Rosario Resort and the Moran Mansion

In 1904 the Seattle shipbuilder and former mayor Robert Moran was told he had a heart condition and perhaps six months to live. He decided that he was simply worn out, took a cruise through the San Juan Islands, and fell for Orcas Island. He bought a farm and lumber mill on the shore of East Sound, kept buying until he held thousands of acres including most of Mount Constitution, and named the estate Rosario after the nearby strait. Between 1906 and 1909 he built a five-storey, Arts and Crafts mansion of island timber and stone, with a nautical theme, stained glass and a music room that later received a two-storey Aeolian pipe organ.

He gave a large part of the estate to the state in 1921 to create Moran State Park, and he sold the mansion in 1938. The buyer was Donald Rheem, a co-founder of the California appliance maker Rheem Manufacturing, who used it as a vacation home. After a succession of private owners, the property opened as the Rosario Resort and Spa in 1960; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and in 2024 it was sold again and partly closed for renovation, with the mansion itself part of the work.

The resort’s ghost is said to be Alice Rheem, Donald’s wife. Versions of the story, repeated for years in guidebooks and hotel round-ups, describe a woman in a red nightgown seen in her old room, the sound of high-heeled footsteps in empty corridors, and moans and creaking from a bedroom when no one was in it. Staff and guests are the usual sources, though the accounts are rarely named. A 2002 Seattle Times round-up of haunted hotels called her presence a rumour.

The documentary trail does not back the legend well. Alice Goodfellow married Donald Rheem in 1922, and the researcher Marlene Pardo Pellicer reports that she died in Oakland, California, in 1956 while living on the family estate in Moraga, rather than on Orcas Island. Pellicer found little evidence that Alice spent much time at Rosario at all, let alone that she was the hard-drinking recluse of the local tale. The story, in other words, may have attached itself to the most famous name in the house’s later history, and the footsteps and shadows may belong to someone else, or to no one.

None of the reported activity has been independently investigated. What the mansion does offer is a rare surviving piece of Puget Sound’s shipbuilding boom, with its organ and original furnishings, and a good lesson in how a ghost story can outrun the paperwork.

Resort staff and guests have described a woman in a red nightgown, high-heeled footsteps with no walker, shadows, the sensation of being caressed by fingers, and moaning or bed noises from a former bedroom. Nothing here has been documented by independent investigators.

Chiefly the mansion’s upper floors and the bedroom linked to Alice Rheem, the corridors, and the corridors; accounts come from staff and overnight guests.

The mansion, with its Aeolian organ and museum of Moran family furnishings, has long been a San Juan Islands attraction, and the ghost of Alice Rheem appears in regional haunted-hotel lists. The mansion’s story is told on Orcas Island historical pages as the creation of one of Seattle’s most prominent industrialists.