Stories of spooks and ghosts are rampant in Port Townsend, where it is easy to envision the face of a disappointed lover driven to suicide peering from the upper stories of the city’s historic downtown brick buildings, or an elegantly clothed apparition in the attic window of any stately Victorian.
Especially late on a rainy, blustery night. Port Townsend shuts down early and even the streets can look haunted if the fog is in.
But you have to go to Chimacum to learn about Alice the Goon.
She was said to haunt a little lake on the old Elk Horn Ranch, a children’s camp once run by the Ammert family at the end of Van Trojan Road.
Van Trojan Road itself is kind of spooky.
Parts of the well-packed gravel road are lined with second-growth cedars, their bare lower branches blackened by deep shade and moisture, dripping with the kind of ragged moss often found in deep rain forests or swamps. There is a bear crossing sign. Eerie.
At the end is the sort of abandoned rural farmhouse that is a magnet for those with active imaginations and a taste for the supernatural.
The little red house has slumped into the hillside, its darkened upper windows looking out blankly like the eyes of the risen dead.
It was a perfect site for a haunted house fundraiser for the Esquire Car Club, which Tom Ammert, whose parents ran the Elk Horn Ranch, set up one year in the early SSRq70s.
Dan and Deborah Christiansen of Marrowstone Island remember it well.
Dan was Deborah’s first date in high school, and the former sweethearts later married after Deborah’s divorce from her first husband.
They enjoy jousting with each other about the good old days.
“We’d have parties up there, and everybody would go jump in the lake,” Deborah said. No, they were not always clothed, she admitted.
“Everybody would say, ‘do you want to go up there and hear Alice’?” And they would trudge across a pasture to the lake.
Dan and Deborah heard the cry of the reputed Alice, who rowed across the lake only on moonlit nights, wailing plaintively for her toddler, by legend drowned long ago in the unnamed lake.
“I heard something, but I was 18,” Deborah said. “What I think I heard was an owl.”
Dan didn’t believe it even then.
“I was out there and heard her screaming, but I just thought it was a cougar,” he said.
On the other hand, he did see the light, a ghostly haze, a “dusky light,” he said, shining in the trees.
No, it wasn’t fog, not on a clear night.
“What did you think of the light?” his wife asked. “I was drunk,” Dan shrugged.
Ammert, who lives farther down the driveway on the family’s property, said the little lake is more of a pond, really, and too far to see from the haunted house.
And no, he hasn’t heard anything from Alice lately.
“It was a story my dad used to tell sitting around the campfire with the kids,” he said, convinced all these years later that it isn’t true.
Everybody in Chimacum knows about Alice the Goon, Ammert said, although it’s not among the ghostly chronicles collected in a small file by the Jefferson County Historical Society.
But the Lady in Blue of the Palace Hotel is there.
Her portrait hangs in the hotel, housed in an 1889 brick building on Water Street built by Capt. Henry Tibbals, and she is said to haunt Room 4 on the second floor, where one of Port Townsend’s various brothels once operated during the heyday of its rough and rowdy seaport days.
Guests in the past have reported seeing her, but she hasn’t been heard from recently, “just once in a while some whiffs of old perfume,” said desk clerk Robert Masuret.
The historical society advertised for ghost stories in 2004, with a future ghost book in mind similar to the maritime stories it has published and sells from its gift shop and other locations.
A ghost-busting group visited the society’s museum, housed in the historical City Hall at the end of Water Street, last February.
“Mostly it was six hours of boredom while they listened to their apparatus,” said Bill Tennant, the society’s executive director.
The group recorded mini-seances held throughout the building, took it back to headquarters, enhanced it and reported hearing the name “Rachel.”
They wanted the museum to sell DVDs of their findings, but Tennant declined.
As far as he knows, there is nothing haunted about the old City Hall, Tennant said, although the old jail area in the basement, which used to be the society’s headquarters and still sports barred windows, can seem pretty spooky what with the clanging radiator pipes and the creaking of aged wood floors above.
Some other stories in the files that may be new to local residents include:
• An April 29, 1899 account in the San Francisco Call newspaper of a report from its Port Townsend correspondent.
“The waterfront contingent is greatly excited over the appearance of a ghost in the dark alleyway back of the office of Rothschild & Co. (now Nifty Fifties Soda Fountain) ship brokers.
Capt. William Breeze reported at least three encounters with “a Chinese with his head split in the center,” but attempts to capture the apparition made it disappear.
The correspondent claimed that local Chinese residents refused to use the alley leading to the docks because they believed one of their countrymen had been murdered at that location by “a highlander.”
The captain’s sighting was confirmed by Night Inspector Brophy, who also had seen the same ghost while on patrol for “opium smuggle.”
• Odd doings at the Rothschild House, a state historical museum on the uptown bluff overlooking the city and Port Townsend Bay, which is open to the public during spring and summer as an example of original Victorian architecture and decor.
Docents have reported violently slammed doors, and once a non-working antique clock began inexplicably ticking.
In 2003, visitors to the house refused to exit by the back door after it had forcefully slammed behind them when they entered, a docent reported.
• Laurel Grove Cemetery.
In response to the historical society’s ad for ghost stories, Louis Frombach sent a handwritten note detailing two spooky experiences while doing maintenance.
Once, he wrote, the rubber kneeling pad he had been using was suddenly caught up by forceful wind, which whirled it around and then returned it to its place on the ground.
Another time, a pair of leather work gloves he’d laid beside him were upright in a prayer position when he turned back to them after clearing a Navy chaplain’s grave.
Anyone with ghost stories to add to the Jefferson County Historical Society’s trove can phone 360-385-1003 or write to the society at 540 Water Street, Port Townsend, WA 98368.
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Julie McCormick is a freelance writer and photographer living in Port Townsend. Contact her at juliemccormick10@gmail.com.
