Shopkeepers in the Down Under at Seattle's Pike Place Market knocked through a hollow wall and found a sealed room holding piles of their own beads and pennies. The vendors have blamed a stable boy named Jacob ever since, and his room is still down there.
Pike Place Market in Seattle is built into a hillside, and below the main arcade the shops stack down five levels into a warren the vendors call the Down Under. In a bead shop on one of those levels, the beads would not stay on the walls.
The market keeps a whole roster of ghosts. Chief Seattle's daughter, Princess Angeline, is reported on the stairs up from Western Avenue. Frank Goodwin, who financed the arcade in 1907 with Klondike gold dust, is said to turn up at the bottom of the Alibi Room steps and introduce himself by name. The one in the bead shop is a boy, and the vendors named him Jacob.
His shop, address #415, had been a federal post office until 1973. Mercedes Yaeger's book "Seattle's Market Ghost Stories" tells what later shopkeepers found. Standing on Western Avenue, they could count six exterior windows across the back of their unit. Inside, they could only account for three. They knocked along the north wall until it sounded hollow, broke through it, and found a large sealed room with the missing windows in it. Beneath the windows were small piles of beads, piles of pennies, and packets of beads marked in their own handwriting from the week before.
Nina Menon, who ran the bead shop with her husband Ram, told the Seattle Times that strands of red beads hanging on a wall hook came crashing down during an agitated phone call. "I was a healthy skeptic, but seeing was believing," she said. "There was no way these beads could have just slid off." By Yaeger's account, an employee deciding what to wear watched a necklace fly off its hook and land at her feet, its center stone exactly the blue of her dress, and in August 2010, after two customers asked Ram for red beads, every container on the table was found holding a single red bead in the middle.
Jacob is generally told as an 8- or 9-year-old stable boy who died in the 1918 flu. Orphaned boys really did tend the horses stabled around the early market, sleeping there on blankets and hay in exchange for the work, and Yaeger's own book goes no further than saying Jacob may have been one of them. No death record, obituary or surname for him has ever surfaced. A group of Girl Scouts once asked him to do something, and within minutes the room filled with the smell of wet hay and horse manure.
"He was really active in 2007," Yaeger told Seattle Met. "I could walk in with a day tour and provoke him, and he'd start throwing things." He calmed down, she said, after the store owner made him a little room with a bed in it.
The bead shop is gone. #415 is a pet-themed gift store now, and it keeps a room for Jacob anyway, a small cart parked inside it and a basket of toys.
