Skagway - Classic

Skagway is a tiny, remote town in Alaska. The population of living souls hovers around 1,000. And by all accounts, there may be just as many souls stuck behind, haunting the place.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Glynn Washington?

  The mistake that some people in our stories make is that if you are going to be terrified, alone, wary, fearful, wide-eyed, petrified, on the edge of nowhere, what you don't want to be is cold.

• 0:24Glynn Washington?

  Since Snap Judgment's Underground Layer, you're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:39Glynn Washington?

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• 1:22Glynn Washington?

  Spooksters, you have spoken. We want more spook, you said. We want the support to show, you said. And can we please, for the love of all that is holy, please get rid of those ads? Well, prayers answered. Spooked Plus has risen. Ad-free spook. The entire library, no interruptions, just you and whatever's lurking in the shadows. Exclusive bonus stories every month, fresh nightmares you won't hear anywhere else. The Spooked Plus community, listen together, chat in real time, because no one should face the darkest alone. And, and, ask me anything for yours truly.

• 2:06Glynn Washington?

  If you've got questions, I've got answers. Maybe. And we're just getting started. Spook says, "We are a small team chasing down the big mystery. Your support keeps this flame burning, so come on in. The door is open. Spooked.supercast.com. That's spooked.supercast.com. Spooked Plus. Don't turn out the lights.

• 2:40Glynn Washington?

  I'm from Michigan. And in Michigan, up north, it gets cold. Colder than cold, bitter cold, to the bone cold, cold. And when you have to be that cold, what you better have, more important than the hats, more important than the fancy ski gloves or the Christmas socks that granny got for you. Now, what you better have is a plan. The problem, of course, is that the cold knows there are some things that you can't plan for.

• 3:22Glynn Washington?

  My name is Clint Washington. And if you can't have a plan, at least have a plan B. Spook starts now.

• 3:48Glynn Washington?

  Now, on Spooked, we travel the world in search of the supernatural, no matter how far away those ghosties and ghoulies may dwell. And today, we're gonna journey far, far up north to Alaska. So come with me now to this place called Skagway, where back in the day, it was a gold rush boomtown. Yeah, we're talking Jack London, Call of the Wild country.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  We are the furthest point north along the coast, and we are basically in the armpit of southeast Alaska.

• 4:27Glynn Washington?

  Cory Giacomozi, she's lived in Skagway for going on two decades. In fact, she's something of an expert on the place. But she told Spook producer Eliza Smith that when she first arrived, she didn't plan on staying.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  I was only there for the summer, which was five months. I was staying up at what is, what used to be known as the Gnome Saloon. And back during the gold rush, most two stories, two-story buildings were saloons downstairs and brothels upstairs.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  But at this point, the Gnome Saloon was a gift shop downstairs and an apartment upstairs where Cory and her coworker lived. They were going out a lot that summer and spent a good deal of time in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  So we'd be standing in front of the mirror and you just got this sense that somebody was standing behind you, watching. But in the mirror, you didn't see anything. So you turn around and there's nobody there. It was just a sense that somebody was behind you. It totally unnerved me, but I thought I was just being paranoid or, you know, uncomfortable in a new surrounding and I could have been making it up. Who knows? But it happened enough times that it was definitely not being made up.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Cory's roommate had a guy stay over one night.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  And in the morning, we were kind of sitting around having coffee and breakfast. And he was, he was talking about how he didn't sleep last night, like how he just tossed and turned and tossed and turned, and yet he had been so tired, he felt like there was something not letting him sleep.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  He felt uneasy, but he couldn't really pinpoint why. And my roommate was like, oh, I slept great. I wonder what it was.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  I did get a little creeped out because I didn't know who or what the presence was, but I didn't feel like it was harmful. It was more just this presence that I couldn't see, but I knew there was something there.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  And when I'd go to the bathroom, you know, to brush my teeth or whatever, I just expected it.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Cory and her roommate shared a bedroom. It was kind of like a dorm room with two twin beds on either wall and a door in between. A month or so after moving in, they were settling down for the evening. It was about 10:00 at night. They got into their beds.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  We started talking about, hey, do you ever get this creeped out feeling when you're, like, somebody's watching you when you're brushing your teeth or combing your hair or putting your makeup on? And we had never talked about our experiences prior to that moment. We were talking, and then all of a sudden I looked, and there's this ethereal person.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  A woman, young woman, about between 17 and 19 years old.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  And she had long brown hair, kind of wavy, pulled back a little bit at the nape of the neck. And then she had a little cotton dress on, long sleeve, like a tan color with some darker flowers on it. She also looked sickly. She was very thin. She was not smiling like a big old smile, but like a whimsical, she looked whimsical.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I was so kind of freaked out. There was a ghost in my room.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Cory kept her eyes on the figure in the corner and asked her roommate.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Do you see what I see? And she said, you mean that woman in the corner of the room? I said, yes.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Describe her to me, please. Like, tell me what you're seeing, because I wanted to make sure that we were seeing the same thing. And so as she described it, I was like, oh, my God, that's exactly what I'm seeing.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I didn't want to run. We didn't even leave the room.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  She wasn't, she wasn't a terrifying presence. She was

