Be afraid, very afraid: Follow us to some of the most haunted spots in downtown Tacoma
Tacoma is gearing up for Halloween in style with an army of 12-foot skeletons and a creepy farmers market.
It makes sense that Grit City would take spooky season so seriously. Tacoma is apparently quite haunted.
On a crisp Monday in October, Chris Staudinger, co-founder of Pretty Gritty Tours, shared tales of local hauntings in downtown Tacoma’s historic Whiskey Row. He noted that multiple serial killers have ties to the city, including Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway.
Staudinger thinks that learning about T-Town’s haunted sites can serve a crucial purpose.
“I think Tacoma, especially Whiskey Row, has acted as sort of this echo chamber where the wrongs of the past kind of reach out to be acknowledged,” he said. “And I think there’s something important about telling ghost stories and remembering to stay vigilant against these things that we often forget.”
Old City Hall
Old City Hall, 625 Commerce St., was built in 1893 and served as Tacoma’s primary civic hub until about the 1950s, Staundinger explained. Today the imposing building contains tales from the crypt.
One story surrounds Gus, a prankster entity who’s thrown liquor bottles and likes to get a bit “handsy” with the living, Staudinger said. Legend has it that Gus was a maintenance man in the early 1900s who was dealt a gruesome death while trying to fix an elevator.
“His cohort, a level up, was operating it, and didn’t hear him down there, and it snapped him in half as the elevator came down on him in the shaft — and then they never compensated his wife,” Staudinger said. “So, part of him has watered the very foundation of this building, and no justice was ever found.”
The city’s first murderers also once occupied jail cells at Old City Hall, he said, including a serial killer named Jake Bird.
Nicknamed the “Tacoma Ax-Killer,” Bird in 1947 hacked two local women to death — a mother and daughter — with an ax. Staudinger said the killer was captured and went on trial, and he vowed to place the “Jake Bird hex” on anyone involved with his conviction.
“They sent [Bird] from the jail here in Tacoma over to Walla Walla state pen,” Staudinger said. “A year goes by with appeals, and then he is executed by hanging — and, right before, the judge, the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorney assigned to him, the courtroom bailiff and his death-row guard either have a heart attack or an aneurysm before he’s executed.”
That’s five deaths if you’re counting, Staudinger noted. Bird confessed to the confirmed murders of at least 44 women.
Lucifer’s Militia
An abandoned parking garage in Tacoma is the location of some strange goings-on, per Staudinger.
The structure at the corner of Commerce and South 7th streets has gone through various incarnations, including an automotive center and warehouse, he said. It was also briefly the main operation headquarters for a motorcycle gang active in the 1950s that called itself “Lucifer’s Militia.”
The satanic miscreants believed they could rip open a gateway to hell through criminal misdeeds, such as arson, burglary and assault, Staudinger said; they also dreamed of abducting and decapitating young girls. Lucifer’s Militia members would cruise around Tacoma wearing leather jackets emblazoned with pentagrams and goat skulls.
Some folks endured chilling experiences at the site when it was a parking garage, he said. Their car might have refused to start, for instance, and they saw a specter seated behind them in the rearview mirror. Others reported to Staudinger that they felt like someone had grabbed them and tried to pin them to the chair.
In 2017, Staudinger said he was delivering a Halloween tour there with a big group when a kid, who had been “doing something on the ground,” started calling for his mom. She rushed to his side, and his arm — from fingertip to elbow — was covered in blood.
The duo promptly fled.
Staudinger said he called the mom after the tour to check on them. Turns out it wasn’t the kid’s blood, he added.
Afterward, an examination of the building turned up nothing suspect — not a drop nor a pool of blood anywhere, he said.
“Whatever portal [the kid] dipped his hand into had been sealed by the time we came back,” Staudinger said.
The Winthrop
The Winthrop Apartments, 776 Commerce St., used to be a hotel, Staudinger said. It was built in the 1920s to welcome tourists coming to visit Mount Rainier, and several presidents stayed there.
Unfortunately, the Winthrop also saw “a shocking amount of suicides,” he said. One such tragedy was a pact between a man and woman — likely a husband and wife, although they were never identified — on the fourth floor.
“And then on the fourth floor,” Staudinger said, “the phone would just continue to ring anytime anyone tried to stay in that room afterwards.”
Pantages Theater
Tacoma’s Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, opened in 1918. Staudinger said its namesake was a Greek immigrant and “bad businessman,” Alexander Pantages, who launched a line of venues from Seattle to California.
The vaudeville magnate got help from a powerful and wealthy woman who’d fallen in love with him, Staudinger said. Kathleen “Klondike Kate” Rockwell bankrolled Pantages’ theaters thanks to the fortune she’d amassed running a bordello.
“When the Tacoma one opens, she arrives — because she and Alexander were about to get married — and a valet brings her a letter” from Pantages, Staudinger said. The letter effectively said: “He’s been married for two weeks and he’ll never see you again. Thanks for the money.”
From there Rockwell embarked on a quest for vengeance, he said. After Pantages was accused of assaulting an actress, Rockwell pretended like she would serve as a character witness for him. Then she dropped out.
Pantages ultimately went to prison and died penniless, Staudinger said: “It’s a real beautiful revenge story.”
As for the ghosts?
“The Pantages says that frequently they’ll see either Alexander or Kate inside the building, and that they come at different times,” Staudinger said. “Alexander seems to show up when the show is bad. Kate shows up when the show is good.”
There’s also a bust above the stage that purportedly changes depending on a production’s merits, he continued. If the show is good, it will look happy. If the show’s bad, it’ll look mad.
Maritime building
The final stop on The News Tribune’s tour with Staudinger was on Whiskey Row, which he dubbed “the ultimate den of drinking, gambling and prostitution for early Tacoma.”
In the late 19th century, the Maritime Building housed the Casino Theater, a high-end brothel with a basement boxing ring where people would gamble on fights, he said. It eventually turned into a newspaper office for a whiskey-and-women-wheeling crime lord, Harry Morgan. Fed up with the negative headlines about him, Morgan created his own paper to produce positive stories instead.
Then in 1909, the Johnson-Cox Printing company started working out of 726 Pacific Ave., a transition that Staudinger joked was “the perfect poetic turn for a brothel.” The printers would describe hearing equipment turn on at odd hours, he said.
In one such instance decades ago, a worker went to investigate.
“Nothing was on, but when he came back down to the main-level office here, something rolled down the stairs,” Staudinger said. “And he heard someone say, ‘John, come back up and play.’”
The man took that as his cue to head out for the night, Staudinger said, adding that the building is “currently for lease.
“It’s beautiful,” he continued, “but it does come with the rowdy ghosts of at least a few ladies of the night — which, I don’t know if that’s an upsell or not.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 2:16 PM.
