Red Onion Saloon

Skagway boomed almost overnight in 1897–98 as tens of thousands of stampeders landed on their way over the White Pass and Chilkoot trails to the Klondike goldfields. In the autumn of 1898 a Seattle saloon man, Peter Lawson, opened the Red Onion as the town’s largest dance hall and saloon. Upstairs was a brothel – according to the National Park Service a higher-class parlour than the one-room “cribs” of nearby Paradise Alley and Yokohama Row.

The gold rush faded quickly. In 1914 the two-storey frame building was moved from Sixth Avenue and State Street to its present corner of Broadway and Second Avenue, turned around so that its old rear became the new front. Local prohibition closed the saloon in 1916. The building now stands in the Skagway Historic District, part of the Skagway and White Pass National Historic Landmark, with its exterior little changed.

Jan Wrentmore reopened the Red Onion as a bar and restaurant in 1980 and restored the upstairs rooms as a brothel museum, where costumed “madams” lead visitors through the cramped bedrooms and explain the house’s system of wooden dolls behind the bar that showed which women were busy. Wrentmore retired in 2024 and the saloon passed to Juneau restaurateur Tracy LaBarge, who told local radio she hoped to meet the resident ghost.

That ghost is known as Lydia. In the version told on tours she was one of the women who worked upstairs and died young; some tellings say she took her own life. No historical record identifying a Lydia at the Red Onion has been published, and the story is best understood as a way of remembering the many anonymous women who worked in Skagway’s gold-rush sex trade, most of whom left little trace in the record.

Staff and visitors describe footsteps crossing the empty upstairs floor, a sudden strong scent of old-fashioned perfume, cold spots and plants that seem to have been watered overnight. Tour guides say Lydia is cool towards men; a few accounts mention a second, unnamed male presence.

Upstairs in the former brothel rooms – the madam’s room, the small crib room and the hallway – most often while the museum is closed or the bar is busy below.

The Red Onion is one of Skagway’s best-known stops for cruise passengers, featured on the “Ghosts and Goodtime Girls” walking tour that ends with a brothel-museum visit and a glass of champagne. Lydia appears in many lists of Alaska’s most haunted places.