Igloo City, Alaska: The Abandoned Igloo Hotel and Its Ghost Story

Drivers on the George Parks Highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks know it at once: a four-story dome shaped like an igloo, standing in a clearing below the mountains at milepost 188.5, about 23 miles south of Cantwell and a short drive from Denali National Park. It was meant to be a hotel. It never took a single guest.

Igloo City appears on almost every list of haunted places in Alaska, usually with a woman in white at an upper window. This guide tells the real story of the man who built it, why it was never finished, where the ghost story comes from, and how to see it without putting yourself or the building at risk.

History of Igloo City

Igloo City was the dream of Leon Smith, born in 1921 in Tiff City, Missouri. Smith fought on Guadalcanal in World War II and later worked as a tugboat captain, deep-sea fisherman and lumberjack before settling in Alaska, where he worked for the Alaska Railroad and ran a service station on the Parks Highway with his wife, Elizabeth. The couple lived in a tiny A-frame cabin behind the site.

Smith began building around the early 1970s, about when the Hurricane Gulch bridge went in nearby, and did much of the work himself, using lumber salvaged from old railroad camps, plywood and urethane foam. From a distance the igloo looks like concrete, but its shell is foam over a wood frame. His plans were ambitious: VICE, which traced his life in 2017, says he pictured 58 guest rooms, a restaurant and bar, a liquor store, a gift shop and a penthouse on the top floor for his family. He hoped to open in the summer of 1973. The name Igloo City came later, from a liquor license a buyer obtained, and it stuck.

The hotel never opened. By the 1990s Smith had run into building code problems, including guest room windows that were too small to pass. Several buyers took the property on and could not pay, and each time Smith took it back. After a fall left him injured, he sold the igloo and the gas station to Brad Fisher, owner of Fisher’s Fuel, for $300,000 in the mid-1990s. Smith died in 1999.

There is no power line to the site, so the gas station ran on generators, and rising fuel prices made it hard to break even. Fisher closed the station in the 2000s (accounts differ on the exact year) and stopped work on the igloo. He was once quoted about $1.3 million to make the building sound. He tried for years to sell the 38-acre property; in 2021 he told the Anchorage Daily News he hoped a buyer would keep the igloo as a novelty that visitors could walk through.

In June 2023 Alaska Public Media reported that Shirley Schmidt and her uncle had leased the property from the Fisher family, with plans to rebuild the old store beside the igloo and put a distillery, Wolf Dog Distillery, and a tasting room on the ground floor. They said publicizing their plans was partly meant to discourage the trespassing, theft and vandalism that had plagued the building.

The Igloo City ghost story

The woman in white

The story told on older lists of haunted places, including our own earlier page, is that a woman in white is seen looking out of one of the igloo’s upper windows, and that strange lights move about inside the dark building at night. Some versions add more detail about who she might be, but none gives a source.

We looked for a first-hand account, a local news report or anything from the people who have owned or worked at the site, and found nothing. The Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Public Media, VICE and Atlas Obscura have all written at length about Igloo City without mentioning a ghost. It is fair to say the story is an internet legend attached to a strange, empty building, not a haunting with witnesses behind it.

Why the igloo feels haunted

It is not hard to see where the legend came from. The building stands alone in the wilderness, with broken and boarded windows and graffiti on its shell, and inside it is a maze of bare framing, debris and missing stairs. Lights seen inside at night are most likely the people who have broken in over the years: VICE and the Anchorage Daily News describe campfires, fireworks, snowmachines on the roof and stolen lumber. A pale shape in an upper window of an empty building at dusk is exactly the kind of thing the eye invents.

Real dangers, not ghosts

The genuine risks at Igloo City are physical. Reporters who went inside describe exposed nails, creaking floors, holes in the walls and long drops. The state once labeled the building an attractive nuisance. Grizzly bears frequent the area and have been known to wander into the igloo, and a man was badly mauled by a grizzly about half a mile away in 1989. Soil around the old fuel tanks had to be dug up and treated for petroleum contamination.

Where to look

• The upper windows: Where the woman in white is said to look out; best seen from the highway pullout in evening light.
• The arched entrance: The igloo’s entrance tunnel, blocked with concrete in recent years. Do not go in.
• The clearing and the mountains: The view of the dome against the Alaska Range is the reason most travelers stop.

Seeing Igloo City safely

Igloo City is on private land, and the building is unsafe. In September 2024 signs at the site said the property had full-time residents and asked visitors to take photos only from the road. Respect that: pull fully off the highway where it is safe, stay outside any fence and photograph the igloo from the roadside. Do not climb on it or go inside, whatever you may see in older online videos.

The igloo is about three hours north of Anchorage and roughly 23 miles south of Cantwell, so it makes an easy stop on the drive to Denali National Park or Fairbanks. There are no services at the site. If the distillery plans come to pass, there may one day be a legal way inside; until then, the view from the road is the visit.

• Visiting Private property; view and photograph only from the Parks Highway
• Ghost hunting No: private, unsafe and posted no trespassing

Tips for your visit

• Watch for the dome on the south side of the highway around milepost 188.5; it appears suddenly after a bend.
• Stop only where you can pull fully off the road, and watch for traffic and wildlife.
• Evening light behind the Alaska Range gives the best photographs.
• Carry bear spray if you get out of the car, and never walk into the brush around the site.
• Combine it with a night in Anchorage at the Historic Anchorage Hotel or a stop in Talkeetna.

More haunted places nearby

• Haunted places in Anchorage: about three hours south, with the city’s haunted hotels and auditorium
• Gakona Lodge: a century-old roadhouse with a pipe-smoking ghost, on the Tok Cutoff
• Haunted hotels in Alaska: historic hotels with ghost stories you can actually book
• Haunted places in Alaska

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.

• Anchorage Daily News: Curious Alaska, the Parks Highway igloo (2021)
• Alaska Public Media: The Parks Highway igloo being renovated to sell booze (2023)
• VICE: The sad history of Alaska's igloo hotel (2017)
• Atlas Obscura: Igloo City
• Listverse: 10 most haunted locations in Alaska (2023)
• Dale J. Travis: Igloo, AK-16-01 (location record)