Hotel Sorrento

An Italianate boutique hotel built in 1909 on First Hill, with mahogany-paneled walls, crystal chandeliers, and a literary reputation anchored by its Fireside Room.

The Hotel Sorrento opened on May 30, 1909, two days before the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition brought 3.7 million visitors to Seattle. Commissioned by local clothier Samuel Rosenberg and designed by architect Harlan Thomas in the Italianate style, the seven-story hotel on First Hill featured arched windows, wide eaves with brackets, a 70-foot landscaped courtyard, and Seattle's first rooftop restaurant on the seventh floor. Its Fireside Room, an octagonal lounge anchored by a fireplace clad in emerald-green Rookwood Pottery tiles from Cincinnati depicting an Italian villa, would become a literary gathering place still hosting silent reading parties more than a century later. Rosenberg's ownership was short-lived -- in 1910, facing financial strain, he traded the entire hotel for 240 acres of pear orchard in Oregon's Rogue River Valley.

The hotel's most famous ghost is someone who never actually set foot inside it. Alice B. Toklas, born in San Francisco in 1877, moved to Seattle's First Hill neighborhood in 1890 when her father came to run Toklas, Singerman and Company, the city's leading dry goods store. An 1895 city directory places the family at 1006 9th Avenue, near the hotel's future site. Alice studied piano at the University of Washington before her mother's illness prompted the family's return to San Francisco before 1898 -- more than a decade before the hotel opened. She went on to Paris, where she became Gertrude Stein's lifelong partner and a central figure in the avant-garde salon scene alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Matisse. After Stein's death, Toklas published The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in 1954, which included a recipe for "Hashish Fudge" contributed by artist Brion Gysin -- the precursor to modern cannabis edibles.

Despite never having visited the hotel, Toklas's apparition is the most frequently reported presence. Room 408 on the fourth floor is the primary hotspot, where guests describe lights flickering down the entire hallway, the sensation of someone sitting on the edge of the bed, and a woman in a turn-of-the-century dress appearing and vanishing. Co-owner Barbara Malone confirmed that multiple staff members have reported seeing the apparition over the years. Alice has been spotted in the garden wearing her iconic full-length fur coat and hat, wandering the fourth-floor corridors in a white dressing gown, and reflected in hallway mirrors on multiple floors. On the seventh floor, phantom piano music plays in the empty penthouse suite -- fitting for a woman who studied as a concert pianist. In the Dunbar Room, drinks reportedly slide across tables when guests are present. The elevator occasionally stops at the fourth floor and opens its doors to an empty hallway.

There is also a more tragic ghost story that some believe better explains the hotel's paranormal activity. On May 9, 1923, Catalino Tarantan, a young Filipino bellboy who had arrived in 1921, went to retrieve a ball lost in the elevator shaft by ten-year-old Suzanne Reid, daughter of Northern Pacific Railway President Judge George T. Reid. Catalino forgot about the 2,000-pound counterweight, which came crashing down on his torso and killed him. His death devastated the hotel community, but none more than his uncle Lorenzo Villanueva, the Captain of the Bellboys, who had brought Catalino from the Philippines and promised his sister he would help the young man build a better life in America.

USA Today named the Hotel Sorrento one of the thirteen most haunted hotels in America. The hotel embraces its spectral reputation, hosting annual November dinners prepared from recipes in Toklas's cookbook -- though the hashish fudge is diplomatically omitted. The Sorrento remains Seattle's oldest hotel still serving its original purpose and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. During the Malone family's 1981 renovation, which consolidated 154 rooms into 76 suites, workers reported unexplained cold drafts and the sound of footsteps in sealed-off corridors. Whether the presence belongs to Alice returning to her childhood neighborhood, young Catalino still faithfully attending to guests, or some other spirit drawn to this Italianate landmark on the hill, the Hotel Sorrento's ghosts seem determined to remain permanent residents.