Haunted Tacoma: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of the City’s Ghost Stories

Reader’s note: supernatural accounts are presented as folklore and reported experiences, not established fact.

Reader’s note: supernatural accounts are presented as folklore and reported experiences, not established fact.

Tacoma earned the nickname “City of Destiny” when the Northern Pacific Railroad chose it as its western terminus in 1873. Boomtown money built it fast: grand hotels, an opera house, a Beaux-Arts train station with a copper dome. Then the busts came, and the fires, and one of the ugliest chapters in Pacific Northwest history. A city that has lived that hard collects stories, and Tacoma’s are some of the best in Washington.

This is a walking tour, not a list. Six stops in walking order: a downtown loop through the historic core, then north to the Stadium District’s château on the bluff, then on to Old Town where the city began — and where one of its darkest nights unfolded. The downtown loop is about 1.2 miles and takes roughly 90 minutes at a strolling pace. Add the Stadium District and Old Town and you’re looking at about 3 miles and two and a half to three hours. Start in late afternoon so the last stops land at dusk, when the stories hit hardest.

The route

1. Old City Hall — 625 Commerce St (start; exterior viewing)
2. Pantages Theater — 901 Broadway (0.3 mi from stop 1)
3. Union Station — 1717 Pacific Ave (0.4 mi from stop 2)
4. Foss Waterway Seaport — 705 Dock St (0.4 mi from stop 3, down toward the water)
5. Stadium High School — 111 N E St (0.8 mi from stop 4, north through the Stadium District)
6. Old Town: Job Carr Cabin & the lost Chinatown — 2350 N 30th St (1.2 mi from stop 5 along the waterfront; drive, bus, or a long waterfront walk)

Total: about 3 miles one way. The downtown loop (stops 1–4) works as a shorter 90-minute walk.

1. Old City Hall — 625 Commerce St

Start where Tacoma’s government started. Completed in 1893 to designs by architect E.A. Hatherton, Old City Hall is Italian Renaissance Revival in yellow Roman brick with terra-cotta trim, anchored by a tall clock tower that narrows as it climbs — a deliberate trick to make it look even taller. The Westminster chime clock was a gift from Hugh Campbell Wallace in memory of his daughter Mildred, presented on Christmas Day 1904 and fully operational by early 1905. The building served as the seat of city government until 1957 and landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Its basement once held the city jail, including an unheated solitary cell the inmates called “Siberia.”

The ghost here has a name, which is always a good sign in folklore: Gus. According to local lore, Gus was named by the staff of the Tacoma Bar and Grill, a restaurant that once occupied the first floor. He’s a prankster, not a menace. Tenants have been locked out of their offices. Objects get thrown. The elevator travels between floors with no one aboard. And the bell tower — the same tower with Wallace’s memorial chimes — rings in the dead of night with nobody near the ropes. Security guards have reported shadowy figures in the hallways and coughing outside the old council chambers, and more than one officer has been called to chase an intruder who wasn’t there.

The building is currently mid-renovation, being redeveloped with restaurant, retail, and office space, so treat this as an exterior stop: stand on Commerce Street, look up at the tower, and listen.

2. Pantages Theater — 901 Broadway

A short walk up Broadway brings you to the Pantages, built in 1918 at the height of vaudeville and still one of the grand old theaters of the West. Its ghost stories are tangled up with a real-life love triangle. Alexander Pantages, the theater magnate, was having an affair with Kate Klondike — “Klondike Kate” of Gold Rush fame — and local legend holds that she put up the money to build the Tacoma theater as a testament to her devotion. It didn’t buy her loyalty in return: Pantages ended the affair for another woman. Since both died, their spirits are said to haunt the building.

The reports have a theatrical specificity you don’t get from generic hauntings. In the balcony, guests have seen a female spirit in vaudeville attire, heard singing old Italian love songs, who vanishes the moment she meets a living eye. Latecomers get a spectral greeting: an usher in period clothing who shows them to their seats, sometimes with a cold hand on the shoulder. And then there’s Jensen, the ghost stagehand — phantom banging and clattering from an empty stage, lights dimming and brightening on their own. The Tacoma Youth Symphony, which performs here, has joked in its own promotions about the opera singer in the balcony and the Mae West lookalike backstage.

See a show here if you can — it’s a working theater, and a ticket is the only way inside.

