Alaskan Hotel and Bar

The Alaskan Hotel opened on 16 September 1913, built in about five months by the promoter Jules Caro with his brothers James and John McCloskey. It was the first purpose-built hotel in Juneau, a gold-mining town where seasonal workers had mostly relied on crowded boarding houses. The three-storey building was designed for miners and itinerant labourers, and its history is a rough-and-tumble one: during Prohibition the bar masqueraded as a soda café, and the upper floors served at least twice as a brothel before authorities closed it down. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 25 October 1978, and owners Mike and Bettye Adams restored it to a Victorian look that it still has today.

Ghost stories here are usually attached to that colourful past. A local legend, repeated on the history site Clio and in ghost-walk write-ups, says the spirit of a woman is felt in Room 219. In the story she turned to sex work after believing her miner husband had died in the mountains; when he returned weeks later and found out, he killed her in the hotel. No record of the couple or the crime has been produced, so the tale is best read as folklore about the building’s reputation rather than documented history. The owner herself has told reporters that the bar and the basement have as much going on as any room.

The story that gave the hotel its modern fame belongs to Room 315, a small third-floor room with two single beds. On 19 May 2007 the guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill was in port, and a young sailor emailed ahead to ask for the haunted room. Staff gave him 315. At about 11:45 p.m. Juneau police were called to a disturbance after screaming was heard from the locked room; while officers were still knocking, the sailor ended up in the street below after breaking several windows, and a guest in the room underneath said she heard the glass go. When police forced the door they found the room’s walls marked with blood. The sailor was seriously injured but survived and was flown out of Juneau. The hotel’s owner later described an angry telephone call from his mother.

What actually happened in the room has never been explained. Reporting by CoastAlaska and KTOO in 2018 stresses how little is known, and that the Navy was apparently keen on avoiding publicity. People who work in the building are divided: the owner says guests rarely report anything but that staff have been spooked enough to quit, while a longtime employee and musician has said every odd incident he saw had a mundane explanation. Author Bjorn Dihle, who retold the story in his 2017 book Haunted Inside Passage, suggested that an expectation of horror and a sleepless night can do much of the work..

Staff and guests describe footsteps, unexplained noises in the bar and basement, a presence in Room 219, and an uneasy feeling in Room 315. Reports come mainly from employees, the owner and visiting ghost enthusiasts rather than from systematic investigation.

Room 315 on the third floor, Room 219 on the second, the downstairs bar and the basement.

The hotel appears in Bjorn Dihle’s Haunted Inside Passage, in Alaska Public Media coverage and in a ghost-hunting television series announced by KTOO; it is also a favourite stop for Juneau’s ghost tours and a genuine live-music bar.