Hotel de Haro

Built in 1886 by lime magnate John S. McMillin around an original Hudson Bay Company post. The oldest continuously operating hotel in Washington state.

Limestone quarrying and lime processing began at Roche Harbor on the north end of San Juan Island in the early 1880s. John Stafford McMillin, born in 1855 in Indiana, relocated to Tacoma in 1882 and discovered the richest deposit of lime in the Pacific Northwest at Roche Harbor. He incorporated the Tacoma and Roche Harbor Lime Company in 1886 and expanded production from 8,000 barrels annually to nearly 150,000 through the construction of thirteen kilns, including innovative "Monitor" design units. By the turn of the century the company dominated West Coast lime markets, operating a fleet of vessels including the bark Star of Chile and the steam tug Roche Harbor, and the company town grew to some 250 people.

In the paternalist manner of a nineteenth-century industrialist, McMillin provided everything his workers needed: a store managed by Thomas R. Kinsey, a Methodist church that doubled as a weekday school, a post office, a doctor named Victor Capron who arrived in 1898, and small uniform cottages for married couples. He built the Hotel de Haro in 1886 around an original Hudson's Bay Company trading post, with one-foot-thick log walls, initially as a boarding house and mess hall for visiting lime company customers. It evolved into a proper guest hotel and is now recognized as the oldest continuously operating hotel in Washington State. An ardent Republican, founding member of Sigma Chi fraternity, and 32nd-degree Mason, McMillin hosted notable guests including President Theodore Roosevelt. He was also known as a domineering figure who engaged in price-fixing and allegedly fired workers for voting against his preferred candidates.

McMillin groomed his son Fred, born 1880, as his successor, but Fred died in 1922. Devastated, McMillin designed the Afterglow Vista mausoleum in the 1930s, a striking monument in the woods near the resort featuring a limestone table surrounded by six stone chairs on a stepped platform, with columns joined at the top in a crown-like formation. The elaborate structure incorporated Masonic symbolism: multiple sets of stairs representing Masonic degrees and spiritual progression, columns matching the dimensions described for Solomon's temple, and a deliberately broken column symbolizing "man dies before his work is completed." The name references sunset-watching, a cherished family ritual at the site. McMillin died on November 3, 1936, and his ashes were placed in the monument alongside those of his wife Louella, three sons, and an infant.

The ghost story centers on Adah Beeny, a domestic helper born in England who immigrated to the United States in her twenties and likely met the McMillin family during their Tacoma days before moving with them to the island. She cared for the McMillin children and Louella's mother, serving the family faithfully across three generations. The 1950 census listed her relationship to John McMillin simply as "friend." She died at her cottage on the island on January 5, 1955, at age 86, of a heart episode, and was cremated in Bellingham. In 1956, after the Tarte family purchased Roche Harbor, resort manager Neil Tarte received instructions to place Adah's ashes, contained in a mason jar, into a copper urn within the Afterglow Vista crypt, specifically in the chair holding the ashes of the infant John McMillin.

A persistent but false legend claims Adah was either John's or Paul McMillin's mistress, and that she died pregnant by suicide in the 1920s. Journalist Richard Walker has stated definitively that these accounts are "absolutely false" and that they hurt McMillin family members who later visited the site. The fabrications likely reflected workers' attempts to undermine powerful management through gossip.

Neil Tarte told the Seattle Weekly in 1987: "Ever since that day we put her ashes into the copper urn, she's refused to leave us alone at the resort. Lights go on and off. Doors open and close. The blender turns itself on." Employees have since reported the storeroom door opening on its own, appliances activating and deactivating spontaneously, glass shelves shattering without apparent cause in the gift shop, items shifting positions in storage rooms, and the unmistakable sound of rustling clothing when no one is present. Staff describe Adah as "a friendly soul who means no harm." In the McMillin Dining Room restaurant, candles reignite after being extinguished and furniture is found mysteriously rearranged.

According to local historian Robin Jacobson, a separate and more sinister presence also inhabits the Hotel de Haro, an entity that causes feelings of intense coldness and radiates malevolent intentions distinctly different from Adah's benign manifestations. At the Afterglow Vista mausoleum itself, visitors on full moon nights have reported seeing the entire McMillin family seated at the limestone table chatting, blue lights dancing above the chairs in the forest darkness, rain that allegedly does not fall inside the columns during storms, and a creeping unease that sometimes escalates to feeling physically pushed from the chairs. The Hotel de Haro continues to operate as part of Roche Harbor Resort, which was purchased by Rich Komen and Verne Howard in 1988 and later acquired by Saltchuk Resources in 1997.