This is one of the original Tell Me A Ghost Story calls from the early days of the show. Short, raw, and exactly where it all started. This call was later incorporated into a longer compilation episode with full host commentary, if you want the complete experience.
Hey, it's Michelle, and this early episode belongs entirely to Maggie from Washington, who called in with a true ghost story about a birthday getaway to Port Townsend that started romantic and ended with her and her husband lying awake in the dark listening to footsteps coming from a floor that did not exist above them.
Port Townsend is one of the most historically documented paranormal destinations in the Pacific Northwest, a Victorian seaport town whose architecture and history have accumulated the kind of layered supernatural activity that draws investigators and skeptics in equal numbers. The Palace Hotel sits at the center of that history. Built as a brothel in the late 1800s, the Palace has one of the most extensively documented haunting records of any hotel in Washington State, with activity reported consistently across decades by guests who had no prior knowledge of the building's history before they checked in.
Maggie and her husband were on the top floor. There were no guests above them. The hotel confirmed it. And yet the footsteps kept coming, slow and deliberate, moving across the ceiling of their room with the specific weight and rhythm of something that knew exactly where it was going. The couple did what most people do in that situation. They tried to explain it away. Old building. Settling wood. Pipes. The Palace Hotel is indeed an old building. But old buildings do not walk.
What Maggie describes in her call is a real ghost encounter that built slowly and then all at once, the specific pattern of haunted hotel activity where the rational explanations run out one by one until there is nothing left but the sound above your head and no one there to be making it.
One caller. One true ghost story from one of the most haunted hotels in the Pacific Northwest. This is where Tell Me A Ghost Story began.
If you have a real ghost story of your own, a haunting experience, something you heard, something you cannot explain, I want to hear it. Call 1 (701) 484-2666 or visit tellmeaghoststory.com to share your story.
You might end up on the show.
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Theme music is Sexy Sax by Cool Cascade.
Production by Newman Media.
[00:00:02] Welcome to Tell Me A Ghost Story, The Late Night Colin Podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained. I'm your host Michelle Newman. This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine
[00:00:34] and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife. So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights. Hey Michelle, it's Maggie, your old friend from Ever Washington. I have a story about my birthday trip that my husband and I took to Port Townsend, Washington
[00:00:57] which is over on the peninsula, which is a very neat old like seafaring slash mining town that's super spooky and has a lot of weird ghosty history. One of my favorite places in the world is the Palace Hotel in Port Townsend, and it's
[00:01:14] this old Victorian hotel that used to be a brothel like they all did. And my birthday is the day before Halloween so it's really fun to go around my birthday because of course all the spooky stuff is happening in Port Townsend.
[00:01:26] In fact while we were there there were a ton of like ghost haunting expeditions and things that were put on by the city but they're all way too expensive to be a part of. They're like, seriously they're like 120 bucks each. It was ridiculous.
[00:01:40] So we get to the Palace Hotel and as we're checking in there are a group of women standing in the corner. A couple of them are dressed in Victorian guard and they're talking about ghost stuff
[00:01:50] so I immediately just jumped in and was like oh my god what's going on? And listen to their stories which is a lot of fun because everybody had a story about the Palace Hotel. So that night we go out, we have some drinks at the bar downstairs.
[00:02:04] We wander around the city. We have a great time and when we come back into the hotel it's dead quiet. Everybody's either out and about or in their rooms or whatever. And we're just little tipsy so we're enjoying ourselves.
[00:02:19] And as we walked up the many many flights of stairs to get back to the third floor to get to our room. We were talking about the history of the ghost stories in the Palace Hotel.
[00:02:33] And supposedly there's a ghost there named Claire who was one of the prostitutes that I think was murdered but I'm not 100% sure. And supposedly there's the ghost of Captain Tivils who built the building and lived
[00:02:46] in it for a really long time and all different sort of spooky things happen in this hotel and there are a ton of stories and ghost stories surrounding it. So we're talking about this as we're kind of walking down the long hallway to our room.