• 9:07Speaker 01

  just like this simple girl.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  She didn't leave the room, like she didn't disappear through the wall or anything. Just what we saw faded.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I feel like it was a more comforting presence.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Like knowing that, okay, what we have been feeling while we're in front of the mirror getting ready, this person behind you, there she is. Now we know who it is.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  And then about a week later, Cory was at work in the gift shop.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  It was a typical day. It wasn't super busy. A man came into the store and he happened to walk up to me and said, "I used to live here when it was a kid's home back in the 50s." I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." I said, "Do you know this woman?" And so I described her to him, you know, what she looked like when she appeared to us. And he said, "Yeah, that sounds like Frances." He also didn't ask how I knew who she was.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  I guess he was about seven years old when he lived there, when it was a kid's home. And the older kids were responsible for the younger ones. And she was responsible for him, so he knew her quite well. So I asked him to tell me a little bit about her. And he spoke very fondly of her, you know, she was really kind and gentle.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  When I described her to him, I said she kind of looked sickly. He was like, "Yeah, I think she had some, she was sickly. She had something that was going on, like a pneumonia or tuberculosis or something." He didn't know, though, what it was because he was a little kid. So he assumed that she had died.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  So I thanked him for sharing what he could about her.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  The man left. And a couple of nights later...

• 11:16Speaker 01

  We again were sitting in our respective twin beds, college style, talking about stuff and she showed up.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  She looked pale. I remember her hair. It was kind of pulled back at the nape of her neck. There were some tendrils that were coming over her shoulder. And that's when we were like, hey, is your name Frances? And she smiled at us and faded away. She never appeared to us again, but she would let us know if our apartment got too dirty. She'd get upset and throw the laundry around and then we'd have to pick it up.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Why do you think she appeared to you guys?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I'm guessing why she chose to appear to us was because we were young women. We were a little bit older than she would have been when she passed.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Maybe you were young enough and curious enough that she felt close to you.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, because she was very curious about when we'd get dressed up to go out. When we were doing our makeup to go out, it was like this sense of curiosity that she had, because I'm guessing she didn't really get that opportunity because she died so young. She was about 17 or 18 when she died.

• 13:19Glynn Washington?

  We're not leaving Skagway yet. No, listeners, because Cory's got another terrifying tale for us.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  I know ghost stories attach to almost every single old building in town, but Lydia is the one that has been mentioned most often.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Cory quit her job at the souvenir shop and started working at a former Gold Rush brothel and bar called the Red Onion Saloon.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  So during the Gold Rush, it was one of the best saloons and dance halls and one of the finest, most expensive brothels in town.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I think when you start working at the Red Onion Saloon, everybody knows that it's haunted. It's just common knowledge.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Lydia's not the only ghost that is hanging out up there. She's just the most active one and the one that wants to be known.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  When Cory started working at the Red Onion Saloon, it seemed all her coworkers had stories about Lydia, the prostitute who hung herself in the former brothel.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  And who saw Lydia hanging?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  That was Madame Spitfire, Billy.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Madame Spitfire, or Billy Clem, is a former tour guide and bartender at the Red Onion. She knows everything about the place.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  During orientation, when I was first becoming a tour guide, she took us on a tour of the brothel museum and said, you know, and she just starts talking about the stories and about her experiences. She pointed to the corner where she saw Lydia hanging and said, "Oh yeah, and by the way, this is where I saw Lydia. This is how we figured out how she died because she showed me right here, hanging in this corner."

