A man is said to stand by the cast-iron stove at the Olympic Club in Centralia, Washington, and nobody has ever named him. Hotel guests upstairs report doorknobs jiggling on their own. A logger was photographed warming himself at that stove in the 1970s.
A man stands by the cast-iron stove at the back of the Olympic Club in Centralia, Washington, and nobody has ever put a name to him. The one account that itemizes what happens inside this 1908 saloon, a 2017 student-paper piece on McMenamins properties and their ghosts, lists three things and calls them seemingly harmless: the man at the stove, a laugh with no one behind it, and music that overpowers every other sound in the room.
The laugh is the part more than one person reports. A visitor who says she was practically raised in the place wrote in 2023 that the Olympic Club is what made her start believing in ghosts, then listed the rest of it. Figures in the back. Footsteps. Cold spots. Candles going out on their own.
The stove is real, and it is still there. When the club was entered on the National Register in 1980, the nomination recorded a wood-burning potbellied stove surviving in the card room behind the bar, under the 1913 tulip stencils, behind the low rail that separates the card room from the cavernous pool hall. The stove was built in 1914.
And there is a photograph of a man at it. In the 1970s, Don Iverson shot an old logger named Pete Neitzel warming himself by the Oly Club's great stove. A McMenamins artist, Lyle Hehn, later painted him at it a second time, the towering Round Oak throwing the heat. Both pieces hang in the building today. Neitzel is documented as a regular into the 1970s and then nothing at all: no source says when he died, or where. No source connects him to the man guests report, either. He is simply the one man the record can place at that stove.
The upstairs has its own report. Hotel guests say the doorknobs jiggle by themselves, which The Chronicle noted in 2024 while covering a ghost-storytelling night held in the building, and which an unrelated visitor that March described watching happen. The second floor carried a reputation long before it carried tourists. McMenamins says ladies of the evening took up residency there. Wikipedia will go no further than a brothel that may have been run out of the hotel by the wife of an early owner, plus an ivory button set into a mirrored booth downstairs, wired to a bell, that rang for something.
McMenamins sells a ghost tour of the place, and the October night show is already sold out. Its own walking guide, though, reaches for the dull answer before any ghost gets one in. Trains still run past the front door. Light sleepers, it says, may occasionally hear a train's mournful cry, and for those folks the house leaves a pair of ear plugs on the pillow.
