Visitors to the Campbell House in Spokane say the portrait of mining baron Amasa Campbell follows them with its eyes, and staff hear a child giggling in the empty upstairs bedrooms. The legend murders three Campbell children. The family only ever had one.
A portrait of Amasa B. Campbell hangs inside the Campbell House in Spokane, Washington, and visitors keep saying the eyes track them from room to room. Campbell made his fortune in Idaho silver, and the Tudor Revival house he built on West First Avenue went up in 1898. No source names which room the portrait is in. The museum's own page for the house doesn't mention it at all.
Most of the rest comes from one ghost tour company, Seattle Terrors, which collects the reports from guides and staff: a child playing in the upstairs bedrooms, giggling in rooms that are empty, footsteps where nobody is walking, whispers carried down the halls. A few witnesses say they have passed Campbell himself in a hallway and recognized him from the painting. Others describe a full figure standing on the stairwell. "Everyone has had their own experience here," one guide told them, "even our guests." What visitors report more often is plainer than that: a feeling on the way in, being overcome with dread, the sensation of being followed through the rooms.
Then there is the story that made the house famous, printed in House Beautiful and repeated by radio sites ever since. "One night in the early 1900s, a burglar murdered three of the four Campbell family children. The last was kidnapped and never returned to the family." Haunted Rooms America ties the portrait straight to it, Campbell watching the rooms "perhaps looking to see if the kidnapper ever returns."
Amasa and Grace Campbell had one child.
Her name was Helen. Born in 1892, schooled at Brunot Hall in Spokane, then sent to Paris to study. She married William Powell in 1917 and died in 1964, outliving both her parents by decades. There were never four children in this house. No newspaper archive, no National Register nomination, no finding aid carries a word about murdered Campbell children, and the trail of the legend runs cold at a magazine roundup.
What did happen here is ordinary and written down. Amasa died of throat cancer in February 1912. Grace lived on in the house until 1924, 26 years in total, a temperance supporter who cast her first vote for president in 1916. Helen gave the place to the Eastern Washington State Historical Society in her mother's memory, and it opened to the public in 1926 under the name it still carries in the local records: the Grace Campbell Memorial House.
Helen's diary sits next door in the museum archive. One volume, daily entries from 1913 to 1917, a young Spokane socialite writing herself down through the war years. The only Campbell child who ever existed left a record of her life in her own hand. The story people tell about the house still kills three children she never had.
