When the Ghost Screams(42)
Tour guide Midge Markey was leading several dozen six-year-olds through the underground when she encountered something that sent a chill through her.
They had stopped below First Avenue and Yesler Way. Here in the shadowy world beneath, a heap of dusty bricks is a favorite frolicking sport for rats. Kids, she explains, always get excited about the rats, so she told them they should look carefully at the bricks. “You just might see a rat scuttling away,” she remarked. While the children were busy looking for rats, she glanced at the old bank vault. There, beside it, stood a mustached man in old-fashioned attire. “His collar was buttoned up with tiny buttons, like the shirts in the 1800s,” Midge told me.
Certain that the children would become hysterical at the sight of the ghost, she quickly turned her attention back to them, preparing to calm them down. But the kids were still searching for rats, oblivious to the ghost who had materialized beside them. Midge looked back at him, and he stared at her for a long moment before fading away.
“I thought I was losing my mind,” she admits. “Then I saw him again, in the same spot a week later!”
While some of the other tour guides teased Midge when she confided in them about her encounters, others have seen apparitions in the dank world beneath. Ghosts are also seen above ground.
The huge arch in the Pioneer Building not only marks the beginning of the Underground Tour, but the spot where three men lost their lives many years ago. (Leslie Rule)
Do they creep up from below?
Many of the area establishments have basements that connect to the underground, and the spirits of yesteryear are seen passing through. At Luigi’s Grotto, a popular restaurant on Cherry Street, Luigi led me through his basement to an opening to the cavernous underground, then showed me a downstairs corner of the restaurant where a waitress once saw a woman materialize.
Is she the same woman who appears just a stone’s throw away at the Broderick Building?
Women from the law offices whisper about the ghostly lady who visits the seventh floor. No one knows what the Victorian woman in voluminous skirts is looking for.
When I stopped in the Megan Mary Olander Flower Shop on First Avenue, I casually asked Megan if the shop had ghosts. She exchanged knowing glances with her employees before admitting, “We have a ghost who turns the radio on and off.”
Do those who suffered unjust deaths still roam the old streets? (Leslie Rule)
And in First Avenue’s J&M Café, an employee was stunned to see a ghost in the basement. The specter stood beside the old ticket booth, which was left over from the days when the location was a trolley station. He looked as if he was planning to purchase fare. But he is out of luck. The last trolley left the station decades ago.
Who are the ghosts of Seattle’s Pioneer Square?
Certainly they are left over from a variety of eras and met different fates, but if we are to embrace the theory that violent death results in the most ghosts, then a dark day in January 1882 is surely to blame.
When George Reynolds married lovely Mary Meydenbauer, everyone expected them to have a long and happy life together, but just weeks later, two killers snatched that away.
George was walking at Third Avenue and Marion Street when two men approached. James Sullivan and William Howard demanded his money. George reached for his revolver, but both robbers shot.
Young George crumpled to the sidewalk and died.
A row of windows in the Pioneer Building look down upon haunted Pioneer Square. (Leslie Rule)
Called to action by the clanging of the fire bell, two hundred determined men ran to search for the robbers. They combed the narrow streets, the shadowy woods, and the cold rocky beach in search of the killers. They drilled holes into the bottoms of all the small boats, so the murderers could not escape by water.
Four hours after the killing, the robbers were arrested, but the vigilantes wanted blood. They grabbed the guilty pair from the lawmen and carried them swiftly to the yard of prominent citizen Henry Yesler. There, a makeshift gallows had been made between two maple trees. With a frenzied crowd of two thousand shouting encouragement, Sullivan and Howard were lynched.
The execution made the crowd hungry for more, so the mob went to the jail for another prisoner, Benjamin Payne.
Benjamin was suspected of killing a policeman, but shortly before his death, the victim had insisted Payne was not to blame. On his deathbed, police officer David Sires had acknowledged he had failed to announce himself as he chased Payne through the dark Seattle streets. Payne, afraid a robber was after him, had shot Sires.
But the crowd was in no mood to listen to reason. Despite Sheriff Wykoff’s protests, the mob broke down a jail wall and carried Payne to the gallows. “If you hang me, you’ll hang an innocent man!” Payne cried, as angry hands slipped a noose around his neck.