Harvard Exit Theatre

The theater manager saw a translucent woman reading by the fireplace on her first week at work, then kept arriving to find fires lit and chairs arranged for meetings in the empty building. Built in 1925 as the Woman's Century Club headquarters, the Harvard Exit showed independent films for 47 years before closing in 2015.

Janet Wainwright walked into the Harvard Exit Theatre lobby on one of her first days as manager and found a woman sitting in a chair near the fireplace, reading a book. Hair in a bun, long floral dress, just slightly see-through. The woman turned, looked at Wainwright, and slowly melted into thin air.

The building at 807 East Roy Street started as the clubhouse of the Woman's Century Club, a group of prominent Seattle women founded in 1891 for "cultural and intellectual development." Charter members included Carrie Chapman Catt, who went on to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Alice Jordan Blake, the first woman law graduate from Yale. They hosted Susan B. Anthony in 1896. They championed reforms from raising the age of consent to prohibiting public spitting. By the 1920s they had 350 members, and in 1925 they built their own three-story brick clubhouse on Capitol Hill, designed by Seattle architect Pierce A. Horrocks, with a main parlor, fireplace, dining room, and theater.

The club's political influence peaked when former president Bertha Knight Landes won election as Seattle's mayor in 1926, the first woman to lead a major American city. She served until 1928 and died in 1943.

When membership declined as women gained broader workplace access, the club sold in 1967. The following year, two Boeing engineers and movie enthusiasts, Art Bernstein and Jim O'Steen, converted it into the Harvard Exit Theatre, Seattle's first twin cinema. The contract required the original parlor be maintained as a meeting place, and the Woman's Century Club continued meeting in the lobby until January 2015. For 47 years, the theater showed independent and foreign films and became one of Capitol Hill's most beloved institutions.

After Wainwright's first encounter, the mornings got stranger. She'd arrive to find lights already on and a fire burning in the fireplace when she was the first person in the building. Once she found chairs arranged in a semicircle around the fire, as though the club had reconvened overnight. Psychic investigators identified this entity as former mayor Bertha Knight Landes, whose reforming spirit refused to vacate the building she'd helped shape.

The most sociable ghost was a portly man in an old-fashioned suit who introduced himself as Peter. Partially solid, partially transparent, described by witnesses as "a very lighthearted fellow, kind of goofy." He was most frequently seen on the first floor, where his playful demeanor startled visitors but caused no distress. A second male entity on the first floor was less friendly and possibly British. Staff felt unseen hands touching them, heard noises with no source, and found film reels moved from their shelves.

A female spirit in Victorian dress hung around the balcony area, where she enjoyed materializing out of nowhere to pester employees. Some accounts connected her to an unverified legend that a club member hanged herself in the upstairs lounge. That room had a reputation for sudden temperature drops and the feeling of being watched. Other female presences, thought to be former club members, appeared to know one another and were sometimes described as helpfully assisting staff with small tasks.

Reports of activity largely ceased around 1987. Nobody ever explained why. In 2015, the Harvard Exit screened its last films during the Seattle International Film Festival and was sold to developer Scott Shapiro of Eagle Rock Ventures. The furnishings, artwork, and the club's Steinway piano were removed and sold. The building became the Mexican Consulate.