WHY WE’RE THE BEST

Group Tours Are The Best

About Your Tour

We believe that ghost tours are one of the most fun, fascinating, and educational ways of experiencing a city. When you take a ghost tour, you get to actually meet and visit with the spirits who walked the streets… long before you.

What Makes This Tour So Memorable?

When you sign up for one of our ghost tours, you get to take a journey, not just through Seattle’s haunted places -but through a portal into another, long-forgotten time.

You’ll discover Suquamish Princesses, swashbuckling sailors, and unruly newspaper men. You’ll meet madames who ran brothels-turned-court houses, and you’ll stand in the same place as ghostly vaudevillians who still walk the halls of Seattle’s oldest and longest-running theaters. Watch history come to life in this fast-paced, friendly, and captivating look at some of Seattle’s most compelling and ghostly characters.

What Makes Seattle Such a Haunted City?

If you’re visiting Seattle, you already know that it is a truly remarkable place; beautiful, picturesque, and brimming with art and culture. What you might not know is that Seattle’s history is filled with the mysterious, the gruesome, and even the tragic. It was -in its earliest days -an outpost far away from any other city, surrounded by the deepest woods and populated with the roughest kind of settlers. Gold miners, loggers, fur trappers, the kind of rough and lawless population that could have used a ladies touch, but there were not that many ladies for touching, and if you did, they might charge you.

To even things up, Asa Mercer made recruiting trips back East to try and find adventurous single women who wanted to move out West, called the ‘Mercer Girls’  Eventually able to offer money and assured of a moral landing by being hosted with local families the trips were a huge success and all but one of the women ended up marrying locals.

Seattle is haunted for these, key reasons…

The Wild West: Seattle is -in many ways -the very definition of the wild west; a place where sailors lived lawlessly; where early Alaska gold miners prospectors stopped off to fill their tankards; where loggers sought their fortunes; and where brothels thrived on the booming and profitable, and legal, the business of offering comfort for money.

Social Unrest: The land that Seattle was built on had been inhabited for at least 4,000 years, since the end of the last glacial period. And in the mid-1850s, when the first white settlers began arriving, the Coast Salish peoples of what is now called the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes were living in 13 villages here. The United States government forcefully moved these people, resulting in the mass displacement of thousands of Suquamish and Duwamish People.

Rapid, Unplanned Growth: Once it had been established as a city, Seattle’s growth seemed unstoppable. Lumber, gold, and shipbuilding thrived, and a new wave of Asian and Italian immigrants arrived to take advantage of new jobs brought by The Great Northern Railway in 1884. Seattle’s infrastructure simply wasn’t able to accommodate the rapid influx of people, resulting in the spread of diseases, fires, and other disasters that caused tragedy and hardship for the people in the city.

Lawless: In these early days, Seattle was a freebooting, lawless, wild town. Lynch law often prevailed, schools barely operated, prostitutes roamed the waterfront, and in the mudflats where much of the city was built, sewage was almost as likely to come in on the tide as to flow away. This unruliness resulted in shenanigans and outlandish behavior that are the fabric of some of the most captivating stories the world over.

Tragic: Because of the chaos, Seattle was in constant turmoil. Fires burned down huge parts of the city, ferries crashed into docks, and gangplanks collapsed, sending dozens of people plunging into the icy Elliot harbor. Unidentified bodies appeared on city streets almost daily, and sickness spread like wildfire through the unclean boom town. Each day seemed to bring new and strange problems. At that time, these features made Seattle an unpredictable and frightening place to live. Today though, they are the makings for truly incredible stories and more than a few ghosts that still haunt the formerly mean streets of Seattle’s Downtown and Pike Place.

Reviews

Cali Wolfe

Review Rating
March 28, 2024

Michael F. was an animated and fun ghostly guide. He wove history and stories together seamlessly ma...

Sarah Silvest

Review Rating
March 28, 2024

She had so much knowledge about the history of Seattle and really made it super fun!

GUIDELINES

  • Remain calm.

    Keep it chill, we are unlikely to see any ghosts, it could happen, and it has, but it’s unlikely.

  • Be polite.

    Conduct the tour as if your grandparents were along for the ride, maybe they are! All are welcome, as long as you are polite.

  • Do not provoke the spirits.

    We want the ghosts to continue to show themselves from time to time, so no surprise exorcisms if you please! Be nice to them, and they will be nice to you.

  • Stay together.

    We haven’t lost anyone to Elliot Bay yet, try not to make this the first one.

  • Watch your step.

    We want to keep everyone on the tour in the realm of the living, we have plenty of ghost stories and don’t need any more thanks!

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