(click to enlarge photos)

Published in The Seattle Times online on Oct. 22, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Oct. 25, 2026

Ghostly Guardians:
Security camera captures spooky shapes at Pike Place Market shop

By Jean Sherrard

Spirits dwell in the Pike Place Market, or so say many who work and live there.

A spooky if harmless frisson, they say, courses along halls, stairs and pathways from Post Alley to the North Arcade and beyond. Here the veil between now and then has worn thin, rubbed by history and generations of hands and footsteps, perhaps allowing elements from another realm to drift on through.

At 1:33 a.m. on June 17, 2025, an intruder broke into the Raven’s Nest, a jewelry and antiques shop just off the Market’s main arcade. Its proprietor, Conrad Steinbrueck, had installed security cameras. What they captured that night is hard to explain.

On quiet nights, tuning into the live feed after hours, Conrad and his wife, Madison, sometimes have seen what he calls “little aberrations,” wispy, slow shapes that float and dance across the darkened showroom. “Minimal,” he says. “Soft and gentle.”

But when the burglar entered, those shapes changed, growing agitated and insistent, darting about while the man moved through the aisles, as if responding to the disturbance.

Dust? Insects? Conrad shakes his head. “There’s no bugs flying in our shop. There’s nothing in here.”

He isn’t alarmed. “We’ve always known that there’s ghosts around the shop and around that part of the market,” he says. “It’s just a thing that we accept about the space that we exist in.”

The Raven’s Nest, and the Market around it, might not exist at all but for Conrad’s grandfather.

In the 1960s, architect Victor Steinbrueck led the fight to save Pike Place from developers who would have razed it for garages and towers. In 1971, voters sided with him, and the old Market survived, its creaking floors and crooked stairways spared.

“Let us be resolved to keep this Market,” he wrote, “that each generation may discover it anew.”

Conrad never met Victor, who died shortly before he was born.

Matthew Steinbrueck, Victor’s son and Conrad’s father, collected petition signatures as a boy. Decades later, he opened the Raven’s Nest. He has a story of his own:

Victor once confessed he worried he’d leave his children no real inheritance, no house, no money in the bank. Only later did Matthew understand what he’d been given. The Market itself, he says, is “the biggest inheritance conceivable.”

It extends to countless others: shoppers, merchants and visitors alike.

Perhaps that’s what stirs in the Raven’s Nest after dark — not nervous ghosts, but guardians. The spirits of those who came before, keeping watch over a gift that belongs to all of us.

Happy Halloween!

WEB EXTRAS

For a narrated 360 degree video of this column, please head on over to our currently haunted YouTube channel.

And here are five Pike Place Market-related “Now & Then” columns authored by our late founder, Paul Dorpat: