Historic Anchorage Hotel

The Anchorage Hotel opened in 1916, when Anchorage was a tent-and-frame railroad camp barely a year old. C. B. Wark built the first wooden hotel and Frank Reed turned it into the town’s smartest lodging in 1917. As the city grew in the 1930s, an annex was added in 1936 – a Gothic-styled building by architect E. Ellsworth Sedille that ranked among the tallest in town. That annex is the hotel that stands today; the original 1916 building was demolished in the 1960s.

The guest register reads like a roll call of early Alaska. President Warren Harding stayed in 1923, and aviator Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers spent time here just before their fatal 1935 crash near Barrow. The painter Sydney Laurence kept a studio and an apartment in the hotel for years and once paid a year’s rent with a painting of Denali. After a slide into neglect in the 1950s, when the annex became the Hotel Ronald Lee, the building was restored in the late 1980s and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

The ghost stories most often name John J. “Jack” Sturgus, Anchorage’s first police chief. Six weeks after taking office, on the night of 20 February 1921, he was found mortally wounded in an alley near Fourth Avenue and E Street, a few steps from the hotel, with his own revolver lying in the snow. Historian David Reamer notes that a coroner’s inquest ruled it murder, though suicide was raised as a possibility; bootleggers he had recently raided were the main suspects, and no one was ever charged. The case remains the department’s oldest unsolved death.

The hotel has embraced its reputation. Staff keep a ghost log at the front desk for guests to record their experiences, and visiting television and news crews have featured it. Besides Sturgus, guests describe children heard or glimpsed on the second floor and a woman in a wedding dress – figures for whom no documented deaths at the hotel have been published.

Guests describe televisions and lights switching on and off, taps that run by themselves, unexplained footsteps and knocking, sudden cold spots, the sound of children laughing, and sightings of a small girl and of a woman in a long white dress. Some guests attribute an unseen presence near the lobby to Chief Sturgus.

Rooms 215 and 217 on the second floor are most often named in published accounts; reports also come from the second-floor halls and the ground floor nearest the alley where Sturgus was found.

The hotel is a staple of Anchorage ghost tours and of Halloween features in Alaska media, and its ghost log has become part of the guest experience. Its centenary in 2016 renewed interest in both its history and its stories.