The Oxford Saloon in Snohomish, Washington still keeps the claw-foot bathtub where a madam named Kathleen was found decapitated. A knifed policeman works the basement stairs, and a ghost society came off the second floor with "You'll die" on tape.
The Oxford Saloon in Snohomish, Washington still has the claw-foot bathtub. It stands in a building on First Street where a woman named Kathleen was found dead in it, decapitated, on the second floor while she was bathing. No one was ever convicted. Some witnesses say the tub occasionally appears to be covered in blood.
Kathleen ran the rooms upstairs. She was a prominent local businesswoman who rented the second floor as boarding rooms, which is what they were called, and worked them as a high-class bordello. She never drank in the saloon herself. She kept an office over at the Eagle's Lodge, where she watched her girls and took reservations for her clientele.
The building was a grocery first. A. M. Blackman opened it on the corner of First and Avenue C, and lost it when the Panic of 1893 came through. The National Register nomination for the Snohomish Historic District covers the rest in two lines: "Built in 1890, this two story wood frame and painted clapboard construction, was the Blackman Grocery Store. About 1910, it became a saloon and has been used as such since that time."
Loggers drank there. Gambling ran downstairs, and one of the basement regulars was a policeman named Henry, who may have moonlighted as a bouncer. The tellings have the fight starting over cards. When Henry moved in to break it up he was knifed, and accounts put his death on the stairway down. He is still on those stairs, they say. He has also been seen many times in the ladies' restroom, and felt there, since women keep reporting that something pinched them. He always disappears when confronted.
No surname survives for any of them. Not Henry, not Kathleen, and not Amelia, one of Kathleen's girls, forced into the work, whose body was found curled up in her bedroom closet with a broken neck. No dates, no inquest, no newspaper account. The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places credits the Oxford with no less than eight of its past visitors, and nobody can name more than three.
Beginning in 2005 the Washington State Ghost Society worked the second floor several times. In the account the saloon still reprints on its own site, two investigators named Russ and Sandy were handed keys to every office up there, and the keys kept dropping out of the locks, as if pulled, before they could turn them. The recorder caught a voice on the landing: "I dropped the keys to my room." In Room 4 a strong male voice spoke directly into the microphone. "I am the one." As they left the floor, the tape picked up a farewell. "You'll die."
Room 6 is the room the legend gives to Amelia. Nothing happened in Room 6 during the investigation.
Russ and Sandy rented that room as an office afterward. They kept coming back to find the furniture rearranged, on days nobody had been in it.
