In Brief
The Uppertown Firefighters Museum in Astoria, Oregon is haunted by a fireman who sleepwalked to his death in the 1920s. Crews who bunked in the old firehouse woke to find him standing over their beds in full gear, and his name was never written down.
The Full Story
Staff and visitors at the Uppertown Firefighters Museum in Astoria, Oregon keep hearing someone on the third floor. Heavy footsteps cross the empty upper level, slow and deliberate, and when anyone climbs the stairs to look, no one is there. They think the footsteps belong to a fireman who died in the building a century ago, though nobody can tell you his name.
The story goes that sometime in the 1920s he sleepwalked to his death inside the firehouse. The crews who bunked there afterward told a stranger thing than the footsteps. They woke in the dark to find him standing over their beds in full firefighting gear, watching them, before he faded out of the room. No source records his name, the year it happened, or how he fell. The lockers, people say, rattle on their own.
The building has had three lives, and the ghost belongs to the middle one. It went up in 1896 as a beer-storage building for the North Pacific Brewing Company, designed by Portland architect Emil Schacht — one of several breweries that lined Astoria's working waterfront in the 1890s. Prohibition closed the brewery in 1915, and the structure sat empty for years until the city bought it and reopened it in 1928 as Uppertown Station No. 2. The remodel was handled by an architect named John E. Wicks, and the third floor, where the footsteps are heard, held the firemen's sleeping quarters.
The station was decommissioned in 1960, when a new headquarters opened directly behind the old firehouse, and the building sat idle again before reopening as a museum around 1989. The Clatsop County Historical Society runs it now, out at 2968 Marine Drive, and the three-story red-brick front still reads FIRE STATION No 2 in raised letters across the top. Inside sit the rigs the fireman would have known — an 1876 LaFrance hook and ladder, a 1921 Stutz pumper, a 1945 Mack engine — polished and parked where the trucks once rolled out to the harbor.
Locals rank the old firehouse with the Flavel House and the Liberty Theatre as one of Astoria's three most-noted haunts. The other two come with names and histories you can look up. Everything about this building is on the record too, the architects, the dates, the National Register plaque it earned in 1984. The one thing nobody can find is the name of the man said to be standing watch on the third floor.
