Old City Hall

Italian Renaissance-style building completed in 1893, featuring a ten-story clock and bell tower. Served as Tacoma's city government center until 1957.

Old City Hall stands at the corner of Pacific Avenue and South 7th Street in Tacoma, an Italian Renaissance Revival monument to the civic ambitions of a city that was, in 1893, the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Designed by Edward A. Hatherton and Colin McIntosh -- Hatherton had resigned as City Architect of San Francisco in 1891 to relocate to Tacoma -- the five-story building was completed on April 23, 1893, at a cost of $257,965, with eight-foot-thick ground floor walls built of local Wilkeson sandstone and a facade of red brick faced with yellow Roman brick that had originally served as ballast on ships sailing from China, Belgium, and Italy. Its most commanding feature is a freestanding ten-story campanile on the southeast corner, its walls designed to tilt slightly inward to enhance the illusion of height. On Christmas Day 1904, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh C. Wallace donated a two-and-a-half-ton Westminster chime-clock and a set of four bells totaling 8,000 pounds of silver metal, cast by the McShane Bell Foundry in Baltimore -- the same company that cast the Liberty Bell. The bells were a memorial to their daughter Mildred, who had died the year before at age twelve. Wallace later served as U.S. Ambassador to France during World War I and signed the Treaty of Versailles.

For sixty-four years the building housed the Tacoma city government, the Tacoma Public Library, law offices, and in its basement, a city jail where prisoners were held before a new facility opened in the late 1920s. One cell door still bears the faded word "SIBERIA" beneath layers of paint, and many of the cells were likely occupied by local bootleggers during Washington's early prohibition era from 1916 to 1920. After city offices relocated to a modern building in 1959, Old City Hall sat vacant for over a decade, and in 1962 it narrowly escaped demolition when the women of the Delphinium Garden Club intervened to save it. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. During the 1970s and 1980s, the building was converted first into boutiques and restaurants -- including the fondly remembered Mama Limone's Italian restaurant -- and then into professional offices, but it struggled to retain tenants. The last tenant vacated after the 2008 financial crisis, and the building has since been undergoing renovation.

The most famous spirit is a mischievous entity known as Gus. No historical records connect the name to a specific individual, but based on his apparent contempt for authority -- particularly security guards and police -- many believe he was a petty criminal who died in the basement jail cells. When the Tacoma Bar and Grill restaurant occupied the first floor, Gus had a signature initiation for every new employee: he would knock each bottle of alcohol off the shelf in assembly-line fashion right in front of the startled newcomer, yet the bottles never broke. On the restaurant's opening day, the stove simply stopped working -- nothing was found mechanically wrong with it, and it resumed operating on its own without another hitch. When staff acknowledged Gus conversationally, speaking to him directly, his pranks would cease, suggesting an entity that craved attention and recognition.

Since the 1970s, police have been called to Old City Hall on numerous occasions to investigate disturbances -- lights flashing on and off, fire alarms and burglar alarms triggering, noises of unknown origin -- but officers have never found evidence of forced entry or any living intruder inside. In 1978, a security guard called police twice in one night because the elevator kept changing floors despite being locked for the evening. An officer named Ortiz corroborated the activity, but only one of the responding officers believed something supernatural was responsible. Security guards have chased intelligent shadows down hallways to dead ends and through the building only to find empty rooms. Several guards have quit rather than continue working night shifts alone.

The bell tower harbors its own entity. Despite the bells being mechanically controlled by a clock mechanism with a twelve-foot pendulum on a forty-foot wire, they ring sporadically at night when the building is empty, usually in the early morning hours. A building manager once spent an entire night inside the tower attempting to catch whoever was ringing the bells and found no living person responsible, leaving convinced a ghost was the culprit. A visitor to the clock tower's gear room reported being overwhelmed by spirit energy and witnessing a repeated vision of a man falling or jumping from the top of the tower.

Beyond Gus and the bell tower entity, shadows of former Tacoma officials have been seen moving through the old council chambers, apparitions appearing to rush through hallways as though conducting urgent civic business. Near the former chambers, disembodied coughs and the sound of someone nervously clearing their throat have startled people who believed they were alone. Tenants have experienced spontaneous lockouts from their offices, doors slamming shut on their own, and the sensation of unseen presences rushing past in the hallways. Outside observers have watched lights turn on and off in sequence through the building's windows, though rooms are always dark by the time anyone investigates inside.