Thornewood Castle

Tudor Gothic castle completed in 1911 for Port of Tacoma founder Chester Thorne, built with 400-year-old bricks from an English manor. Featured in Stephen King's Rose Red miniseries.

Thornewood Castle was built between 1908 and 1911 on the shores of American Lake for Chester Thorne, a Yale-educated financier who co-founded the Port of Tacoma and served as the first president of the National Bank of Tacoma. In 1907, Thorne purchased a 400-year-old Elizabethan manor in England and had it dismantled brick by brick, shipping the materials around Cape Horn on three vessels. Architect Kirtland Kelsey Cutter assembled them into a Tudor Gothic mansion spanning over 27,000 square feet with 54 rooms, incorporating 500-year-old Welsh red bricks, hand-hewn English oak staircases, and more than 100 pieces of stained glass salvaged from 15th and 16th century churches. The Olmsted Brothers designed 37 acres of formal English gardens on the 100-acre estate, and in 1930 the Garden Club of America declared it the most beautiful garden in the country. Chester called it "the house that love built," having commissioned it for his wife Anna after more than twenty years of marriage. Anna's favorite room faced not the lake like the others, but Mount Rainier, overlooking what she called her Secret Garden.

Chester Thorne died at the castle on October 17, 1927, after a lingering illness. Anna remained at Thornewood for another 27 years, dying peacefully there in 1954. Their daughter Anita, who had contracted scarlet fever as a teenager and lost much of her hearing, inherited the estate but sold it in 1959. The property changed hands and deteriorated over the following decades before Wayne and Deanna Robinson purchased it in 2000 and began restoration. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

The Robinsons soon discovered they were not alone. Chester Thorne's ghost appears most frequently in his second-floor bedroom, following a residual pattern: he enters through the door, walks past the bed, and vanishes into the bathroom. He has also been seen outside wearing his favorite brown riding suit and boots, carrying a riding whip as he crosses the lawn toward the garden fountains. In his former smoking room, light bulbs are repeatedly found unscrewed, a phenomenon that occurs so persistently that staff have stopped replacing them. Anna is seen in her bedroom window seat, gazing longingly over the garden she loved in life. Guests in what is now the bridal suite have looked into Anna's original mirror and seen her reflection standing behind them. Chester and Anna occasionally appear together at the top of the grand staircase, dressed as if heading out to an elegant soiree, lingering for a moment before vanishing.

The most extraordinary phenomenon is the phantom party. Deanna Robinson reported that one night while reading in the Great Hall, the room suddenly filled with the sounds and sights of a cocktail party. At least 100 people appeared to be socializing, dancing, and drinking. The scene was hazy but clearly visible, as if she had stepped back in time to the Thorne era. Someone even dropped a glass. Despite owning the estate, Robinson said she felt like an intruder, as if the ghosts were disturbed by her presence.

Other spirits haunt specific rooms throughout the castle. In the billiard room, footsteps climb the staircase followed by the unmistakable sounds of a game being played. A male ghost in a brown suit emerges from the bathroom in the Grand Room, crosses to the dining room, and disappears through the glass doors, believed from old photographs to be Anna's second husband. In the Grandview Room, a ghostly servant once organized a guest's shoes and neatly folded his socks over them. The Gold Room on the third floor carries a persistent lavender scent and experiences poltergeist movements of toiletries, particularly women's articles. Their daughter Anita, who often hid during social gatherings due to her hearing loss, is glimpsed as a sad, wistful figure sitting by her window, and guests in her former bedroom report phantom piano music during the early morning hours.

The Washington State Ghost Society conducted a formal investigation and captured Electronic Voice Phenomena of a man singing in the kitchen, though no visual apparitions appeared for their equipment. Paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley visited twice, and during her second visit had the entire castle to herself overnight. She experienced the billiard-playing ghost, footsteps on the central staircase, and disembodied voices in Anna's Room. In 2000, ABC selected Thornewood from proposals across 30 states and Canada as the filming location for Stephen King's Rose Red miniseries, investing over $500,000 to restore the mansion to its 1911 condition. The finished series aired in January 2002, and a prequel, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, was also filmed at the castle. Today Thornewood operates as a bed and breakfast and event venue, where guests can sleep in the same rooms where Chester and Anna still seem to linger.