The Seattle Underground: History, Ghost Stories and Tours

Walk through Pioneer Square and look down: the small glass squares set into some sidewalks are vault lights, skylights for a city that still exists underneath. Beneath your feet are the original ground floors and sidewalks of Seattle’s first business district, sealed off for more than a century.

Only a small part of the Seattle Underground has been made safe for visitors, but it is enough to see brick arches, old shopfronts and a bank vault, and to hear the stories guides have collected over sixty years. This guide covers the real history, the ghost stories and which tour to choose.

How Seattle buried its own streets

Seattle’s first downtown grew on tidal flats along Elliott Bay. The streets flooded, and at high tide the sewers backed up. Then, at about 2:20 in the afternoon on June 6, 1889, a pot of glue boiled over in a carpentry shop and started a fire that burned some 31 blocks of mostly wooden buildings. It was the worst fire in the city’s history.

The city rebuilt fast and in brick and stone, as new rules required, and it took the chance to fix the drainage. Streets were raised on retaining walls, by about 12 feet in most places and close to 30 in some, and the gaps behind the walls were filled with earth washed down from the hills. Merchants did not wait for the streets: they built at the old level, so for years shoppers climbed ladders between the new roadways and the old sidewalks below.

Eventually the sidewalks were roofed over at street level, and glass vault lights were set in to let daylight down to the old walkways. Shops moved up to the new ground floors, but people kept using the passages below until 1907, when the city condemned them for fear of bubonic plague, two years before the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The basements became storage, and some became flophouses, gambling dens, speakeasies and opium dens.

By the 1950s Pioneer Square was run down and threatened with clearance. Bill Speidel, a Seattle journalist and author with a taste for the city’s rowdier history, had been showing friends around the ruins, and on August 3, 1964 a Seattle Times column told readers interested in the old storefronts to contact him. Hundreds did. He formalized the Underground Tour in May 1965, and the attention helped win Pioneer Square its status as a historic district in 1969.

Speidel’s family still runs the tour, which starts beneath Doc Maynard’s Public House on Pioneer Place. A second company, Beneath the Streets, opened other sections in 2013. Only three or so blocks of passages have been made safe; the rest of the old city lies sealed beneath the sidewalks.

Ghost stories of the Seattle Underground

Edward, the bank teller

The best-known ghost of the Underground is Edward, said to haunt the teller cage of an old bank that tours pass through. Ghost hunters say recorders have picked up the name Edward, sometimes Eddy, when asked who is there, and a tour guide in the 1980s is said to have seen a tall man in suspenders with a handlebar mustache.

Some versions add that he was shot and killed on duty. We found no record of that, and the writer who collected the stories says she could not verify it either.

The woman behind the vault

Another story says a woman was murdered behind the bank vault and lingers there. No name or date has ever been attached to it, so treat it as the kind of tale that grows in dark places.

The seamstresses and the woman in white

Near the old Oriental Hotel, visitors describe the shadowy outlines of women walking. Elsewhere in the tunnels a woman in white is said to wander, and one guide told of a couple whose vacation photo was photobombed by a woman in Victorian clothes.

What the tours say

Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour is a history tour with plenty of jokes, and its own site does not promise ghosts. The ghost stories come mostly from evening ghost walks, ghost hunting groups and visitors. Spooked in Seattle, based in Pioneer Square since 2004, takes its evening groups into a section of it.

Where to look

• The old bank and teller cage: for Edward.
• Behind the vault: where the unnamed woman is placed.
• The vault lights: look up at the glass squares from below.
• The Oriental Hotel section: for the seamstresses’ shadows.
• Doc Maynard's Public House: where Speidel’s tour begins.

Touring the Seattle Underground

Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour runs every day of the year except Thanksgiving and Christmas, with 75-minute tours on the hour from 10 AM to 6 PM and extra half-hourly tours from June to September. It begins beneath Doc Maynard’s Public House at 614 First Avenue, between Cherry and James Streets, with tickets online, by phone or at the counter in Pioneer Place Park.

For ghost stories, book an evening walk. Spooked in Seattle runs 90-minute tours most evenings from its office at 89 Yesler Way, mixing haunted buildings above ground with a section of the Underground. Beneath the Streets offers its own history tours of different passages.

Expect stairs, uneven ground, low ceilings and dust. The passages are basements under private buildings: never try to enter one on your own.

• Visiting Only on a guided tour; tours start beneath Doc Maynard’s Public House
• Tours Bill Speidel’s Underground Tour (75 minutes, daily); Beneath the Streets; Spooked in Seattle evening ghost walks
• Hours and season Underground Tour hourly 10am to 6pm

Tips for your visit

• Take the daytime Underground Tour first for the history, then an evening ghost walk for the stories.
• Wear sturdy shoes; floors are uneven.
• Look for vault lights in the Pioneer Square sidewalks before you go down.
• Have a drink at the Owl N’ Thistle or Merchant’s Cafe afterward; both have their own ghosts.
• Book ahead on summer weekends and cruise days.

More haunted places nearby

• Merchant's Cafe and Saloon: Seattle’s oldest bar, a block away, with a haunted basement
• Haunted places in Seattle: Kells, Pike Place Market and the rest of the city’s haunts
• Haunted hotels in Seattle: sleep somewhere haunted after your tour
• Haunted places in Washington
• Haunted places in Seattle

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Wikipedia: Seattle Underground
• HistoryLink: Bill Speidel and the Underground Tour
• Bill Speidel's Underground Tour (official site)
• Bill Speidel's Underground Tour: about
• Atlas Obscura: Seattle Underground
• Alliance for Pioneer Square: Spooked in Seattle Tours
• The Ghost in My Machine: The twisting tunnels of the Seattle Underground
• The Ticket (Seattle Times): A haunted date in downtown Seattle