From the early 1970s, staff at Seattle's Harvard Exit Theatre kept finding a translucent woman by the lobby fireplace, said to be the first woman to run a major American city. Then one manager explained the pranks behind her, and stopped short of one thing.
The Harvard Exit Theatre in Seattle had a ghost with a resume. From the early 1970s on, staff at the Capitol Hill cinema reported a translucent woman in turn-of-the-century dress in the lobby, on the stairs and up on the third floor, sometimes crying. Janet Wainwright, who managed the place for much of that decade, unlocked the doors one day and found her sitting in a chair by the lobby fireplace. Wainwright walked toward her. "She turned and looked at me and just faded into nothing."
There was more. Wainwright arrived some mornings to lights already on and a fire already burning, and once to the lobby chairs pulled into a semicircle around it. Other employees of the period reported a woman sobbing somewhere in the building. A projectionist supposedly came in one day to find the projector running.
The resume was the part everyone loved. The cinema had moved into the Woman's Century Club's 1925 brick clubhouse at 807 E Roy Street, and it never really moved the club out; the sale in 1968 came with a clause keeping the parlor as the club's own, and the members went on lunching there on bone china while films ran down the hall. So the woman by the fire was said to be Bertha Knight Landes, club president from 1918 to 1920, who in 1926 became the first woman elected to run a major American city. Landes died at her son's house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1943, a long way from that lobby.
Then there was the door. Shortly after Alan Blangy started as manager, he and his assistant were closing up when Blangy heard a noise in the third-floor auditorium and saw the fire-escape door swinging shut. He caught it, and something on the other side pulled back against him in hard jerks. Seconds later the two of them shoved it open. Nobody was out there, and neither man had heard feet on the metal.
In 1990 the paranormal author Rosemary Ellen Guiley came through and Blangy told her the rest of it. After Wainwright reported the apparition, other staff had started pranking her, lighting the fire before she got in and setting up the chairs. Films screened during the day, so somebody had likely left the projector running. Old building, creaky, mice. "Much of the publicized phenomena were practical jokes or had possible natural explanations," Guiley wrote, and nothing had been reported since the mid-1980s. The Woman's Century Club "officially has no comment."
The write-ups since have never caught up. Atlas Obscura, the Seattle Times' own haunted-sites guide and the working ghost tours all retell the fire and the chairs as things nobody could explain.
Blangy could explain them. He could not explain the door, and from that night on he never wanted to be in the theater alone.
