Uppertown Firefighters Museum

An 1896 Astoria brewery turned 1928 firehouse turned 1990 museum, haunted by the sleepwalking firefighter who fell to his death there.

Sometime in the 1920s, a firefighter at Astoria's Uppertown Station Number 2 sleepwalked off something inside the building and died from the fall. The exact circumstances are gone. So is his name. What survived is the story that crews bunking in the station after his death sometimes woke up to find him standing over their bunks in full firefighting gear, looking down at them, then fading. A few of them put in for transfers.

That's the original ghost. Most of the rest of what people report at the museum traces back to him in some form, though the secondary phenomena have their own catalog: locker doors banging on their own, heavy boots crossing the third floor when no one is up there, odd sounds from the rooms that used to be sleeping quarters. Investigators who go upstairs to find the source of the footsteps never find anyone, and the noises stop while they're looking.

The building has had three lives. Portland architect Emil Schacht designed it in 1896 as part of the North Pacific Brewery, one of several breweries packed along Astoria's working waterfront in the 1890s. Prohibition closed the brewery in 1915, the structure sat vacant for five years, and the city of Astoria bought it in 1920. After conversion work, it reopened in 1928 as Uppertown Fire Station No. 2 and ran for thirty-two years until a new headquarters station went up directly behind it in 1960. The old firehouse went idle again. In 1990, on the 120th anniversary of Astoria's first volunteer fire department, it reopened as a museum.

The collection is unusually deep for a Saturday-only museum in a town of ten thousand. An 1876 LaFrance Hook and Ladder, a 1911 LaFrance Chemical Wagon, a 1921 Stutz Pumper, a 1945 Mack Pumper Engine, hand-pulled and horse-drawn rigs alongside the motorized ones. The building is on the National Register. Admission is free and the donation jar sits by the door.

Operating hours are noon to three on Saturdays, June through September. Most of the activity people report happens during the long weeks when no one's inside, which is most of the year. Local paranormal accounts list it alongside the Liberty Theatre and the Flavel House Museum as one of the three most reliably reported addresses in Astoria. The other two are bigger, better-funded, and better-documented. The old firehouse on Marine Drive holds its own anyway, on the strength of one anonymous fireman whose name nobody bothered to write down before everyone who knew it died.