Butterworth Building

The claim you will hear on any Seattle ghost walk is that Kells sits in the old embalming room and crematorium. The earliest detailed description of the building says otherwise. Per the Seattle Mail and Herald of August 1904, the embalming room and the morgues were upstairs on the First Avenue floor; the level flush with Post Alley held the heating plant, the stables and the funeral wagons, which is also all the 1969 nomination form records of it — "Stables and hay storage were on the alley level." No crematorium appears in that 1904 inventory at all; the crematory and columbarium Bagley described in 1929 belonged to the firm's next premises, the 1923 building on Melrose and Pine. What Kells does occupy, besides that basement, is the old "stock room" of fireproof vaults where bodies were in fact stored — a real connection to the dead, and a different one from the one that gets sold. Dating the story is more useful than arguing with it. Kells opened in 1983. The Market ghost tours are older than the tourist boom suggests and younger than the pub: on its own website in November 2005 the operator, Mercedes Yaeger, wrote that "it was my father, Michael Yaeger, who first started these tours with Shelia Lyon of the Market Magic Shop in 1986." The earliest printed mention of this building's ghosts that can be dated is 1 January 2003, and it is a single clause with no witness and no detail, in Walt Crowley's HistoryLink survey of Seattle apparitions: "odd apparitions in Belltown's Butterworth Building — previously a mortuary". Alongside it runs a price ladder, taken from the tour company's own archived pages: ten dollars in November 2005, when the building was already a teaser on the front page ("Do you know where Seattle's first mortuary is located? How many ghosts inhabit it?"); fifteen in July 2008; seventeen in October 2011, when the old chapel had become a separately ticketed twenty-dollar product sold on a single line — "Go in the old Mortuary and see the Chapel as it is being restored. GAC did an overnight in the building." The tour's co-guide in 2005 was a horror-puppet and prosthetics maker who described himself on the same page as a "ghost magnet". Market Ghost Tours stopped being archived after February 2012; on 17 August 2026 marketghost.com was a parked page offering the domain for $3,895. The mundane explanations are not something a sceptic has to supply. They are printed inside the same articles that carry the stories. The photograph that opens the Seattle Times feature of 13 June 2008 shows Karen McAleese startled by footsteps overhead, and the caption resolves them: "The footsteps? A building contractor working upstairs." Scott Craig, who ran Café Sophie at street level, described the chunk of ceiling plaster that fell near the table his customers had christened the "haunted booth" and then explained it himself — "It turns out there was a problem with the ceiling." Arnie Millan, who ran Avenue One there from 1997 to 2002, was blunter: "They didn't have an effect on our business except we had Halloween parties every year." And the incentive does not sit where you would expect. In 2008 it was the tour operator urging the tenants to monetise, not the other way round: "These ghosts want to be heard, so [the McAleeses] should make the hauntings a selling point... They need to promote the crazy activity that has happened there. The hokier, the better." Her suggestion was a goth nightclub called "The Mortuary". Patrick McAleese, described in the same article as undeterred by ghosts, was planning to ask a priest friend to bless the chapel before opening it. Eighteen years later the pub still has not taken the advice. Its website was measured on 17 August 2026 — six pages, 3,425 words — and returned zero occurrences each of ghost, ghosts, haunt, haunted, haunting, spirit, apparition and paranormal, against Kells 193, Irish 42, Guinness 2, mortuary 1, Butterworth 1, McAleese 1 and 1983 once in the same pass. The one line it does sell is "the Butterworth Building, Seattle's first mortuary". That superlative is worth following, because it degrades in three steps. Bagley in 1929 and the nomination in 1969 make a narrow, defensible claim: the city's first purpose-built modern mortuary, designed for one firm's exclusive use. In March 2008 the photographer of the picture on this page, Joe Mabel, noted on Wikimedia Commons that the Halloween listings of the alt-weekly The Stranger were calling it "Seattle's first" and added that he suspected "it is merely the oldest surviving". The pub's flat version, "Seattle's first mortuary", is refuted by Butterworth's own career: he was in the undertaking business in Seattle from 1892, at three addresses before this one. Two further claims should be attributed and left there. Yaeger told the Seattle Times that a shaman had counted nineteen fully formed ghosts inside the old mortuary and that the building stands on a Suquamish burial ground; no documentary support has been located for either. Her third claim has a real anchor: she attributed the emaciated apparitions to the patients of a Seattle doctor who starved people on tomato broth and enemas, and that is Linda Burfield Hazzard, whose case did pass through this building in 1911. Finally, the record of what has been added to and taken out of the public account of this building is itself instructive. On 15 November 2010 an account calling itself Waghosthunters added to the Wikipedia article a paid Darkness Radio event held in the old chapel on 11-14 November with its list of celebrity guests, and the news that an episode of Ghost Adventures would air on 17 December; an editor removed it as promotion twenty-seven minutes later. The episode did air on that date. In April 2012 an anonymous editor added that the crew "found evidence" supporting the haunting, and was reverted the next day. Running the other way, on 6 September 2015 an anonymous editor wrote into the article: "In the 1980s, as an employee of Kramer, Chin & Mayo, Inc., in the Marketing Dept., I would often work late, sometimes as late as midnight, and I did not once ever encounter anything ghostly." It stood for a year and ten days and was struck out on 16 September 2016 as original research. It is unsigned and unverifiable, and it remains the only account on record from somebody who worked nights in the building.