Golden North Hotel

The Golden North is one of the landmarks of Skagway’s Klondike Gold Rush historic district, topped by a gilt dome that is visible from the cruise-ship docks. The National Park Service, which curates the town’s historic district, gives a more complicated history than the usual ghost-tour version. The building went up in early 1898 as the Klondike Trading Company store, at a time when tens of thousands of people were passing through Skagway on their way to the goldfields. A hotel of the same name was run from the building by the popular manager Thomas Whitten, advertising rooms with “No bar – no bunks,” until he died in January 1900 after a fall from a gangplank on Moore’s Wharf. His housekeeper, Mary Falk, then took over.

In 1908 Ed Foreman and George Dedman bought the old store, jacked it onto rollers and moved it to its present corner of Third Avenue and Broadway, where the hotel moved into it. The Dedman family was still running it in 1930, when Henry Dedman was manager, and ghost-travel writers later billed it as one of the oldest hotels in Alaska. It closed in 2002 after a long run, and the building now houses several businesses, so the room numbers in the ghost story can no longer be booked.

The haunting legend centres on Room 23 and a woman known as “Mary.” In the most common telling she came north with a prospector fiancé nicknamed Klondike Ike, who left her in the hotel while he headed for the Yukon. She fell ill with pneumonia, or in other versions shut herself away in worry, and died in the room before he returned. Guests and staff have said they saw her at the window or in the hall, felt cold air and woke feeling as if they were choking. In Room 14, one floor below, people have described a gentle glittering light, sometimes called an orb, that visits at night and before dawn. Ghost-travel websites and bloggers repeat these accounts; none gives dates or names for the witnesses.

None of the sources consulted names a real fiancée who died in the building, and the stories disagree about who she was: some call her a fiancée, others simply a woman waiting for her lover. The NPS history does name a real Mary at the hotel, the housekeeper Mary Falk, who took charge after Whitten’s death, though nothing connects her to any ghost. Taken together, the legend looks like a tale that grew around a hotel in a city best known for waiting, desperation and short fortunes.

A woman said to stand at a window or in a hallway, cold air and a feeling of choking in Room 23, and a harmless twinkling light or orb in Room 14, reported by guests, housekeepers and other staff.

Room 23 on the third floor (north-west corner) and Room 14 on the second floor.

The hotel is a stock stop on Skagway ghost and history walks and features in books and websites on haunted Alaska, including field guides to haunted hotels.