Flavel House Museum

Captain Flavel sinks through the floor when caught looking. His daughter Katie keeps reopening her bedroom curtains.

At the Flavel House Museum, somebody opens Katie Flavel's bedroom curtains. Volunteers close them during regular maintenance. They come back minutes later and find them open. This happens often enough that the staff treats it as routine rather than unusual. Katie, in life, was particular about natural light and insisted on keeping the curtains drawn back. The reasonable conclusion is that she still does.

The house Katie grew up in was built for her father, Captain George Conrad Flavel, who was Astoria's first millionaire. Visitors and staff have reported the full figure of the Captain in his second-floor bedroom, looking as solid and recognizable as he does in the family photographs hanging on the same floor. By the time anyone takes a second look, the room is empty. The sightings are remarkably uniform across decades, always the same room, always the same disappearance. Whatever loop the Captain is caught in, the presence of the living briefly snaps him out of it.

Flavel made his fortune as a Columbia River bar pilot, guiding ships through one of the most dangerous river mouths on the West Coast, and then invested the proceeds in real estate. When he retired at sixty-two, he commissioned German-born architect Carl W. Leick to design a mansion that would announce his status. The result, completed in spring 1886, is a Queen Anne with eleven thousand six hundred square feet of floor space, fourteen-foot first-floor ceilings, handcrafted Douglas fir woodwork stained to look like mahogany, six fireplaces with imported tiles, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, and a four-story octagonal tower that gave the Captain a 360-degree view of the river. He could watch ships from his own home, and the bedroom sightings put him at the same window the Captain used in life.

The Flavel sisters, Nellie and Katie, were trained musicians and held recitals for Astoria society in the music room on the first floor. Phantom music and faint voices have been heard in that part of the house, soft enough to suggest a performance is happening in a room visitors can't quite reach. A floral scent appears in Katie's bedroom at unpredictable times and disappears just as suddenly. A second woman's figure, separate from the Captain, has been seen in the second-floor hallway and slips out of view as soon as anyone tries to follow.

The library has its own atmosphere. Staff describe an unhappy presence there, and visitors with no idea the house has a haunted reputation have independently mentioned the feeling on tours. It's the only room in the house where the activity reads as troubled rather than tender.

The Flavel House survived the 1922 fire that took out much of downtown Astoria, became a museum in 1951, and has been operated by the Clatsop County Historical Society ever since. The Society talks about the architecture, the woodwork, the tower, the Captain's career on the bar. The ghost stories live in the unofficial layer that every old house museum eventually accumulates, told by guides between rooms and by visitors after the tour. Closing the curtains in Katie's bedroom is part of the building's working schedule now. Maintenance closes them. Katie opens them. Maintenance closes them again. This has been going on for as long as anyone has been keeping track.