3. Union Station — 1717 Pacific Ave

Head east to Pacific Avenue and you can’t miss it: the 90-foot copper dome of Union Station, glowing green over downtown. Built 1909–1911 to designs by Reed and Stem in full Beaux-Arts splendor, it was the western terminus of the Northern Pacific. It’s been on the National Register since 1974. The last passenger train left on June 14, 1984; after standing empty, the building was rehabilitated in 1990–92 as the federal courthouse for the Western District of Washington, with Dale Chihuly’s glass installations filling the great rotunda.

The station’s best-known ghost has a name almost too perfect for a vaudeville-era railroad depot: Yehudi. A student reporter for the WSU Signpost who worked events in the building described him as a harmless poltergeist, presumably young and male, fond of small flirtatious pranks on female visitors — including a burst of static and strange cooing through a stage manager’s headset during a show setup, confirmed by a second listener. The same account mentions the old ballroom once serving as a morgue, and a standing invitation of sorts: push a ball into the middle of the floor in the “Old Timer’s room” and watch it roll on its own. Separately, local radio station KATS has reported a man haunting the old train station — talking, making loud noises for attention — with officers called to the building more than once, finding nothing but an uneasy feeling.

Practical note: this is a working federal courthouse. The grand lobby and rotunda, with the Chihuly glass, are open to the public during business hours — you’ll go through security screening, so bring ID and patience. After hours, admire the lit dome from the sidewalk; it’s spectacular.

4. Foss Waterway Seaport — 705 Dock St

Drop down toward the water to the Foss Waterway Seaport, home of the Balfour Dock building — a century-old wheat transfer warehouse and one of only two surviving sections of the “mile-long wheat warehouse” complex built in 1900 to load cargo onto square-rigged sailing ships. When Tacoma was the City of Destiny, this is where the destiny shipped out. The maritime museum (open Thursday through Sunday, $10 for adults) holds over a century of Commencement Bay artifacts.

The ghost stories here come with the building’s own after-dark program: Pretty Gritty Tours runs a haunted tour of the Seaport ($30, about an hour) that walks the old Balfour Dock halls, opens the locked archives, and trades in the full waterfront catalog — shipwrecks, sea-monsters, and what the tour company describes as the ghost encounters of the museum’s own staff.

5. Stadium High School — 111 N E St

North through the Stadium District, the château on the bluff comes into view long before you arrive — French château turrets and mansard rooflines staring out over Commencement Bay. Its history is pure Tacoma boom and bust. Construction started in 1891: the Northern Pacific’s Tacoma Land Company was building a luxury hotel, designed by Hewitt and Hewitt, meant to rival the great railroad hotels of the continent. The Panic of 1893 killed the dream mid-construction; the unfinished shell became a lumber warehouse until a fire gutted it in 1896. The railroad began tearing it down — some 73,300 bricks were carted off to build depots in Missoula and Wallace, Idaho — before the school district bought the remains in 1904. Architect Frederick Heath turned the ruin into a school, and Tacoma High School opened on September 10, 1906, renamed Stadium High School in 1913 for the Stadium Bowl next door. Film fans know it as the school from 10 Things I Hate About You (1999).

The lore here is appropriately dramatic for a building that was almost demolished twice. US Ghost Adventures, which runs Tacoma’s “Tacoma Terrors” ghost tour, tells of a woman in black who walks the shoreline below the bluff, forever searching for her lost husband. Local storytellers add the classic haunted-school catalog: footsteps in empty hallways, lockers slamming on their own, a shadowy figure in the stairwells — the stories tend to converge on a worker who never left.

This is an active public school, so the grounds are exterior-only for walkers. But there’s a legitimate way in: Pretty Gritty Tours runs a ticketed Stadium High School tour from the basement to the towers, and reviewers consistently call it the best history tour in the city.

6. Old Town: Job Carr Cabin & the lost Chinatown — 2350 N 30th St

The last stop is the oldest ground: Old Town, Tacoma’s original settlement, about a mile and a half north of downtown along the waterfront. The Pretty Gritty Old Town Ghost Tour ($25, an hour, twelve blocks) meets near the Job Carr Cabin Museum, the replica pioneer cabin that anchors the neighborhood’s frontier past — and the cabin and surrounding blocks have their own uneasy reputation among local ghost-hunting groups. The tour’s own description sets the tone: “gruesome murders, hexes, defiled burial grounds,” the remains of “Tacoma’s charred Chinatown,” and “a maritime curse” binding it together.

