Hotel de Haro

Hotel de Haro in Roche Harbor, Washington's oldest continuously operating hotel since 1886, is haunted by Adah Beeny, a governess who served the McMillin family for three generations and now opens storeroom doors, flicks lights, and rustles through hallways. Local historian Robin Jacobson notes a second, more sinister unnamed presence that brings cold air and bad feelings alongside Adah's domestic haunting.

Local historian Robin Jacobson has studied the spirits at Hotel de Haro and reached a conclusion that complicates the ghost story: "There are two different spirits at the Haro. One is definitely Adah, and one seems more sinister."

The friendly one is Adah Beeny. She was hired as a governess by Mrs. McMillin when the family lived at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. After the children grew up, Adah stayed on to care for Mrs. McMillin, serving the family for three generations until her death in 1955. Her ashes were interred in the McMillin family mausoleum in the woods, a place called Afterglow Vista. In life, she was devoted to the household. In death, she appears to be maintaining it.

Staff members know her habits. She opens the kitchen storeroom door. She turns lights on and off. She opens and closes drawers. Items in storage rooms shift position between checks. The sound of rustling fabric moves through hallways when no one is there. One woman trying to enter the lobby reported her hands going numb, saying "the hotel is so haunted" before backing away. Adah's activity is domestic, purposeful, and familiar to anyone who has worked at the hotel long enough. She runs things.

The second spirit is different. Staff describe a feeling of coldness and a sense that whatever this presence is, it does not have good intentions. Jacobson does not identify this entity. It may connect to the harder history of the site, the years of industrial labor in the limestone quarry and lime kilns that John McMillin operated, the workers who lived and died in company housing in the shadow of the hotel.

John S. McMillin purchased the Hotel de Haro in 1886, making it the oldest continuously operating lodging in Washington state. He ran the Tacoma and Roche Harbor Lime Company, and by 1890, a full town had grown around the hotel: a company store, a school, employee homes, and the industrial infrastructure of a limestone quarrying operation. McMillin was powerful enough to host President Theodore Roosevelt at the hotel. He was eccentric enough to build Afterglow Vista, a Masonic-inspired mausoleum in the forest where stone columns surround a table with chairs for each family member, positioned so the setting sun illuminates the scene. McMillin, his wife, and Adah Beeny are all interred there.

The hotel retains 20 guest rooms and operates as part of Roche Harbor Resort. It displays historical information about the quarry era and its notable visitors. The building looks much as it did in the 1890s, a wooden structure on the harbor with gardens at its entrance. Glass shelves in the gift shop have shattered without explanation. Appliances activate and deactivate on their own. The storeroom door opens itself at least once a week.

The legend of Adah Beeny has grown distortions since the 1960s. Some versions claim she died young, pregnant and abandoned by a McMillin family member. Family accounts reject this version completely. A photograph of Adah at 85 years old proves she lived a long life. The tragic backstory appears to be fiction layered onto a real person. Adah Beeny was a valued member of the McMillin household for three generations, honored enough to be buried alongside the family. The ghost story does not need the melodrama. A woman who spent her entire adult life serving one family, interred in their mausoleum, continuing to open their storeroom doors and straighten their shelves more than seventy years after everyone she knew is dead, is a story specific enough on its own.

The other presence at Hotel de Haro has no name, no biography, no photograph at 85. It brings cold air and bad feelings and no explanation. Jacobson noted the duality. The hotel contains both.