The Silverbow Inn, Juneau: The Baker Who Never Left

The Silverbow Inn is a small hotel on 2nd Street in downtown Juneau, a few blocks uphill from the cruise docks and the Alaskan Hotel. Its main building is a concrete storefront with “Messerschmidt 1914” above the door, joined over the years to three other structures, and the upstairs rooms where four generations of a baking family once lived are now guest rooms and suites. Breakfast is included, and the ground floor is home to In Bocca al Lupo, one of the best-known restaurants in town.

Its ghost is the baker. Gus Messerschmidt founded his bakery here in the early 1900s and died in 1938, but local lore says he has never quite clocked off. Early risers report a man in the old bakery before dawn, or simply the feeling that someone is already at work. For more stays like this, see our guide to haunted hotels in Alaska.

The ghost of the Silverbow Inn

Gus in the bakery

Gustav “Gus” Messerschmidt was a German baker who had worked in San Francisco before coming north to Juneau in 1898. He baked bread for the town for four decades and raised nine children above the shop with his wife Gertrude. He died in 1938, and his children kept the ovens going.

The story is that Gus never left. Guests who come downstairs before dawn have described seeing a man in the old bakery area, or the sense that someone is moving about and working while the rest of the building sleeps. It is a story that fits the building: a bakery runs on night shifts, and for most of a century somebody really was up at that hour, firing the ovens.

A friendly presence

Nobody describes Gus as frightening. The stories are about a man going about his work, not one bothering the guests. UnCruise’s guide to Juneau’s ghosts tells his story alongside the Alaskan Hotel’s, and says that even guests who never see a thing can taste a bit of Juneau’s history here.

What the records say

The inn itself does not make much of the ghost; its own history page talks about bread, bagels and families rather than spirits. Dates for the bakery also differ. The inn says Gus founded his San Francisco Bakery in 1902, the Juneau Empire dates it to 1899, and older ghost guides say 1898, the year he arrived. Some retellings also call him Austrian, but the inn and the Empire both say he was German.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The old bakery floor: Where Gus is seen in the early morning. Now part of the restaurant and public spaces.
• The upstairs rooms: The Messerschmidt family’s former apartments, converted for guests in the 1980s.
• The rear building: Where the bakery’s original brick oven stood.

History of Silverbow Inn

Gus Messerschmidt arrived in Juneau in 1898, at the height of the gold rush years, and named his business the San Francisco Bakery after the city he had come from. It started on Main Street and moved to a wooden building on 2nd Street, where a horse-drawn wagon made deliveries. By 1907 the bakery used two buildings, with a big brick oven in the rear one.

In 1914 Gus moved the old front building and put up the concrete structure that still stands, with his name and the date over the entrance. The family lived upstairs. His daughter Katherine Messerschmidt Shaw was born in the building and celebrated her 100th birthday there in 2009. After Gus died in 1938 his children ran the bakery, renamed it Purity Bakery in the 1940s, and kept it going until 1980, when supermarkets had made small independent bakeries hard to sustain.

The upstairs apartments were converted into guest rooms after the family sold. In 1997 Jill Ramiel and Ken Alper opened the Silverbow Bagel Bakery downstairs, a 24-hour bakery that became a Juneau gathering place for art shows, folk festival singers and World Cup mornings. It closed in October 2015, and in 2017 chef Beau Schooler opened In Bocca al Lupo in the space, which the New York Times later named one of the best pizza places in the country. Today the inn combines four buildings added over more than a century.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Breakfast is included; come down early if you want to meet Gus.
• Book dinner at In Bocca al Lupo downstairs, especially on a busy cruise day.
• Look for “Messerschmidt 1914” above the entrance before you go in.
• Walk downhill to the Alaskan Hotel & Bar on South Franklin Street, Juneau’s other haunted hotel, for a drink in its gold rush bar.
• Juneau’s downtown is steep. Pack shoes with grip in the wet months.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Haunted hotels in Alaska: Including the Alaskan Hotel & Bar a few blocks away
• Historic Anchorage Hotel: Alaska’s best-known haunted hotel
• Haunted places in Alaska: More of the state’s ghost stories
• Haunted hotels in Alaska

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• Silverbow Inn: Our Downtown Juneau Hotel
• Juneau Empire: From bread to bagels to Bocca, the Messerschmidt 1914 building feeds Juneau
• Alaska Public Media: After 18 years of bagels, Juneau's Silverbow bakery to close (2015)
• UnCruise: Ghosts of Juneau

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