Merchant's Cafe & Saloon

Pioneer Square's oldest restaurant, where staff leave a nightly glass of whiskey on the basement safe for a ghost named Otto who throws wine bottles when he's ignored. An 1890 building that has served as a saloon, brothel, and gold-dust bank, with at least five spirits including two children who died in a 1938 fire.

An elderly man walked into Merchant's Cafe carrying an antique doll. He handed it to the bartender and said it was "for the little girl downstairs, the ghost." When asked if he'd deliver it himself, he replied, "No, she will be coming up to get it," and left. The doll now sits on top of the basement safe.

The site at 109 Yesler Way predates Seattle as we know it. An 1864 building here housed E.M. Sammis, Seattle's first resident professional photographer, who captured the only known photographs of Doc Maynard and Chief Seattle from his second-floor studio. That building burned in the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889. John Hall Sanderson commissioned the current brick-and-terracotta structure in 1890, designed by architect W.E. Boone, a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, at a cost of $15,000.

In 1892, Charles Osner bought the building and renamed it the Merchant's Exchange Saloon. Recognizing demand among Seattle's lonely lumberjacks and Klondike-bound miners, Osner imported women he called "seamstresses" and housed them upstairs. Their framed portraits lined the back wall of the bar as a selection system for clients. When Franz Xavier Schreiner, a German-born former U.S. Cavalry baker who had served under Lieutenant John Pershing, purchased the saloon in 1898 for $3,000, he expanded further. His basement "Sunday Bank" exchanged miners' gold dust for cash, processing as much as $100,000 in a single weekend. Within two years he paid off the mortgage and bought the entire Sanderson Building for $46,000. When Washington prohibited liquor in 1916, Schreiner quietly moved bootleg alcohol and gambling into the basement and changed the sign to "Merchants Cafe - Cigars and Soft Drinks." He sold to his son Carl and nephew Johann in 1922 for ten dollars each. The Schreiner family owned the cafe for 74 years.

In 1938, fire swept through the building. The brick walls held, but several people died inside, including two children, a boy and a girl, who died of smoke inhalation. Staff believe the children lived on the upper floors where their mothers worked in the brothel. Their spirits are the most frequently encountered presence in the building. Employees working alone in the basement describe small shadowy figures darting between doorways, children laughing when no one is present, and a creepy habit of tugging on workers' shirts from behind.

The most active spirit is Otto, identified by a medium on the Travel Channel's The Dead Files as an early 1900s manager who never stopped working. Owner Darcy Hanson has documented multiple encounters. Once, when a bartender asked Otto to turn off a television that was bothering her, it switched off instantly. Another time, Otto tugged twice on Darcy's shirt behind the bar. She dismissed it until a loosely hanging picture crashed to the floor moments after she stepped away from where she'd been standing, which would have hit her. In November, wine bottles were thrown from a rack above the basement safe overnight. Staff now leave a glass of whiskey on the safe each evening as an offering. The disturbances stopped.

The upper floors hold the presence of the women who once worked there. Portraits of the former sex workers hang on the walls, and visitors report seeing the eyes of one painting, an "Oriental dancing girl" by artist Nathaldi Siehel, follow them around the room. When the owner photographed the painting, the image appeared to show furniture, a mirror, and a lamp in the background that weren't physically present. In the basement restrooms, doors slam on their own, faucets turn on and off, and a woman's voice has been heard whispering into men's ears. A bartender investigating strange noises in the underground bar encountered a man in a charred suit with a severely burnt face who vanished after being spotted, believed to be a victim of the 1938 fire.

AGHOST, the Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma founded by Ross Allison in 2001, has investigated the premises. The cafe also appeared on The Dead Files, which confirmed multiple entities. The building temporarily closed on New Year's Eve 2024 for electrical and plumbing renovations under owner Darcy Hanson and reopened in March 2025, with the original carved mahogany bar shipped around Cape Horn, the pressed-tin ceiling, and all its resident ghosts intact.