Pike Place Market

Pike Place Market opened in August 1907 so that farmers could sell directly to Seattle’s shoppers, and it grew into a warren of arcades, stairways, stalls and lower levels tumbling down the bluff toward Elliott Bay. Ten million people a year now visit. In its early days farmers brought produce in by horse, and stables, cheap hotels and rooming houses filled the surrounding blocks. When the 1918 influenza pandemic reached Seattle that October, some of those buildings served as quarantine wards.

The market’s ghost stories grew with its history. Michael Yaeger, whose family runs a shop in the market, began Halloween ghost tours there in the 1980s; his daughter Mercedes took them over, running Market Ghost Tours from Ghost Alley Espresso, a tiny café in a 1908 restroom that the market itself calls “definitely haunted.” She researches fire-insurance maps, leases and old newspapers, while freely admitting that the stories require a leap of faith.

The tales include “Jacob,” said to be a stable boy who died young in an epidemic and who knocks stuffed animals and clocks off the shelves of a toy shop, where staff have made him a little bed; a small, mischievous boy seen hiding behind desks in a former day care on a lower level; and Frank Goodwin, one of the market’s founders, who died in 1954 and is said to appear as an old man at the bottom of the stairs by his former office, offering directions.

The most poignant figure is Kikisoblu, known as Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle (Si’ahl) of the Duwamish and Suquamish. When Native people were barred from living in the city that bore her father’s name, she refused to leave her small waterfront cabin just below Pike Street, where she lived by taking in laundry and selling baskets until her death in May 1896. Guides say she is glimpsed on the stairs up from Western Avenue near the site of her home. For many Seattleites, her story is less a ghost tale than a reminder of the Duwamish people pushed out of their own land.

Staff and visitors report a small boy glimpsed in shops and corridors, objects and merchandise flying or falling in a toy store, an elderly man who offers directions on a stairway and vanishes, and a slow-moving woman seen out of the corner of the eye on the Western Avenue stairs.

Post Alley and the Gum Wall area around Ghost Alley Espresso, the lower levels of the Main Arcade, the stairs to the Alibi Room, a toy store in the market and the stairs up from Western Avenue.

Market Ghost Tours is one of Seattle’s best-known ghost walks, and the market leans into Halloween with themed shops, bars and theatre. Princess Angeline is also remembered in photographs, histories and Seattle’s Native community as a symbol of Duwamish resilience.