Hotel Sorrento

The most frequently seen ghost at this 1909 Italianate hotel is Alice B. Toklas, who lived in the neighborhood as a teenager but left Seattle more than a decade before the hotel was built. Room 408 is the hotspot, with phantom piano music on the seventh floor and an elevator that opens to empty hallways on four.

The most famous ghost at Hotel Sorrento never actually set foot inside the building. Alice B. Toklas moved to Seattle's First Hill neighborhood in 1890, when her father came to run Toklas, Singerman and Company, the city's leading dry goods store. An 1895 city directory places the family at 1006 9th Avenue, near the hotel's future site. But Alice left Seattle before 1898 to care for her sick mother in San Francisco, more than a decade before the hotel opened. She went on to Paris, became Gertrude Stein's lifelong partner, published a cookbook in 1954 with a recipe for "Hashish Fudge" contributed by artist Brion Gysin (the precursor to modern cannabis edibles), and became a central figure in the avant-garde salon scene alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Matisse. She never came back to First Hill.

The hotel opened on May 30, 1909, two days before the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition brought 3.7 million visitors to Seattle. Commissioned by local clothier Samuel Rosenberg and designed by architect Harlan Thomas in the Italianate style, the seven-story building featured arched windows, wide eaves, a 70-foot courtyard, and Seattle's first rooftop restaurant. The Fireside Room, an octagonal lounge anchored by emerald-green Rookwood Pottery tiles from Cincinnati depicting an Italian villa, became a literary gathering place that still hosts silent reading parties. Rosenberg's ownership lasted one year. Facing financial strain in 1910, he traded the entire hotel for 240 acres of pear orchard in Oregon's Rogue River Valley.

Despite never visiting, Alice is the presence guests encounter most. Room 408 is the primary hotspot: lights flicker down the entire fourth-floor hallway, guests feel someone sitting on the edge of the bed, and a woman in a turn-of-the-century dress appears and vanishes. Co-owner Barbara Malone confirmed that multiple staff members have seen her over the years. She has been spotted in the garden wearing a full-length fur coat and hat, wandering the fourth-floor corridors in a white dressing gown, and reflected in hallway mirrors on multiple floors. On the seventh floor, phantom piano music plays in the empty penthouse suite, fitting for a woman who studied as a concert pianist at the University of Washington.

There is a more tragic story that some believe better explains the activity. On May 9, 1923, Catalino Tarantan, a young Filipino bellboy who had arrived in 1921, went to retrieve a ball lost in the elevator shaft by ten-year-old Suzanne Reid, daughter of Northern Pacific Railway President Judge George T. Reid. Catalino forgot about the 2,000-pound counterweight. It crushed his torso and killed him. His uncle Lorenzo Villanueva, the Captain of the Bellboys, had brought Catalino from the Philippines and promised his sister he would help the young man build a better life in America.

In the Dunbar Room, drinks slide across tables. The elevator stops at the fourth floor and opens its doors to an empty hallway. During the Malone family's 1981 renovation, which consolidated 154 rooms into 76 suites, workers encountered sudden icy drafts and footsteps in sealed-off corridors. USA Today named Hotel Sorrento one of the thirteen most haunted hotels in America. The hotel hosts annual November dinners prepared from Toklas's cookbook recipes, though the hashish fudge is diplomatically omitted. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021, it remains Seattle's oldest hotel serving its original purpose.