The history underneath the folklore is the heaviest on this tour, and it’s fully documented. On November 3, 1885, a mob of some 500 white residents — led by Mayor Jacob Weisbach and including police officers, businessmen, and political leaders — descended on Tacoma’s Chinese community. They marched roughly 700 Chinese residents out of the city at gunpoint to the Lakeview rail station (in what’s now Lakewood), forcing those who could pay to buy their own train tickets to Portland. Days later, the community’s homes and businesses — “Little Canton” — were burned to the ground. The methodical expulsion became nationally notorious as the “Tacoma Method.” Twenty-seven men were charged; none were convicted. In 1993 the city council formally called it “a most reprehensible occurrence,” and in 2005 the Chinese Reconciliation Park broke ground on the waterfront — a quiet, powerful place to end the walk.

Old Town today is public streets, shops, and waterfront park — walk it freely, and give the Reconciliation Park the few quiet minutes it deserves.

Know before you go

Parking: Downtown Tacoma has metered street parking and several garages; the Tacoma Dome Station garage is free and the Link light rail into downtown is free too — an easy park-and-ride. Old Town has free street parking near the Job Carr Cabin.

Best time: Start mid-afternoon so the downtown stops land in daylight (Union Station’s rotunda is only open during business hours) and the Stadium and Old Town stops land at dusk. October is ideal — the light, the fog off the bay, the season.

Night safety: Downtown Tacoma’s core is well-lit and walkable, but stick to main streets after dark and keep valuables out of sight. Treat the waterfront stretch to Old Town as a drive or bus ride once it’s fully dark — it’s quiet down there at night.

What to bring: Comfortable shoes (there are hills — this is Tacoma), a camera, and a flashlight if you’re doing the Foss Seaport haunted tour. Check museum and tour hours before you go; they change seasonally.

Prefer a guide? If you’d rather hear it all from a local after dark, Tacoma Terrors — the US Ghost Adventures ghost tour — walks the haunted side of downtown nightly. Book the Tacoma ghost tour →

Thornewood Castle — the “Rose Red” mansion — sits about 12 miles south of Tacoma in Lakewood, an easy add-on to a haunted weekend: the real history of Washington’s ‘Rose Red’ mansion. For ticketed scares rather than history, see our Washington haunted houses guide, and for the statewide tour, 15 Most Haunted Places in Washington State.

Sources

HistoryLink.org, “Tacoma High School opens on September 10, 1906” (File 5069) — http://www.historylink.org/File/5069

HistoryLink.org, “Tacoma’s Stadium Bowl opens on July 10, 1910” (File 5070) — https://www.historylink.org/File/5070

SAH Archipedia, “Stadium High School” — https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WA-01-053-0054

SAH Archipedia, “U.S. Courthouse at Union Station” — https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/WA-01-053-0055

GPSMyCity, “Old City Hall, Tacoma” — https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/old-city-hall-49696.html

US Ghost Adventures, “The Most Haunted Places in Tacoma” — https://usghostadventures.com/haunted-places/the-most-haunted-places-in-tacoma/

American Ghost Stories, “The Ghostly Stage of the Pantages Theater” — http://americanghoststories.com/pacific-coast-ghost-stories/washington/the-ghostly-stage-of-the-pantages-theater-tacoma-wa

The Signpost (Weber State), “Haunted train stations and flashing ghosts!” — https://thesignpostwsu.com/26127/editorial/haunted-train-stations-and-flashing-ghosts/

HauntedPlaces.org, “Old Tacoma City Hall” — https://www.hauntedplaces.org/item/old-tacoma-city-hall/

HauntedHouses.com, “Old Tacoma City Hall” — http://hauntedhouses.com/washington/old-tacoma-city-hall/

Pretty Gritty Tours, Old Town Ghost Tour — http://prettygrittytours.com/old-town-ghost-tour.html

Pretty Gritty Tours, Haunted Tour of the Foss Seaport — https://prettygrittytours.com/haunted-tour-of-the-foss-seaport.html

WSU College of Arts and Sciences, “The notorious ‘Tacoma Method'” — https://cas.wsu.edu/2021/08/23/the-notorious-tacoma-method/

Wikipedia, “Tacoma riot of 1885” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_riot_of_1885

PCAD, “Tacoma Theatre, Tacoma, WA” — https://pcad.lib.washington.edu/building/4751/