Flavel House Museum

A Queen Anne-style mansion built in 1886 for Captain George Flavel, designed by architect Carl W. Leick. The 11,600-square-foot property with a four-story tower is now a museum operated by the Clatsop County Historical Society.

Captain George Conrad Flavel was Astoria's first millionaire, a Columbia River bar pilot who amassed his fortune guiding ships across the treacherous river mouth and investing shrewdly in real estate. When he retired at age sixty-two, he commissioned German-born architect Carl W. Leick to design a home befitting his status. Completed in the spring of 1886, the Queen Anne mansion spans eleven thousand six hundred square feet with fourteen-foot ceilings on the first floor, handcrafted Douglas fir woodwork made to resemble mahogany, six unique fireplaces with imported tiles, indoor plumbing, and gas lighting. A four-story octagonal tower gave the Captain a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the Columbia River, allowing him to monitor ship traffic even in retirement. The house survived the devastating 1922 fire that destroyed much of downtown Astoria and became a museum in 1951, operated by the Clatsop County Historical Society.

The Captain appears not to have left his beloved home. Museum visitors and staff have reported seeing the full apparition of George Flavel in his second-floor bedroom, where he appears solid and recognizable before sinking through the floor and vanishing once he realizes he has been noticed. The sightings are consistent across multiple witnesses over the decades, always in the same room and always ending the same way, as though the Captain is caught in an eternal routine that the presence of the living briefly interrupts.

The Flavel sisters, who were gifted musicians, are believed to be responsible for phantom music and disembodied voices heard on the first floor, particularly near the music room where they once held recitals for Astoria society. The sounds are described as faint but distinct, as if a performance is taking place in a distant room that guests cannot quite reach. In the former bedroom of Katie Flavel, museum volunteers have documented a persistent and specific phenomenon: the room's curtains are closed during normal maintenance, only to be found open again minutes later when no one else is in the home. Staff attribute this to Katie herself, who was known during her lifetime to always prefer natural light and insisted on keeping the curtains open. The curtain activity has been observed so many times that it is now considered routine rather than alarming.

A woman's ghost has been sighted in the second-floor hallway, distinct from the Captain's apparition, who vanishes when approached. A floral scent with no identifiable source has been detected at unpredictable times in Ms. Flavel's bedroom, filling the room suddenly and dissipating just as quickly. The library has long been noted as housing what staff describe as an unhappy and strange presence, a feeling of unease that even visitors with no knowledge of the house's haunted reputation have independently remarked upon. Despite the breadth and consistency of these reports, the Clatsop County Historical Society maintains a focus on the mansion's architectural and historical significance, allowing the ghost stories to remain an unofficial but well-known complement to the guided tours that take visitors through one of the finest Victorian homes on the Oregon Coast.