Tokeland Hotel

A Chinese immigrant named Charley died of carbon monoxide poisoning behind a parlor fireplace at Washington's oldest resort hotel in the 1880s. His ghost spins dinner plates in mid-air, traps owners in storerooms, and shares the property with a phantom cat that jumps onto guests' beds in the night.

Fishermen dining at the Tokeland Hotel have watched their plates lift off the table, spin in the air, and settle back down. Nobody runs. At Washington's oldest resort hotel on Willapa Bay, that's just Charley being Charley.

Charley was a Chinese immigrant smuggled into the country during the Chinese Exclusion Act era to work on Pacific Northwest railroads. According to the story passed down through generations of hotel owners, Tokeland's remote coastal location made it a landing spot for smuggling ships. One night, as a vessel arrived offshore, Charley jumped ship and fled to the hotel, where the Kindred family hid him in a secret compartment behind the parlor fireplace. Someone lit a fire without knowing he was inside. Charley died of carbon monoxide poisoning behind that wall.

The hotel started as a two-story farmhouse built in 1885 by Elizabeth Brown and her husband William Stingly Kindred, four years before Washington achieved statehood. Elizabeth's parents, George and Charlotte Brown, had homesteaded 1,400 acres on the Toke Peninsula in 1858 among the Shoalwater Tribe led by Chief Toke. By 1899 the Kindreds expanded the farmhouse into the L-shaped Kindred Inn, attracting lumber barons, merchants, and sportfishermen from as far as California. William served as postmaster from 1894 to 1915, and the property grew to include a golf course, dairy, oyster farm, and post office.

Katherine White, who with her husband Scott purchased the abandoned hotel in 1989 and reopened it on Mother's Day 1990, came face to face with Charley on the second floor. She described him as a hazy white form several feet wide, resembling a cumulus cloud. On a separate occasion, Charley latched the storeroom door shut and trapped her inside as the lights failed. A heavy metal roller skate fell from a high bookshelf, narrowly missing her head. Scott once observed a bright gleaming white glow on the kitchen floor that cast no shadow when he passed his hand over it.

Room 7 is the hotel's most active spot, officially designated a Haunted Room along with Room 4. Guests in Room 7 have reported night terrors and a tall dark figure standing over their bed. Children staying at the hotel describe seeing an older man wearing overalls and a fishing cap, visible only from the waist up. The third floor, used only for storage, produces the sounds of scraping coat hangers and footsteps through the night, though no guests sleep above.

A phantom cat also roams the property, possibly the same feline seen in an old photograph with William and Lizzie Kindred. Historian Elisa Law has described feeling the ghost cat jump onto the foot of her bed and walk around her feet during multiple stays. A hotel logbook documents fifty to sixty guest accounts of shadowy figures, nighttime tapping, and objects moving across rooms.

In the 1970s, a Pacific storm washed away a small cemetery on the hotel grounds. Duck hunters later recovered three tombstones: one for Leonidas Norris, who died in his early twenties from a hunting accident; another for Albert Brown, who died at age nine after becoming trapped in bay mud; and a third marked only with the initials CLL, which some believe belonged to Charley. The tombstones, separated from whatever remains the ocean took, now serve as decorations at the hotel.

A fourth generation of owners arrived in 2018 when Seattle chef Heather Earnhardt and contractor Zac Young purchased the property, bringing Earnhardt's acclaimed Wandering Goose restaurant concept to the historic dining room. Last Tuesday, a fisherman's plate did a full rotation six inches above the table. He finished his meal.