Pike Place Market

America's oldest continuously operated public farmers market, open since 1907. Nine acres of vendors, buskers, and underground corridors built atop Seattle's original waterfront.

Pike Place Market opened on August 17, 1907, when eight farmers sold their entire stock to a crowd of nearly ten thousand eager shoppers. The Goodwin brothers -- Frank, John, and Ervin -- who had made their fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush, built the first covered arcade that November with seventy-six stalls. Over the following century the market grew into nine acres of vendors, buskers, and underground corridors layered atop Seattle's original waterfront -- land that the Duwamish people had long considered sacred.

The market's most revered spirit is Princess Angeline, born Kikisoblu around 1820, the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle himself. After the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott forced the Duwamish onto reservations, Angeline refused to leave. She lived in a waterfront cabin on Western Avenue between Pike and Pine Streets, earning her keep by taking in laundry and selling hand-woven baskets. She died on May 31, 1896, and was buried in a canoe-shaped coffin at Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill. Her slow-moving, hunched figure is seen throughout the market, particularly on the stairs up from Western Avenue and near a rough wooden column on the lower level. Visitors report cold spots surrounding the column, and photographs taken near it frequently display anomalies. When approached, the figure vanishes.

Frank Goodwin, one of the market's original developers, died in his sleep on December 3, 1954, at age eighty-nine. His ghost has been encountered near the bottom of the Alibi Room stairs, where he introduces himself by name, asks if visitors need help with directions, and then disappears. His nephew Arthur Goodwin, who took over as market president in 1926 and designed the interiors to resemble a theater with thousands of lightbulbs throughout the arcade, haunts the area around Ghost Alley Espresso. When the coffee shop opened in 2012 in a former 1908 men's bathroom attendant room, objects immediately began falling or flying off walls despite being well-secured. Baristas have reported sensing a male presence, and one closing employee saw the apparition of a tall man wearing a hat standing in the doorway. A visiting child drew a detailed sketch of a suited man with wings, describing him as an angel who was "trapped." Arthur's silhouette is also seen in the windows of the Goodwin Library, his former office, where he reportedly still swings a phantom golf club.

The building at 1921 First Avenue, which now houses Kells Irish Restaurant and Pub, opened in 1903 as the E.R. Butterworth and Sons mortuary -- reportedly the first purpose-built mortuary in Seattle, equipped with the first elevator on the West Coast, used for transporting bodies. A shaman brought in by paranormal expert Mercedes Yaeger, who ran Market Ghost Tours for thirteen years, counted nineteen fully formed ghosts inside the building. Owner Karen McAleese reported seeing a tall man in a suit jacket with very thin hands walk to the end of the bar on All Saints' Day and simply fade away. A figure known as the Suspender Man, wearing suspenders and a newsboy hat, has been observed in the second-story window.

Other spirits populate the market's many levels. A boy believed to be eight or nine years old, called Jacob, is thought to be a victim of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. He resides in the Merry Tales toy store, where he was especially active in 2007, throwing objects off shelves to play with customers. The activity calmed after the shop owner provided him a small room with a bed. At the Bead Zone in the DownUnder shops, co-owner Nina Menon watched red beads hanging securely on a wall hook crash to the floor during a phone conversation. The Fat Lady Barber, who according to market lore would sing men to sleep in her barber chair and steal from their wallets, reportedly fell through a deteriorating floor to her death. Workers still hear her singing softly during late-night cleaning shifts. A psychic named Madame Nora is said to inhabit a crystal ball that now resides in Sheila's Magic Shop, with objects moving on their own after hours.

Multiple ghost tour companies operate in and around the market, and Ghost Alley Espresso sells Mercedes Yaeger's book "Market Ghost Stories," a 148-page collection of historical accounts and paranormal occurrences. The market's layered construction -- with underground corridors, former mortuary spaces, and century-old infrastructure built on Duwamish land -- makes it one of the most densely haunted locations in the Pacific Northwest.