The ghost reported in the master bedroom of Meeker Mansion in Puyallup, Washington is snoring. Ezra Meeker, dead since 1928, turns up in his own bed, and his wife Eliza Jane arrives as perfume with no source. Their museum wants nothing to do with any of it.
Meeker Mansion in Puyallup, Washington is a house museum whose most-repeated ghost is a man asleep. Haunted directories have Ezra Meeker, dead since 1928, snoring in the master bedroom of the house he built, and occasionally seen full-bodied in his own bed. His wife Eliza Jane arrives differently. She comes as perfume, moving room to room with no source anyone can find, and she has been reported at the bedroom window and at the mirror in the restroom, putting more of it on.
The only detailed first-hand account anyone has published belongs to Lynne Sutherland Olson, a psychic medium who worked a fair in the house in November 2011 and drew the master bedroom as her station. She wrote that she saw and heard Ezra "sawing logs on the left side of the bed," with Eliza Jane lying on the right, back turned, "as she patiently waited for her weariness to overcome his snores."
Eliza Jane, by Olson's telling, had opinions. The milk-glass vases flanking the mantel mirror were wrong; those spots were meant for oil lamps with clear crystal chimneys. The Grecian maid painted on the fireplace tile was a "shameless hussy" she had been overruled about, because Ezra liked the matching knight. Don't drip water on the carpet. Don't drop crumbs. At the end of the day, Olson looked back and saw her framed in an inlaid stained-glass door, waving goodbye.
It was Eliza Jane's house to have opinions about. She commissioned it after the couple's seasons in Europe, where she had been presented to Queen Victoria in a dress sewn by a Puyallup dressmaker. She hired the Tacoma architects, paid for the place on the condition that she was the one paying, and had the title registered in her name. Ezra's hops covered it, 500 acres of them, until a plague of hop lice took the crop. All his accumulations were swept away, he said, and he quit the business, "or rather, the business quit me." The mirror in the staircase alcove still hangs at Eliza Jane's height, 4 feet 8 inches.
The Puyallup Historical Society owns the house now, and it wants no part of the story. On its page for the Spiritualist Faire it hosts three times a year, roughly 20 readers taking appointments at tables through the rooms, the society says plainly that it has "never encountered any spirits in the Mansion, day or night."
The tour writeups say otherwise. One has Ezra's snoring as "a major nuisance to overnight guests," at a house that has never advertised an overnight stay. Another moves him outdoors, sawing logs in the yard, still working. That last image does have a source. It is Olson's phrase for a man asleep in bed.
