Mayflower Park Hotel

Downtown Seattle's oldest continuously operating hotel, opened in 1927 as the Bergonian, where a couple in Room 1120 woke to find a ghost floating above their bed. Three spirits haunt the building, including a top-hatted Greeter in the lobby and a Trickster who relocates janitors' mop buckets between floors.

A couple staying in Room 1120 at the Mayflower Park Hotel woke in the middle of the night to find an old man's ghost floating above their bed, watching them sleep. They requested a room change immediately.

The hotel at 405 Olive Way is the oldest continuously operating hotel in downtown Seattle. Stephen Berg, a prominent local builder, commissioned architect B. Dudley Stuart and the firm of Stuart and Wheatley to design it. Construction took six months at a cost of approximately $750,000, and the hotel opened ahead of schedule on the evening of July 16, 1927, with a concert orchestra and dancers filling the mosaic ballroom floor. The lobby had Oriental carpets, palm trees, mirrors, and a central goldfish fountain. Berg named it the Bergonian, a portmanteau of his own surname and his favorite newspaper, Portland's The Oregonian.

Sold during the Depression in 1933, it became the Hotel Mayflower. A Bartell Drugs occupied the ground floor from 1928 to 1946, and when the drugstore left, the hotel acquired its fourteen-stool soda fountain equipment and created the Carousel Room, Seattle's first hotel bar, decorated with clowns and suspended carousel horses. The property declined until Marie and Birney Dempcy bought it in 1974 for $1.1 million, finding it at 25 percent occupancy with an average nightly rate of $11.50. Marie became Seattle's first female hotel general manager. In 1976 they opened Oliver's Lounge, taking advantage of Washington's legalization of visible hard alcohol service to create the city's first "daylight bar" with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street. In the early 1980s, the hotel fought Seattle's attempt to seize the property for the Westlake Center development and won at the state Supreme Court level.

Three spirits are known to haunt the building. The most famous is the Greeter, a figure in a top hat who appears in the lobby waving at arriving guests before vanishing completely. His identity is unknown, though his formal attire and welcoming manner suggest a connection to the hotel's earliest years.

The spirit of Room 1120 is described as an older man who occupied a sixth-floor room during the Bergonian years. Sources disagree on whether he was a long-term guest or a hotel employee who worked as a door greeter. What the accounts agree on is that he died in his room and remains there. Beyond the couple who saw him floating above the bed, other guests in Room 1120 report a strong unseen presence, disturbing noises, and a persistent sense of unease that prompts room-change requests. Some describe him as benign, someone who causes no real disturbance beyond the discomfort of knowing you're not alone.

The third entity is the Trickster. This one targets hotel employees, not guests. In one incident, a janitor mopping the floors late at night turned to dunk his mop into a bucket of water and found it had vanished entirely. After several minutes of searching, he located the bucket on a completely different floor. Staff have found items relocated overnight, lights behaving erratically, and they describe a persistent feeling of being watched during graveyard shifts.

The hotel retains much of its original 1927 character: the terra cotta exterior, a salvaged five-tier crystal chandelier originally from the Olympic Hotel, and a 1770 grandfather clock in the lobby. It became a member of Historic Hotels of America in 1999 and remains one of the last locally owned and independent hotels in Seattle.