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Cory spent her days sorting through old garter belts, tattered quilts, even old bras. The brothel was left the way it had been the day it closed. One day, she and Billy were working on a new display.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I was precariously perched on this ladder and there was hanging these heavy pieces of wallpaper that I'd framed and archivaled so that we could show people the different layers of wallpaper that have come off the walls upstairs in the brothel. And Billy was helping me.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And I went to go put it on the wall and I felt this coldness behind me.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And this hand on my shoulder and I'm, you know, four feet up in the air, off the ground and I was just, it froze me for a second. And Billy's like, "Yep." I didn't even get the words out of my mouth before Billy's like, "Yep." Lydia's standing right behind you and I'm like, "I know."

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Hey. Okay, I think we're good to go.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I decided I had to call Billy, the woman who probably knows Lydia better than anyone who's ever worked at The Red Onion.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  Could you introduce yourself?

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Sure, I'm Billy Clem, I live in Skagway, Alaska. Lived here about 22 years. I came with my mom to see the whales and I never left, I stayed here.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  And can you tell me the first time you ever interacted with Lydia?

• 17:06Speaker 04

  My very first year. I was originally a bartender and we used to hear her upstairs.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  There was a staircase that was in the very back of the building and it went over the beer cooler and you would climb up the staircase, just this really narrow staircase that went to the top and then it opened up into the ten rooms that the girls used to work out of. It was very evident that it was a woman because of her boots. It sounded like those little boots that we wore when we were in costumes, the little, you know, Victorian boots with the two heel on them and it sounded like somebody was heel to toe, heel to toe, not like clomp, clomp, clomp, it was a dainty walk.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  And so, we would hear her walk upstairs and, you know, I had kind of heard the stories about Lydia, but I was pretty skeptical.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And then, a couple of weeks later, during Skagway's annual 4th of July bash, Billy was upstairs, doing inventory.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  And I kept hearing somebody whisper my name, and I thought it was one of the pizza dudes up there. Then I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder, and the room got really, really cold before that happened. And I kinda, it kinda makes your hair stand up on your neck.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  And I looked up, and I saw her hanging from a noose, from the ceiling. And I got really scared, and I stepped down off of there, and she was looking at me, and she was trying to say something.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  And I couldn't figure out what she was trying to say, and she had a mark down her right cheek.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  And after I saw her hanging from the noose, I ran downstairs out the front door, and I called the boss, my boss at the Red Onion, Jan. I said, "Jan, there is a woman hanging from the noose up in the pizza dude's kitchen." And she says, "Billy, calm down, calm down, tell me exactly what you saw." And so I explained it to her, she goes, "Oh, that's Lydia, that's the ghost." And I said, "Well, you know, those are things that you could have told me before."

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Once she appeared to me, she appeared to me often then. Like, you know, when I was walking down the hallway, I'd turn, and she'd be standing there, and she'd walk closer to me, and so I'd just stand there and wait for her to come closer, thinking she was gonna try to tell me something, but again, I never really got the message.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  I guess I thought about her when I wasn't there, because she was curi-, it was curious, you know? Of course, when weird things are happening, you're gonna wanna know who's doing it and why they're doing it.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  I began to assume that she was probably a working girl, that she had probably come there because either her boyfriend or her husband, somebody left her there, and/or she was trying to get to Dawson City where the gold was, but she got stuck in Skagway.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Her spirit is still here. So I'd love to know why it's still here, why she came here, what brought her here.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  There were stacks and stacks of old moldy newspapers up in the brothel. Billy and Cory rifled through them, reading obituaries and looking for any mention of the girls at the Red Onion Saloon, or the Soiled Doves, as the papers like to call them. They needed to know, who had Lydia been when she was alive?

