In the season of pumpkins, candy, and costumes, we looked into the creepier side of real estate, and we found the story of Seattle’s Mayflower Park Hotel. Okay, so technically it’s “real estate” only in the very short-term, multi-unit sense—but close enough. This haunting is good enough for a little stretch.
The Mayflower Park Hotel opened in 1927, the same decade the Paramount Theatre opened and Sears started a store in Seattle, and the same decade as the first aeriel circumnavigation of the world (which landed in Sand Point!). For more context, the 90-year-old Mayflower Park Hotel predates Pike Place Market, which opened in 1930.
In those early years, an older man lived on the sixth floor. Specifically, in room 1120. No one knows how he died, but die he did, and his spirit was loathe to leave the Mayflower Park. His ghost has allegedly refused to check out of the hotel.
In multiple, unrelated incidents, guests have claimed to have seen this former tenant. Some have seen the man moving between rooms, and others have felt his presence in room 1120. “I feel as if someone is in there with me,” one guest said. Strange noises of the ghostly variety have been reported as well.
My favorite part of this haunting: once while an employee was mopping, and he turned back to his mop bucket, only to have the mop bucket vanish. He found it later, one floor below.
Some hotel guests have insisted on changing rooms and leaving 1120 alone for its ghostly tenant, but the ghost has consistently been described as a “benign presence.” Rather than an eerie, unsettling apparition, this ghost just adds another layer of intrigue to Seattle’s longest continually operating hotel.
