Manresa Castle

Charles Eisenbeis, a prominent businessman and Port Townsend’s first mayor, completed his castle-like brick mansion on the hill above the town in 1892 for himself and his wife, Kate. Port Townsend was then booming on the expectation that it would become the great seaport of Puget Sound; the boom soon faded. Eisenbeis died in 1902, and Kate remarried a few years later.

In 1927 Jesuit priests bought the building as a training college, added a wing with a chapel and sleeping rooms in 1928 and named it Manresa Hall, after the Spanish town where Ignatius of Loyola began his spiritual exercises. When the Jesuits left in 1968 the building became a hotel, and it has operated as one – with a restaurant and lounge – ever since. The Massey family bought it in 2004.

Manresa’s fame as one of Washington’s most haunted hotels rests on two stories. In one, a young woman named Kate, a guest while the house was a private home, died after a fall from a window of Room 306 on hearing that her fiancé had been lost at sea. In the other, a priest died by suicide in Room 302, the turret room below the attic. Both are stated as fact in countless guides. But in 2003 a former manager told the Peninsula Daily News that a bartender, Nick Gael, had invented both tales to satisfy guests who kept asking about odd noises – footsteps in the attic and voices in empty rooms.

The confession did not dent the castle’s reputation. Paranormal groups continue to investigate, the tower room is dressed with props for tours, and in January 2015 the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures locked itself in for an episode broadcast that September. The owners welcome the publicity, while acknowledging that the most famous ghosts were born behind the bar.

Guests describe footsteps in the attic, voices in empty rooms, thumping overhead, light fixtures swaying, and the feeling of being tugged or touched while asleep – reported most often in Rooms 302 and 306.

Room 306 and the turret Room 302, the attic above them, and the hallways of the 1892 house and 1928 Jesuit wing.

Manresa Castle appears on Ghost Adventures and many other paranormal programmes and in nearly every list of haunted hotels in the Pacific Northwest. It anchors Port Townsend’s busy ghost-tour scene, alongside the town’s Victorian seaport district and Laurel Grove Cemetery.