a few years before and burned the wooden markers, so a good number of those graves had nothing on them to read. Denny Park got its lawn. Around 1930, crews leveling Denny Hill lowered the park about 60 feet. HistoryLink records the story that they turned up more bodies, probably Indian graves, and carried them off at night so nobody would make a scandal of it. Legend makes that the origin of the graveyard shift.
On Beacon Hill, the ghost stories at Comet Lodge Cemetery have centered on children for more than a quarter-century. Neighbors say glowing children come into houses near the cemetery and rummage through toy chests. In 2001, a woman who lived nearby and had tried to sell her house several times without luck told the Post-Intelligencer, “Everyone knows about the ghosts.”
One of the 1884 removals became a ghost story of its own: a madam the old settlers called Mother Damnable.
The Underground
The Great Fire killed no one. What it did was bury the city’s ground floor. When Pioneer Square went back up, the streets went up with it, six and a half feet in places and 32 in others, partly to fix a sewer system that ran backwards at high tide. Owners built faster than the city could raise the roads, so shopfronts that opened at street level ended up a floor below it. The doors were sealed. Nobody thought about them again until 1964, when the newspaperman Bill Speidel started walking visitors through what is now the Pioneer Square Underground. People have been paying to go down ever since.
Writer Bess Lovejoy, whose 2022 book Northwest Know-How: Haunts is a guide to the region’s ghosts, calls many of Seattle’s ghosts “memories of the many layers beneath our shiny modern city.” Down here, the layers are real. In 2007, Ghost Hunters came to search these passages for ghosts from the gold rush. The Underground has stories of its own, from a bank teller in a handlebar mustache to the women the city once called “the seamstresses.”
The Water
On the evening of November 18, 1906, the steamer Dix left Seattle for Port Blakely with 77 people aboard and crossed the path of the steam schooner Jeanie off Alki Point. The Dix went down in five minutes. At least 39 died, which HistoryLink calls the worst maritime disaster ever recorded on Puget Sound, and not one body was recovered. The water was too deep for divers. Port Blakely petitioned the government to blast the wreck open and free the bodies, and the Navy said it wasn’t their jurisdiction. In 2023, explorers found the Dix sitting upright in 600 feet of water in Elliott Bay.
Lovejoy writes of ghosts along the waterfront, too. At Pier 70, on Alaskan Way, the most famous is a bearded young sailor in a peacoat and slouched cap, possibly murdered back when the waterfront was rougher. He’s been named Paddy. She also tells of ghost ships seen floating in the harbor, which are said to warn of disaster.
Epidemics
The influenza reached Seattle on October 3, 1918, and killed some 1,600 people in six months. The theaters went dark, the schools closed, gatherings were banned, and the city wore gauze masks.
At Pike Place Market, the guides of Market Ghost Tours tell of the orphaned boys who cared for farmers’ horses and lived in the Market’s stables. Many of them died young, of diphtheria and then the flu. One of them, a stable boy called Jacob, is said to have haunted a bead shop in the Market. The guides say you could walk into the shop, yell “Jacob, do something!” and watch the beads go flying off their hooks. When the shop became a pet-themed gift store, the staff set up a little crib with toys for him in a back storeroom.
Crime
In February 1983, 13 people were shot dead in the Wah Mee Club, in the basement of the Louisa Hotel in the Chinatown-International District. One man survived. Axios reported in 2024 that Maynard Alley, outside the building, stays on the city’s haunted-spot maps, and the ghost tour company Seattle Terrors writes that many say the victims’ ghosts still haunt the building. The people who own the building would rather you knew something else about it. “The building shouldn’t be remembered for one night in 1983,” said Teri Woo, whose family bought it around 50 years ago. “It should be remembered for how it served the Chinese community.”
