Fort Worden's 1904 Guard House in Port Townsend, Washington is said to hold a soldier who shot himself on duty and stayed angry about it. The barred cells came out long ago. The building is a bar today, and you can take your drink in the old jail cell.
The Guard House at Fort Worden, in Port Townsend, Washington, is said to hold a soldier who is still angry about how he died. Local lore has it that a man assigned to the building, worn down by the loneliness of the duty, shot himself there with his service pistol. Ghost-lore listings describe him as shy and sometimes furious, mad at himself, a shadowy presence felt and seen inside the building and outside it. They also say he is walking his post, finishing a watch he broke off.
In April 2003, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Bloom stopped at the Guard House while she was in Port Townsend for a conference. She came away with a photograph of what she called a "clear, brilliant blue ghostly figure standing in front of me just outside the Guard House." By her account he turned up only after a fellow investigator asked him to show himself, and that is the detail the story hangs on. Not an old night looping. Something that listens.
The building went up in 1904, two years after the Army activated the fort on Point Wilson: a 1½-story white frame box with slate shingles, a stone basement, and the cell block in the rear. The 1974 National Register nomination notes that the barred cells were pulled out, but the sloping concrete floor stayed, "with arcs cut into the concrete by the swinging of cell doors."
No record names the soldier. No date, no unit, nothing in the nomination and nothing in the post cemetery rolls, which run past 430 burials and open with Private Elisha Webb, dead of illness three weeks after the fort came alive in 1902.
Fort Worden files its ghosts by building. At Point Wilson, Maria Hastings Littlefield, wife of the light's first keeper, is said to go through the closets and drawers of the keeper's house looking for a son who drowned, and to vanish the moment anyone walks into the room. At Alexander's Castle, the brick tower an Episcopal rector built above the bluff for a bride who married someone else while he sailed to Scotland to fetch her, a man boarding there drowned in the basement cistern. That is the one tragedy the Port Townsend Leader attaches to the place.
The Guard House stopped being a guard house long ago, and in 2016 it stopped being the park's visitor center, converted into a pub with a fireside lounge built inside the old holding cells. It went dark in January 2025 and reopened that June under new operators. Washington State Parks posts the hours: coffee and pastries at 9 a.m., full service from 11:30, wine and beer and craft cocktails on the patio or in the old jail cell.
