The Hotel de Haro at Roche Harbor, Washington keeps a ghost the resort's own manager named out loud in 1987: Adah Beeny, a household helper whose ashes rode up to the family mausoleum in a mason jar the year after she died.
The Hotel de Haro sits on the waterfront at Roche Harbor, Washington, and it has a store room door that will not stay shut. Appliances switch themselves on. Objects move around in storage overnight, glass shelves in the gift shop have shattered with nobody near them, and staff and guests report the sound of clothing rustling past in halls where no one is walking. The resort has a name for who is doing it, and a theory about the exact moment it started.
Adah Beeny died on San Juan Island on January 5, 1955, at 86. She was born in England, Seattle Met says, and she worked in the household of John S. McMillin, the Tacoma lawyer whose lime company owned every building, every cottage and every acre of Roche Harbor. She looked after the children, and after Louella McMillin's mother. Seattle Met's account has her dying at her own cottage of a heart episode, and being cremated over in Bellingham.
Then her ashes came home and sat there. By the following year the jar was on the mantle in the office of McMillin's son Paul, and Neil Tarte, who took over managing the resort not long after she died, says he was handed it and told to carry it up the hill. Up the hill is Afterglow Vista, the McMillin mausoleum in the woods above the old company cemetery: a limestone table ringed by six chairs on a stepped platform, the family's ashes sealed into the chair bases. Adah's were added to the chair already holding the ashes of the McMillins' infant son John.
Tarte blamed everything that came after on that walk. "Ever since that day we put her ashes into the copper urn in the family crypt, she's refused to leave us alone at the resort," he told the Seattle Weekly in 1987. "Lights go on and off. Doors open and close. The blender turns itself on. The usual ghostly pranks."
A front desk clerk put it to 48° North more plainly: "Things happen in this building…Doors slam and windows rattle." The county's visitors bureau tells of a woman whose hands went numb as she tried to walk into the lobby, who said the hotel was so haunted she could not go in.
What the ghost story did to Adah is the part nobody at the hotel mentions. For decades the retelling made her a McMillin mistress who died pregnant in the 1920s, hanging from a chandelier. The family calls that absolutely false, and so does Richard Walker, the local journalist who wrote the book on Roche Harbor. Her burial record and a photograph of her taken in 1953, at 85, say the same thing.
She was a woman who looked after other people's children, and she lived to be old.