[00:03:03] And the really neat thing about the Palace Hotel is that the building, the Captain Tivils building that it's in was built in like the late 1800s. The building next to it was built in like the 1910s, 1920s, sometime in there and sometime
[00:03:22] in the last decade or so, the hotel bought that building next door, renovated it and made it a part of the Palace Hotel. The thing is though that the Palace, the original Palace is like creaky and Victorian
[00:03:37] and really pretty and a little frayed around the edges in the way that like an old Victorian hotel should be whereas the new portion of the hotel is all modern and sleek and the
[00:03:50] apartments are very like furnished in a modern way versus Victorian way in the old part of the building and there is on the third floor a path between the two buildings and you can
[00:04:03] even see not only the original wallpaper that was hanging in the Palace when it first opened but you can see like the brick as you pass through as you're entering one building from another.
[00:04:16] As we were walking around because we're just checking it out as we were walking around in the new part of the building, the new building, the air felt wildly different like the air was bright and light. It was happy.
[00:04:31] It was kind of hopeful and as soon as you pass through that brick walkway into the old Palace Hotel, the air was stifling and thick and really heavy kind of weighed you
[00:04:42] down and we found that very odd because we kept kind of going back and forth between the two buildings in this little walkway and you could feel it. You could feel the air change and the vibe change as if like all the history of the
[00:04:56] Palace Hotel stayed in this building and just sort of grew and got heavier and got you know stookier and creepier. So we settle into our room which is the Miss Kitty room and it happens to be
[00:05:11] one of the corner rooms on the side of the building so you get this absolutely beautiful view of downtown Port Townsend, the ferry coming in and out from the islands across the way. Just really really beautiful perfect weather sunny, crisp, cool because it's the you know middle
[00:05:30] of fall. So that night we go to sleep and in the middle of the night I got woken up by footsteps from the ceiling above me and I was really annoyed because we live in the bottom level of an apartment and we always have somebody walking above us.
[00:05:56] So even on our vacation here I am getting woken up in the middle of the night with somebody walking above me. And I found that very annoying but like what are you going to do? You're in a hotel, it's an old building at Creeks.
[00:06:12] I go back to sleep. The next morning we wake up, we you know bum around before going to get breakfast and I mentioned to my husband how annoying it was that we heard footsteps above us
[00:06:23] and he went yeah that is really annoying like I heard them in the middle of night too and I was like what the hell were they doing up there? So we just shrugged it off because you know what are you going to do?
[00:06:32] And we go downstairs and exit the building to go out to breakfast and then Steve remembers that he left something in the hotel room so he's got to run back up and I'm sitting there outside looking at the building, looking
[00:06:44] up at our windows to our room and I realized that we're on the top floor. There is nobody above us. I distinctly heard footsteps walking back and forth above me in the middle of the night. So I went into the lobby and I was talking to the receptionist
[00:07:03] and I was like just out of curiosity is there any space above us? Like is there a room where you know people go and get supplies or anything? Like is there any way somebody would be walking above us?
[00:07:16] And she was like no not at all and I was like because I heard footsteps last night and she pulls out this huge black bind order and like flops it on the table between us and it's like this is filled with ghost stories from this hotel.
[00:07:27] You should put yours in too. Thank you Maggie for calling in with your story. I was doing some research and found this posting on Reddit by bestclerk935 and it goes why can people hear ghosts and spirit footsteps but they can't clap or pick things up
[00:07:55] when asked? Why is it always footsteps? Do they have special ghost shoes? And I think this is a valid question. If they have ghost shoes then they have ghost shoe stores and is that why we have all the ghost malls now?
[00:08:14] That's all we have this week folks. Do you have a ghost story? Call 701-484-2666. Or go to tellmeagostory.com and leave your story there. Go ahead and leave me a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. Was something particularly scary in this episode?
[00:08:48] Or maybe you've had a similar experience? Leave your comments via our Spotify page. Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week. And as always, I'm your host Michelle Newman signing off. See you next week.