Kirkman House Museum

William and Isabella Kirkman both died on April 25 in different years, and both haunt their 1880 Italianate mansion in Walla Walla. A ghost once joined a guided tour and participated with the group before vanishing, and the most active room belongs to their daughter Fanny Ann.

William and Isabella Kirkman both died on April 25, years apart. Tour guide Rick Tuttle, whose own birthday falls on that same date, leads visitors through the Kirkman House Museum in Walla Walla dressed in period attire and finds the coincidence impossible to dismiss. The Kirkmans find it hard to leave, too.

William was born in Bury, England, in 1832. He crossed the Atlantic at twenty, landed in Boston, and headed west for the California Gold Rush. After years of prospecting, cattle driving, and trading across Australia, the Sandwich Islands, and British Columbia, he settled in Walla Walla in 1870 with his wife Isabella Potts, a native of Balla Bay, Ireland, whom he'd married in San Francisco on February 2, 1867. By the late 1870s, Kirkman had built a fortune through ranching and mercantile ventures and commissioned a grand Italianate brick mansion on Colville Street.

Completed in 1880, the house featured fifteen-inch-thick walls made from Weston, Oregon brick, Tuscan and Corinthian columns, a trompe-l'oeil marble-finish foyer, oak parquet floors, marble-faced fireplaces, and a widow's walk atop the roof. Nearly seven thousand dollars for a house in territorial Washington. It was the second-oldest brick building in Walla Walla.

The grief inside those walls ran deep. Isabella gave birth to ten children. Six died in infancy or childhood, including a son named George who perished during their time in Idaho City in the winter of 1868-1869. The tenth child was born inside the mansion and survived only two days. The house where the Kirkmans hosted Walla Walla's finest society was also the house where they buried most of their children.

In 1892, the family embarked on a ten-month tour of Europe. On the return journey, William fell gravely ill aboard the train. He died at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, on April 25, 1893, at sixty-one. When word reached Walla Walla, the flag was hung at half-mast over city hall. Mourners filled the yard and spilled into surrounding streets. The man who'd arrived as an English immigrant cattle driver left as one of the city's most revered citizens, having served on the City Council, School Board, and Whitman College Board of Trustees.

Isabella lived in the house until 1919, when she donated it to Whitman College. During the college's use from 1920 to 1924, the mansion housed students including Walter Brattain, who went on to co-invent the transistor and win the 1956 Nobel Prize. After the college years, the grand rooms were partitioned into apartments, ceilings lowered, the widow's walk removed. Fifty years of deterioration followed. In 1977, the Historic Architecture Development Corporation purchased the property for fifty thousand dollars and began restoration. One of the best discoveries came in September 1979 when a volunteer spotted the original widow's walk balustrade at the Garden City Furniture building on Alder Street, where it had sat unrecognized for nearly half a century. It went back on the roof where it belonged.

William's ghost is most often seen standing at the top of the main staircase, surveying his home. Isabella and their daughter Fanny Ann roam the hallways and peek from behind curtained windows. Fanny Ann's bedroom is considered the most active location in the house. Museum staff report lights turning on in rooms that have been shut and locked for the night.

In one of the more striking incidents, a ghost joined a guided tour. It participated alongside living visitors before vanishing. No one noticed anything unusual until the headcount came up short at the end.

The Kirkman House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and opened as a museum in 1981. It's now a featured stop on the Walla Walla Ghost and Creepy Tales walking tour. Rick Tuttle leads visitors through the rooms, sharing the same birthday with two ghosts who share the same death day, in a house where six children never grew up and the widow's walk spent fifty years in a furniture store before someone thought to look up.