State file · AK
Haunted places in Alaska
What are the most haunted places in Alaska? The best-known are Historic Anchorage Hotel and Red Onion Saloon.
Alaska’s settler ghost stories are young by American standards – most of its towns were founded in the gold rushes of the 1890s or along the railroad in the 1910s – but they come thick. Skagway, the boom-town gateway to the Klondike, turned its saloons, brothels and hotels into a living museum, and its guides keep the ghosts of stampeders and “good-time girls” in the tour script. In Anchorage the oldest buildings are barely a century old, yet the city’s first hotel and its first, unsolved police killing have produced a durable legend.
- 2 hauntings
- 8 recorded sightings
Haunted places in Alaska
Historic Anchorage Hotel
Downtown Anchorage’s oldest hotel, where guests log ghostly visits and the city’s first police chief is said to walk near the spot he was shot. Local legend
Red Onion Saloon
A Klondike gold-rush saloon and upstairs brothel in Skagway, where staff say the perfume and footsteps of a woman called Lydia linger. Local legendThe ghost lore of Alaska
Long dark winters, isolation, earthquake-damaged buildings and abandoned Cold War sites all feed the state’s eerie reputation. So do stories that are not ghost stories at all: Alaska Native peoples have their own traditions about the dead and the land, which belong to those communities and are best learned from Native-led cultural centres rather than haunted-house lists.
Most of Alaska’s ghost tourism is seasonal and centres on Skagway’s historic district, downtown Anchorage, and old roadhouses and hotels along the main highways. Several of the state’s spookiest-looking sites, such as Whittier’s ruined Buckner Building, are unsafe and closed to the public.
Ghost-hunting hotspots
- Skagway Historic District
A preserved gold-rush town of saloons, hotels and brothels whose summer walking tours mix Klondike history with ghost stories.
- Downtown Anchorage
The city’s oldest blocks around Fourth Avenue hold its first hotel, the site of its first police chief’s unsolved death and several theatres with resident-ghost lore.
- Seward
The railroad’s ocean terminus, where the 1916 Van Gilder Hotel is known for stories of a woman seen in its upstairs rooms.
- Whittier
The abandoned Buckner Building, a Cold War-era “city under one roof”, attracts eerie legends – but it is unsafe and off limits.
Timeline
- Autumn 1898Peter Lawson opens the Red Onion Red Onion Saloon
At the height of the Klondike stampede, the Red Onion opened at Sixth Avenue and State Street as a dance hall and saloon with a brothel on the upper floor.
- 1914The building is moved Red Onion Saloon
The saloon was hauled to Broadway and Second Avenue and turned so its rear became the front. Local prohibition closed it two years later.
- 1916The Anchorage Hotel opens Historic Anchorage Hotel
C. B. Wark opened the first Anchorage Hotel in the new railroad town; it was upgraded to a luxury hotel the following year.
- 20 February 1921Chief Jack Sturgus is shot Historic Anchorage Hotel
Anchorage’s first police chief was found with a gunshot wound in an alley near Fourth Avenue and E Street and died in hospital later that night. A $1,950 reward produced no arrest.
- 1936The annex is built Historic Anchorage Hotel
A Gothic-style annex designed by E. Ellsworth Sedille opened to handle the growing city’s visitors. It is the building that operates as the Historic Anchorage Hotel today.
- 1980Reopened as bar and brothel museum Red Onion Saloon
Jan Wrentmore reopened the Red Onion and restored the upstairs as a museum. Staff stories about Lydia became part of the tours that followed.
- 15 April 1999Listed on the National Register Historic Anchorage Hotel
After restoration in the late 1980s, the Anchorage Hotel Annex was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
- October 2024New owner, same ghost Red Onion Saloon
After 44 seasons Wrentmore retired and Tracy LaBarge took over the saloon. Coverage of the handover by KHNS and KTOO noted the house ghost, Lydia, among the traditions the new owner meant to keep.
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