The attic of the E.R. Rogers Mansion in Steilacoom, Washington lost its floor in a restaurant conversion. Staff and patrons kept seeing a woman's stockinged foot tread the air up there, and a sheriff's dog flatly refused to climb the stairs.
The attic of the E.R. Rogers Mansion in Steilacoom, Washington has no floor. It was pulled out when the 1891 house was converted into a restaurant, leaving open joists over the second story. People kept seeing a woman's stockinged foot up there anyway, coming down and treading the air where the boards used to be.
One night a bar patron visiting from England stopped mid-conversation and went pale. He had just watched the foot step through empty space into the attic. The hostess with him, Jennifer Laughlin, knew the room. She had been sent up alone for extra chairs once and found herself enveloped in a cheap, heady perfume. "There was no one there and there was someone there," she said. Enough of the staff had their own version that many made it a personal policy never to go up alone.
The rest of it happened after closing. Doors swinging open, lights coming on, candles snuffed out, that same perfume filling an empty room, bar televisions and blenders and sound systems flipping on and switching channels with nobody in the building. Co-owner Gordon Robertson said his bartenders took it in stride. "I do believe there are spirits here," he told the News Tribune in 1991. "But not all the spirits are like the movies. It's not all that glamorous."
One bartender who had already locked up saw the lights come back on and someone moving inside, and called the sheriff's department. The K-9 cleared the first two floors, then refused the deputy's command to go up to the attic. "He said he'd never seen the dog do that before," Robertson said. A carpet-cleaning crew hired out of Seattle for an overnight job did one room, packed up, waived the bill and would not say why.
E. R. Rogers built the 17-room house in 1891 for his wife Catherine, and lived in it about two years before the Panic of 1893 took the house and his fortune together. The family moved back next door. The mansion became a boarding house called the Waverly Inn, then the Waverly by the Sea, and Hattie Bair ran it as a rooming house through World War II. The restaurant came much later, out of what the News Tribune called a Victorian derelict, and it is gone now too. Law offices fill the rooms.
Nobody has ever settled who the woman is. The Seattle Times named Catherine, dead nearly a century by then, who was said to have loved the place. Robertson wondered instead about the stepdaughter, Kate, coming back to the house she felt she deserved, or a boarder who never checked out, or Hattie still fussing over guests.
The man is easier to name. A 1992 News Tribune feature reported E. R. Rogers himself, seen over and over rocking in a chair at the north window. People who tried to live in the house said he keeps that chair by that window. They move it into a closet, and it comes back.
