Old City Hall in Tacoma keeps a prankster called Gus, who emptied the bar shelf in front of every new hire and rode a locked elevator between floors. No historian has ever found anyone by that name attached to the building.
Old City Hall in Tacoma, Washington has a ghost named Gus, and if you worked the bar on the first floor, the way you met him was that he took every bottle off the shelf in front of you. Staff at the Tacoma Bar and Grill treated it as a rite of passage for new hires. SouthSoundTalk has him knocking the liquor down and then lining the bottles up along the counter. HauntedHouses.com tells the end of it differently: he pulled them off one at a time, assembly-line fashion, in front of the startled employee, and not one of them broke. He quit once the new person started talking to him.
The restaurant is where the name comes from. Staff there called him Gus, and nobody has traced it back any further than that. No historian has found anyone named Gus connected to the building.
That hasn't stopped people filling in who he was. Grit City Magazine calls him a night guard. Seattle Terrors guesses at a petty criminal once held in the basement jail, reasoning backwards from the fact that he has sent security officers and police on wild-goose chases after an intruder who was never there. And Pretty Gritty Tours tells the version everybody repeats: a maintenance man working in the elevator shaft in the early 1900s, killed when a colleague a level up ran the car down without knowing he was under it. "It snapped him in half," co-founder Chris Staudinger told The News Tribune, "and then they never compensated his wife."
There is no death record for it. No inquest, no newspaper account, nothing in the National Register nomination or the building's own history. The story exists only as a story.
The elevator, though, keeps turning up. A man who says he was the building's security guard in 1978, writing later on a haunted-places listing, said he called Tacoma police twice in one night because the car kept moving between floors after he had locked it off for the evening. One of the responding officers, he said, watched it happen too.
The building went up in 1893, yellow Roman brick over foundation walls 8 feet thick at the base, holding the city offices, the public library, attorneys, and the jail in the basement. One cell door down there still shows the word SIBERIA under a thin coat of paint. Nobody knows who painted it.
The clock tower has something of its own. Every account that mentions both keeps them apart: Gus works the building, and an unidentified presence up in the tower rings the bells in the small hours, when the place is empty. Those bells were a memorial, 8,000 pounds of silver bell metal given by Hugh and Mildred Wallace on Christmas Day 1904 for their daughter, who died at 12.
They were taken out of the tower in 2023, over concerns about how it would hold them in an earthquake.
