Tokeland Hotel

Washington's oldest hotel, originally built in 1885 as a private home and later expanded into the Kindred Inn beach resort.

In 1858, George and Charlotte Brown settled on the Toke Peninsula along Willapa Bay, homesteading 1,400 acres among the Shoalwater Tribe led by Chief Toke. When their daughter Elizabeth married carpenter William Stingly Kindred in 1880, the couple built a two-story wood-frame farmhouse with a gabled roof and brick fireplace in 1885, four years before Washington achieved statehood. By 1899 they expanded the structure into an L-shaped resort called the Kindred Inn, attracting lumber barons, merchants, and sportfishermen from as far as California. The Kindreds developed a golf course, dairy, oyster farm, and post office on the grounds, with William serving as postmaster from 1894 until 1915.

The hotel's most enduring ghost story centers on a man known as Charley, a Chinese immigrant smuggled into the country during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act to work on Pacific Northwest railroads. According to the account passed down through generations of hotel owners, Tokeland's remote coastal location made it a landing spot for smuggling ships. One night, as a vessel arrived offshore, Charley jumped ship and fled to the hotel, where the Kindreds hid him in a secret compartment behind the parlor fireplace. When a fire was inadvertently lit in the fireplace while he remained concealed, Charley died of carbon monoxide poisoning. His spirit has reportedly wandered the hotel's hallways ever since.

Charley is described as a mostly friendly presence who occasionally turns mischievous. Fishermen dining in the restaurant have watched plates lift off tables, spin in the air, and return to the surface. Objects disappear from one room and reappear in another. Katherine White, who with her husband Scott purchased the abandoned and deteriorating hotel in 1989 and reopened it on Mother's Day 1990, reported coming face to face with Charley on the second floor, describing him as a hazy white apparition several feet wide resembling a cumulus cloud. On another occasion, she claims Charley latched the storeroom door shut, trapping her inside as the lights failed. A heavy metal roller skate once fell from a high bookshelf, narrowly missing her head. Her late husband Scott once observed a bright gleaming white glow on the kitchen floor that cast no shadow when he passed his hand over it.

Room 7 is the hotel's most active paranormal location and is officially designated a Haunted Room alongside Room 4. Guests in Room 7 have reported night terrors and the apparition of a tall dark shadow standing over their bed. Children staying at the hotel have described seeing an older man wearing overalls and a fishing cap, visible only from the waist up. The sounds of scraping coat hangers and footsteps echo through the night on the third floor, which serves only as storage with no guests above. A phantom cat also roams the property, possibly the same feline seen in an old photograph with William and Lizzie Kindred. Historian Elisa Law has described feeling the ghost cat jump onto the foot of her bed and walk around her feet during multiple stays. A logbook maintained by hotel staff documents fifty to sixty guest accounts of shadowy figures, nighttime tapping, and objects moving across rooms.

A 1970s Pacific storm washed away a small cemetery that once stood on the hotel grounds. Duck hunters later recovered three tombstones from the area: one belonging to Leonidas Norris, who died in his early twenties from a hunting accident; another for Albert Brown, who died at age nine after becoming trapped in bay mud; and a third marked only with the initials CLL, which some believe belonged to Charley. The tombstones, separated from any remains, now serve as decorations at the hotel. A fourth generation of owners arrived in 2018 when Seattle chef Heather Earnhardt and contractor Zac Young purchased the property, bringing Earnhardt's acclaimed Wandering Goose restaurant concept to the historic dining room while preserving the hotel's haunted character.