Kirkman House Museum

An 1880 brick mansion built by English immigrant William Kirkman, now a museum displaying original furnishings from the Wild West era.

William Kirkman was born on December 7, 1832, in Bury, England, the son of a Scotch-Irish factory foreman. He crossed the Atlantic in 1852, landing in Boston before heading west to California during the Gold Rush. After years of prospecting, trading, and driving cattle across the frontier territories of Australia, the Sandwich Islands, and British Columbia, he settled in Walla Walla, Washington in 1870 with his wife Isabella Potts, a native of Balla Bay, Ireland, whom he had married on February 2, 1867, in San Francisco. By the late 1870s, Kirkman had built a fortune through cattle ranching and mercantile ventures, and he commissioned the construction of a grand Italianate brick mansion on Colville Street. Completed in 1880, the house featured fifteen-inch-thick brick walls made from the Weston, Oregon Foundry, Tuscan and Corinthian columns, a trompe-l'oeil marble-finish foyer, oak parquet floors, marble-faced fireplaces, and a widow's walk atop the roof. The home cost nearly seven thousand dollars, a substantial sum for the era, and stood as the second-oldest brick building in Walla Walla.

The Kirkmans moved into their new home with four surviving children: William Henry, Fanny Ann, Myrtle Belle, and Leslie Gilmore. But the house witnessed profound grief from the start. Isabella had given birth to ten children in all, and six of them died in infancy or childhood, including a son named George who perished during their time in Idaho City in the winter of 1868-1869. The tenth child was born inside the mansion itself and survived only two days. The house where the Kirkmans celebrated their greatest triumphs in Walla Walla society was also the place where they buried their deepest sorrows.

In 1892, the family embarked on a ten-month tour of Europe, visiting Isabella's parents in Ireland and William's relatives in England and shopping for wedding clothes for daughter Fanny Ann's upcoming marriage. On the return journey, William fell gravely ill aboard the train. He died at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on April 25, 1893, at the age of sixty-one. When word reached Walla Walla, the flag was hung at half-mast over city hall. His funeral was held in the mansion, and the mourners were so numerous they filled the large yard and spilled into the surrounding streets. William Kirkman had arrived in Walla Walla as an English immigrant cattle driver and departed as one of the city's most revered citizens, having served on the City Council, School Board, and Whitman College Board of Trustees.

Isabella continued living in the house until 1919, when she donated it to Whitman College, valued at twenty thousand dollars, to aid fundraising for a new dormitory. During the college's use from 1920 to 1924, the mansion housed students including Walter Brattain, the future co-inventor of the transistor and 1956 Nobel Prize laureate. After the college years, the house was converted into apartments, its grand rooms partitioned, its ceilings lowered, and its widow's walk removed. For fifty years, the mansion deteriorated. In 1977, the Historic Architecture Development Corporation purchased the property for fifty thousand dollars and began restoring it to its Victorian splendor. One of the most remarkable discoveries came in September 1979 when a volunteer spotted the original widow's walk balustrade at the Garden City Furniture building on Alder Street, where it had sat unrecognized for nearly half a century. It was returned to its rightful place atop the house. The Kirkman House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and opened as a museum in 1981.

The paranormal activity at the Kirkman House centers on three members of the family: William, Isabella, and their daughter Fanny Ann. Board member and tour guide Rick Tuttle, who leads visitors through the house dressed in dapper period attire, has collected accounts from employees and visitors over the years. William's ghost is most often seen standing at the top of the main staircase, as if surveying his home. Isabella and Fanny Ann have been spotted roaming the hallways and peeking from behind the curtained windows. Fanny Ann's bedroom is considered the most active paranormal location in the house. Museum staff report lights turning on by themselves in rooms that have been shut and locked for the night. In one of the most striking incidents, a ghost apparently joined a guided tour led by a museum volunteer, participating alongside the living visitors before vanishing. Perhaps the most uncanny detail is the date: both William and Isabella Kirkman died on April 25, years apart, a coincidence that Rick Tuttle, whose own birthday falls on that same date, finds impossible to dismiss. The Kirkman House is now a featured stop on the Walla Walla Ghost and Creepy Tales walking tour, which takes visitors through the city's most haunted landmarks.