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Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 24, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 27, 2024

Tacoma’s Brunswick Hotel offers (goose) bumps in the night

By Jean Sherrard

We’ve all felt fear — of the dark, of the unknown, of those places where the thin veil between light and shadow seems particularly threadbare, where things may well go bump in the night.

In Tacoma’s Dome district, Alfred’s Café owner Scott Wright leads a tour of the historic Brunswick Hotel, its upper stories largely empty since the early 1960s. The ground floor houses Wright’s bustling tavern and eatery, which he purchased in early 2020 after 16 years as bartender. Once a skeptic, he has encountered spine-tingling thrills and chills.

“Sometimes when I’m alone upstairs at night,” he says, “I’ll hear something like a door banging shut and practically hit the floor — it’s pretty nerve-wracking.”

Wright insists it’s more than just goosebumps.

“In the tavern downstairs, I’ve seen coffeepots fly off the shelves,” he says. “The chandeliers start to shake by themselves, each moving independently of the other.” Also par for the course, electronics, particularly tv and radio, turn off and return to life inexplicably.

An employee once complained about someone pulling her hair. “But there was no one anywhere close to her,” Wright says.

In dark, winter months, the eerie events seem to multiply.

Built in 1888 in the Grit City’s rough-and-tumble downtown, the Brunswick was, noted Tacoma’s Daily Ledger, “a fine hotel … well-arranged and nicely furnished.”

While its 38 small rooms, many with adjoining doors, have inspired claims that the hotel operated as a bordello, cramped rooms also meant ready access for railroad and lumber workers and sailors in search of cheap digs.

In 1907, the Chicago, St. Paul and Milwaukee Railroad bought the land out from under the Brunswick as a site for its new freight and passenger terminal. The three-story hotel was sold to new owners from Montana who hoisted the entire 46-by-90-foot structure onto a log “roller skidway” and towed it two blocks to its current location.

Over the years, home to pool halls, saloons and cigar shops, the

hotel’s rough customers often made the local dailies. Stories of con artists, armed robberies and stick-ups proliferated.

In 1914, Harris Halbstein, a tailor, was arrested by the Secret Service for a crude counterfeiting operation in room 37. He spent 10 long years in the pokey for $1.03 in fake coins.

In 1918, Army Private James Carner attacked Annie O’Toole, the Brunswick’s proprietor, when she dumped him. Nabbed running onto the Milwaukee tracks, Carner told police that he had been “rejected in love” before being carted away.

Today’s clienteles are well behaved by comparison, except, Wright says, the occasional mischievous, if harmless, spooky visitor.

WEB EXTRAS

To view our spooky narrated 360 video of this column, click here!

A few more photos of the hotel and cafe: