Smith Tower

Smith Tower, Seattle's 1914 skyscraper, is haunted by former mayor Bertha Knight Landes (identified by a workman she startled in the 1980s), a woman in white near the 35th-floor observatory, and a gray figure in the wine cellar. The Wishing Chair in the Chinese Room supposedly guarantees marriage within a year.

In the 1980s, a workman assembling a historical exhibit inside Smith Tower felt someone creep up behind him. He turned around and saw an older woman inspecting his work. She looked real. When he was later shown a photograph of Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle's first female mayor, he identified her immediately as the woman who'd been watching him.

Landes died in 1943, nearly three decades after Smith Tower opened on July 4, 1914. The tower was the vision of Lyman Cornelius Smith, a New York industrialist who made his fortune selling typewriters and firearms. At 42 stories, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi when it opened and the fourth tallest in the world. Smith himself never saw it finished. He died in 1910, four years before the building was complete.

The elevator operators became part of the tower's identity. Smith Tower was one of the last buildings on the West Coast to employ them, running century-old bronze-toned wrought-iron birdcage elevators lined with Mexican onyx, topped by a row of carved Native American chieftain heads watching from above like sentinels. That 103-year tradition ended when the building was renovated.

On the 35th floor sits the Chinese Room, furnished with carved teak furniture and a ceiling of carved wood and porcelain panels. The centerpiece is the Wishing Chair, a carved piece incorporating a dragon and a phoenix, rumored to have been gifted by China's Empress Dowager Cixi before her death in 1908. The legend: any unmarried person who sits in the chair will be married within a year. Smith's own daughter tested the claim and married in the Chinese Room itself.

The ghost stories go beyond Bertha Landes. A woman in white roams the speakeasy-themed observatory bar on the 35th floor. Witnesses believe she threw herself from the observation deck, and visitors claim they can hear her cries echoing through the upper floors. An opaque, gray figure has been spotted in the wine cellar.

The tower also carries Prohibition history. Roy Olmstead, Seattle's most infamous bootlegger, operated during the same era, and the building now leans into that legacy with The Good Bootlegger's Guild experience. One persistent rumor claims Landes herself used a radio signal from the tower to relay coded information for rum runners moving product through the city. That could be true or a good bar story, but it fits the building's layered personality: part landmark, part speakeasy, part haunted high-rise.

Smith Tower doesn't look haunted. It looks dignified, all white terra cotta and brass. But the elevator shafts still carry their original cage doors, and the Wishing Chair on the 35th floor grants wishes to people who don't know they're sitting in a room with ghosts. The workman from the 1980s is probably retired by now. Bertha Landes is not.