Employees and visitors at the Kirkman House Museum in Walla Walla, Washington describe a father, a mother and a daughter moving through the halls and watching the street from behind curtained windows. All three Kirkmans died somewhere else.
A ghost once took the guided tour at the Kirkman House Museum in Walla Walla, Washington. That is the whole of the account, one line in a Walla Walla Union-Bulletin write-up of the town's ghost walk: one of the house's dead sat in on a tour led by a museum volunteer. No date, no volunteer's name, no word on how it ended.
The rest of what the museum's people describe is steadier, and it is always the same three. The Union-Bulletin reports employees and visitors who have seen figures roaming the halls of the brick mansion or peeking out from behind its curtained windows, and staff who talk about lights turning on by themselves and "other events beyond the physical realm." The figures are taken to be William Kirkman, his wife Isabella, and their daughter Fanny Ann.
William built the place in 1879 and 1880 out of brick hauled from a foundry in Weston, Oregon, and spent close to $7,000 on it. He had come out of a Lancashire mill town as a loom hand, chased gold in California and Australia, and ended up running cattle from Pasco to Spokane. The result is the second-oldest brick building standing in Walla Walla and the only Victorian Italianate house in town, a style he had picked up in his San Francisco years.
Isabella bore ten children in the course of that climb. Only four reached adulthood. Five were already buried by the time the family moved into the new house in 1880, and the tenth was born inside it: Mabel Kirkman, born June 6, 1882, dead June 8, laid in the family plot at Mountain View Cemetery when she was two days old.
None of the three people reported in the halls died there. William was on the train home from ten months in Europe when he died at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on April 25, 1893. Walla Walla hung the flag at city hall at half-mast, and a local paper wrote that the house "was crowded with sorrowing friends, as was also the yard and streets surrounding the residence." Fanny Ann married in the front parlor in November 1894 and moved into a house next door to her mother rather than stay on. Isabella gave the mansion away to Whitman College in 1919, and it went on to be a men's dormitory and then apartments for more than fifty years, the widow's walk pulled off the roof and the ceilings dropped. She died on April 25, 1931, the same calendar date as her husband, 38 years later.
So the accounts name a father, a mother and a daughter who all left the house alive. The one person known to have died inside it is in none of them. She was two days old.
