Haunted hotel guide · Juneau, Alaska

The Haunted Alaskan Hotel & Bar, Juneau: Alice, Room 219 and Room 315

A gold rush hotel on South Franklin Street with a brothel past, a lively bar downstairs and a reputation that has only grown since Portals to Hell came to town. Here is what guests and staff report, and how to stay.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate hotels

4.0/5Haunted Rooms Score

1913Year opened

Room 219Most requested room

Check availabilityMeet the ghosts

The Alaskan Hotel & Bar opened on September 16, 1913, on South Franklin Street in downtown Juneau. It was the mining town’s first purpose-built hotel, a place where gold miners could sleep somewhere better than a crowded boarding house, and it has never really stopped taking guests since. Today it is a small, old-fashioned hotel above one of the busiest bars in town, restored to its Victorian look, with a long wooden bar downstairs.

It is also, by most accounts, the most haunted building in Juneau. Its best-known story is a woman called Alice, said to have been killed by her husband in Room 219, and its strangest is a night in Room 315 in 2007 that local reporters still write about. In 2025 readers voted it fifth in USA Today’s 10Best contest for best haunted hotel, ahead of the Stanley. For more of the state’s haunted stays, see our guide to haunted hotels in Alaska.

The ghosts of the Alaskan Hotel

Alice and Room 219

The story most people come for begins in the gold rush. Local legend says a young married woman was left alone in Juneau when her husband went off to the mines and did not come back. Believing he was dead, or that he had struck it rich and left her, she turned to prostitution to survive. Weeks later he returned, found out how she had been living and killed her in the hotel. Former manager Scott Fry told the writer Jeff Belanger the woman’s name was Alice, though he admitted he was not sure of the details, and some retellings date her death to 1917.

We could find no record of the killing, so treat it as legend. But Room 219 is where staff and guests feel her most. A front desk worker told Belanger the room is always cold and gives him goose bumps, and that guests sometimes ask to be moved out. Next door in Room 218, guests have come to the desk saying, “She’s in my room,” and described a woman sitting on the bed or touching them.

The woman in the mirror and on the stairs

The Alaskan is full of old mirrors, and several stories involve them. A friend of Fry’s said the woman can be seen in a mirror at the top of the stairs near Room 308, and bar patrons have reported seeing a woman walking down the stairs into the bar. Fry, who worked at the hotel for years without a single supernatural experience of his own, pointed out that mirrors can play tricks on tired eyes. Fair enough, but the reports keep coming.

Room 315 and the night of May 19, 2007

Many of the longest-running stories belong to Room 315, a small third-floor room with two single beds and a painting of two early twentieth-century women on the wall. On May 19, 2007, a sailor from the cruiser USS Bunker Hill, in port for the night, emailed the hotel asking for its haunted room and was given 315. Just before midnight police heard screaming from the locked room. When they broke down the door the walls were covered in blood, and the sailor had gone out of the window, crashing through glass as he fell between the buildings. He walked to the street, was flown out of Juneau and survived.

Nobody has ever explained what happened in that room. KTOO, which reported the story in 2018, called it a horror story that may or may not be a ghost story, and Juneau writer Bjorn Dihle has suggested alcohol and confinement can make people see things that are not there. Owner Bettye Adams says 315 is not special, and that the second floor, the bar and the basement have “all kinds of haunting.”

The man in the basement

In September 1998 Joshua Adams, the owners’ son, who grew up in the hotel and calls himself its unofficial historian, found a man dead in a hot tub in the basement. He told KTOO he believes that man still haunts the building, and he talked about it at length with the Portals to Hell crew when they filmed here.

The bathroom that changed

One of the odder stories comes from Ron Wendt’s book Haunted Alaska. A woman named Elva Bontrager told him she walked into an old-style bathroom at the hotel, stepped out and came back to find it brand new, and said others had told her of the same thing.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 219: Alice’s room. Always cold, according to staff, and the room guests ask for by number.
• Room 218: Where guests have reported a woman sitting on the bed.
• Room 315: The third-floor room behind the 2007 Bunker Hill story.
• The stairs and the bar: A woman seen in the mirror near Room 308 and walking down into the bar.
• The basement: Where a man was found dead in 1998. Not open to guests.

History of The Alaskan Hotel & Bar

Alaska had become a U.S. territory only a year earlier when promoter Jules B. Caro and the brothers James and John McCloskey opened the Alaskan in 1913. Building it took five months. For the opening the owners planned a gala and tied the door keys to a toy balloon, a sign that the hotel meant never to close. It was Juneau’s first hotel building, built for the miners working the big hard-rock gold mines around Gastineau Channel.

Like a lot of mining-town hotels, the Alaskan had a second business. It ran a brothel at least twice, the first time legally and the second time until local authorities shut it down. During Prohibition the bar turned into a soda cafe, though other drinks were reportedly available if you asked. At one low point the building was condemned.

Mike and Bettye Adams bought the hotel in 1977 and have spent nearly fifty years restoring its Victorian look. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 25, 1978, and today it is the oldest operating hotel in Juneau. Joshua Adams wrote a history of the hotel in 2004 and has said he is working on a second book about its ghosts.

Television found it more than a decade ago. Travel Channel’s Hotel Impossible featured the Alaskan, and in October 2018 Jack Osbourne and the Portals to Hell crew spent a night investigating for the show’s 2019 premiere episode. In 2025 it made its first appearance in USA Today’s 10Best haunted hotel contest and finished fifth out of twenty.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Book directly with the hotel and ask for Room 219 by number; it is a regular room, so it goes to whoever asks first.
• Expect noise from the bar below on weekend nights. Light sleepers should ask for a room away from the street side.
• Look for the mirror at the top of the stairs near Room 308 on your way to your room.
• Juneau is a cruise port: book early for summer, and walk South Franklin Street in the evening once the ships have gone.
• Pair your stay with the Historic Anchorage Hotel, the other hotel always named as Alaska’s most haunted.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Historic Anchorage Hotel: Alaska’s other famous haunted hotel, with a ghost log at the front desk
• Haunted hotels in Alaska: Including the Silverbow Inn a few blocks away in Juneau
• Red Onion Saloon, Skagway: A gold rush brothel up the Inside Passage, a short ferry ride north
• 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.

• The Clio: The Alaskan Hotel & Bar
• Ghost Village: The Ghosts and Legends of Juneau's Alaskan Hotel
• KTOO: A sailor requested a haunted room at the Alaskan Hotel. He barely survived (2018)
• KTOO: New ghost hunting TV show to premiere featuring Alaskan Hotel (2019)
• Juneau Independent: The Alaskan Hotel & Bar finishes fifth in USA Today's best haunted hotel contest (2025)

Booking links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.