Tenants of the Georgetown Castle in Seattle keep meeting an old woman with coal-black eyes, one hand at her throat, the other striking out. Her name drifts between Sarah and Mary. The gambler who built the house died of carbolic acid upstairs in 1903.
Two men living in the Georgetown Castle in Seattle in the 1970s kept meeting the same woman inside it. Ray McWade and Petter Pettersen described an elderly figure in a long white dress with coal-black eyes, one hand clutching her own throat, the other striking out at the air, and the portrait of a sinister-looking man floating behind her. Pettersen painted her. An elderly visitor looked at the painting and said it was her great-aunt Sarah, who had met a bad end in that house.
That is as close as anyone has come to naming her, and it did not hold. Atlas Obscura is blunt about the drift: "One moment, her name is Sarah. The next, it's Mary. Today, the ghost has flowing red hair and a white nightgown. Tomorrow, it's dark hair and kohl-rimmed eyes." Her death travels two ways as well, strangled by a magician during the house's 1920s brothel years, or shot by an abusive pimp.
The man who built the place is easier to follow, up to a point. Peter Gessner ran the Central Tavern in Pioneer Square and moved his gambling operation out to Georgetown after being sued for letting minors play, then worked cards and a brothel out of his own new Queen Anne house. Seattle Met tells the marriage this way: he built the 9-bedroom house for his young wife Lizzie, who took up with the manager of a chicken farm the couple owned before the place was even finished, and was convalescing out there from what the papers called a "surgical operation" when the police shut his tables down.
In July 1903, Gessner was found dead in a second-floor bedroom, his lips and tongue scorched by carbolic acid. Most of the papers wrote him up as a lovelorn suicide. One noted suspicious circumstances, friends suspected foul play, and the coroner decided against an inquest. Lizzie and her chicken farmer married and moved into the house her first husband built.
McWade and Pettersen also found a tiny room walled off completely, carrying a cold nobody could account for. Lynda Bazan and her son Micah Schlede bought the castle in 2004, when it had one working shower for 9 bedrooms and no insurer willing to touch it. They replaced the roof and all 52 windows and let three paranormal teams spend the night. Both owners report banging doors, sudden chills, heavy footfalls. One houseguest said he had been pushed down those stairs at 1 a.m. and refused to sleep there again. Another came down in the morning and asked Bazan, "Whose baby was crying?"
A marker stands at the front fence, listing the house as a rooming house, a brothel, a clubhouse for the Nonpareils baseball team, "as well as home to a ghost named Sara." The city's inventory of the property is shorter about the living: "This house is reported to have been constructed in 1902 for Peter Gessner. Information regarding Mr. Gessner has not been obtained."
