16 doors at the Palace Hotel in Port Townsend carry the names of women who worked its Prohibition-era brothel. Miss Claire has Room 4, and guests keep seeing her in blue at the top of the stairs. One came back saying her portrait was empty.
16 doors at the Palace Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington carry women's first names, lettered on and left there. Miss Claire, Miss Cecilia, Miss Ruby, Miss Pearl, Miss Genevieve. They belong to women said to have worked the place when the two upper floors were a brothel, and one of them is still reported in her room. Miss Claire has Room 4.
Around the hotel they call her the Lady in Blue. A large portrait of her hangs at the top of the main staircase, and people have described a woman in a blue dress standing up there since the 1960s. One guest came away with something worse than a sighting. The portrait was empty: frame on the wall, canvas in the frame, the figure gone out of it.
The building went up in 1889 for a retired sea captain named Henry Tibbals, three saloons and a billiard parlor on the ground floor, rooms to rent above. From 1925 to 1933 those upper rooms ran as the Palace Hotel, which the town knew as the Palace of Sweets, and which sold liquor straight through Prohibition. Then the sheriff raided it in the mid-1930s. The girls left town, and Marie, the madam, was told to close her business and be gone by the following Saturday.
Marie had the corner suite on the second floor, looking out over Port Townsend Bay, with the only fireplace in the building. It is Room 3 today, red wallpaper and deep green woodwork, and together with Room 4 next door it draws more reports than anywhere else in the hotel. Beds shaking. Moans. Knocking with nobody out in the hall. Cold drafts through a shut room, and perfume.
The staff have been writing it down since 1987 in a scrapbook and guest logbook they call the Ghost Files, more than a hundred accounts in it by 2008. From 1987: "She came to my door last night and tried to come in, though the lock was strong." From a guest named Michael in 1996: "Does the image of two grown men sleeping with the lights on all night answer the question?"
Why Claire stayed is a story the hotel's binder tells and no record supports. A guest essay retells it this way: she was engaged to a sailor who left her standing at the dock, and her wedding gown, never worn, was found years later in a trunk in Room 4.
Cheryl Heller cleaned those rooms for 18 years and worked her way up to housekeeping manager, and none of it frightened her. She calls the ghosts "the people of the house." She says hello to them when she walks in, and she'll tell you it is the warmest, friendliest place she has ever been.
