Sorrento Hotel

The Sorrento opened in 1909, just ahead of Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, as a luxury apartment hotel on First Hill, the residential ridge above downtown. It was the project of the clothier Samuel Rosenberg and the work of architect Harlan Thomas, who gave it an Italianate look that suited its name. The hotel struggled at first: in 1910 Rosenberg traded it for an orchard in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley. It nevertheless became one of the city’s grander addresses, known into the 1960s for a top-floor dining room with views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains.

In the 1980s the Malone family bought the building and renovated it. The Fireside Room, with its Rookwood tile fireplace, became a popular lounge, and the hotel was designated a Seattle Landmark in 2010 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. A 2016 SeattlePI piece traced the hotel’s haunted reputation to its place on a USA Today list of the country’s 13 most haunted hotels.

Its ghost is said to be Alice B. Toklas, the writer and long-time partner of Gertrude Stein, who has become a figure of popular lore as the supposed inventor of the pot brownie. According to the tales, she appears as a figure in flowing white on the fourth floor, particularly around Room 408, where lights dim and flicker. Other accounts describe footsteps in the corridors, a presence felt by the fireplace in the Fireside Room, and drinks that slide along the bar in the Dunbar Room. The hotel’s marketing manager has told a reporter that the encounters are friendly.

The link to Toklas is hard to square with the dates. She lived in Seattle in the 1890s, in a house near the future site of the hotel, while studying music at the University of Washington, then moved to San Francisco and later Paris. The hotel did not open until at least a decade after she had left. As far as anyone can show, she never stayed there at all, and the brownie recipe usually credited to her, the “Haschich Fudge” in her cookbook, is more a matter of popularising it than inventing it. The legend therefore seems to attach a famous Seattle name to a building rather than describe anyone who died or lived in it.

Guests and staff report a woman in a long white gown on the fourth floor, flickering or dimming lights near Room 408, footsteps in empty hallways, a sensation of presence by the Fireside Room fireplace, and wine glasses or drinks sliding on the bar. The witnesses are rarely named, and the hotel describes the reported presence as benign.

The fourth floor and Room 408 in particular, the Fireside Room lounge and the Dunbar Room bar.

The Sorrento is a fixture of Seattle’s haunted-hotel round-ups and of the city’s guidebooks to historic hotels. The legend draws on Toklas’s fame as Gertrude Stein’s partner and on her Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, whose “Haschich Fudge” recipe made her a pop-culture figure.