McMenamins Olympic Club

A bartender saw an ashtray fly across the room at this 1908 Centralia gentleman's club turned McMenamins brewpub. A ghost called Elmer stands by the cast iron stove, doorknobs jiggle with nobody behind them, and train robber Roy Gardner's spirit may haunt the room where he was arrested in 1921.

A bartender watched an ashtray fly across the room with nobody near it. That's the Olympic Club in a sentence: a place where objects move on their own and the staff barely flinch anymore.

The building opened in 1908 as a gentleman's resort on Tower Avenue in Centralia, Washington. Belgian crystal, Tiffany lamps, and mahogany woodwork greeted loggers and miners who came to blow their week's pay at the bar, card room, pool hall, and cigar counter. Before the Olympic Club existed, a saloon known as the Olympic Saloon occupied the same site as early as 1891, so the location has been pouring drinks for well over a century. Jack Sciutto, a Canadian businessman who partnered with Ernest Rector in 1911, ran the operation and earned himself the title "King of Bootleggers" during Prohibition. A mirrored booth near the entrance served a specific purpose: patrons could spot incoming federal agents before their drinks needed to disappear.

A fire on June 26, 1913, gutted the building. Sciutto rebuilt it with Art Nouveau interiors that survive in the current structure. In October 1914, yeggmen cracked the club's safe with a sledgehammer and walked out with $600, roughly $19,000 in today's money. The crime was never solved. The Vogel family took over ownership and maintained it for decades. The National Register of Historic Places listed the building in 1980.

The most famous non-ghost incident happened in 1921. Train-robbing bandit Roy Gardner escaped from federal guards, clung to the cowcatcher of a slow-moving train headed for Centralia, and checked into the hotel. He was captured there shortly after. A mural depicting his arrest hangs in the club today alongside newspaper clippings and his mugshots. Some visitors and staff believe his spirit lingers in the room where he stayed, which gives one of the hotel rooms a reputation that the others don't share.

In 1996, the McMenamins brothers purchased the club and the adjacent but shuttered Oxford Hotel for $300,000. They reopened in January 1997 as a brewpub, hotel, and theater, keeping the historic bones intact while adding their signature quirky artwork to the walls.

The ghost reports are specific in ways that make them hard to dismiss as atmosphere. The most frequently seen figure stands near an old cast iron stove on display inside the hotel. Staff and guests have nicknamed him "Elmer." Researchers from Paranormal Investigations of Historic America (PIHA) traced a possible identity: Louis Galba, who rented a room at the hotel formerly on this site and died after jumping from his second-story window during an 1908 fire. The timeline and location match. PIHA also documented chairs in the basement rearranging themselves between visits, an ax that fell from a wall mount with no one nearby, and music being "drowned out by a mysterious tune" from no identifiable source during an overnight investigation.

Hotel guests add their own accounts. A paper cup on a nightstand tipped over on its own around 3:10 a.m. When the guest stood it back up, it tipped again minutes later. Doorknobs jiggle by themselves and then lock for a few seconds with nobody on the other side. Clocks change the time they're set to without being touched. Alarms trigger with no explanation. Staff hear laughter echoing through empty hallways, a man's voice from rooms that are unoccupied, and footsteps on stairs when the hotel is quiet. Candles blow out in rooms with no draft and no open windows.

The Olympic Club has been the site of multiple violent deaths over its century-plus of operation, and the building's history gives the hauntings a backstory that feels earned rather than invented. McMenamins now runs ghost tours through the property during October, and the Lewis County Historical podcast has covered the building's paranormal reputation in detail. The ghosts seem content with the new management. Elmer hasn't left the stove.