• 21:35Speaker 04

  We pieced it together over time. And we went through the stories about the people that had died, and where they died, and how they died. And we did find lots of papers in the floors and in the walls. And she found, you know, 27 pieces of wallpaper. And we did find a woman had died in that property. So I figured that was Lydia. And they never called them by names in the newspapers. They called them the Soiled Dove, or the Fairies, or, you know, women of ill repute.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Billy and Cory also took into account all of the stories people had told them over the years about seeing Lydia. Drinkers down in the saloon, the regulars, the bartenders, and the waitresses.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  People that have seen her have always seen her dressed as a proper Victorian woman. So that's the side that she's showing us, is that she was a proper Victorian woman. She didn't come up here to be a prostitute. It was something that happened as a result of her circumstances. And this was not a life she chose. It was a necessity to survive.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Turning to the world's oldest profession seemed to have taken a toll on Lydia. Remember how, when Billy first saw Lydia hanging in the brothel, she had a mark on her cheek?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Typically, back then, if a woman contracted a disease like syphilis, the madam or the pimp would scar their cheek as a warning to anybody else, so that she was basically untouchable.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  And once she got syphilis, you were done. There was no hope for you.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And she could never work again as a prostitute. So Lydia took her own life, since, I guess she didn't see another way out.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  After Billy and Cory pieced Lydia's story together, things changed.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And once we started recognizing that, it seemed to make things a little bit easier. You wouldn't be sitting there, or you wouldn't be doing something, and all of a sudden, boom, there's Lydia. She wasn't as scary, I guess is the word.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Cory felt like the best thing to do was to start acknowledging Lydia, treating her with respect and kindness. And so...

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I went into the brothel and just started talking. And, yep, you feel silly doing it, but just saying hi to her every day, that was a big deal. Saying hi to her every day makes her much more pleasant to work with.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Sometimes Billy felt like Lydia was her coworker, a member of her team, like she had her back when things got hectic at the bar.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  One day, I was down at the bar and this man got really violent with a girl, with his wife, that was sitting there. And...

• 24:56Speaker 04

  I told him, "You are not allowed to act that way here. You will stop and cease right now, or I'm calling the police." And he was gonna get up out of his chair, and all of a sudden, his chair fell over backwards, and he had a boot mark right on the front of his chest in dirt. And I was thinking to myself, "Thanks a lot, Lydia. I needed that. That was really cool. Thank you."

• 25:27Speaker 04

  And the last time I actually saw an apparition, saw her face, she was standing behind this man in the brothel, and I was in the madam's room, and she was right between the doorways. And she looked in at me, and I acknowledged her, and continued on my tour, and then I looked back there, and she was gone. I don't think I ever saw her again.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Do you ever feel like, you know, a lot of these girls, like you said in the newspapers, their names were never recorded. They were kind of forgotten in a lot of ways. Almost like they were never there. I mean, did you feel like you wanted to help these girls be remembered in some way?

• 26:10Speaker 04

  Oh, I did. Every day, I did a tour, and I talked about them. And I talked, and to this day, there is still a legacy at the Red Onion that talks about the Good Time Girls, and what they did, and what they sacrificed. They didn't have much of a life. Most of them died before they were thirty.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And you think Lydia was one of those who just stayed behind?

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Yep, I do.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  I believe that she... The reason that I think that here, there are so many haunted buildings in Skagway is because this was the place that people came to get their... to realize their dreams. You know, we were in the middle of the Depression down in War Forty-Eight. Nobody had any money. They scraped together everything they had just to get a steamship ticket to come to Skagway, and then they realized that they have to go another five hundred miles north of this in order to get to the gold, because there was never any gold in Skagway. It's all 500 miles north a year. So if they didn't have the money to get the ton of goods that they had to carry over the path, they were stuck here.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  They didn't have enough money to get the steamship back down. So lots of the women would find out that they could wash dishes for 10 cents a week, or they could work in a dance hall for 25 cents a dance, or they could work as a good time girl, and then they would make enough money to go home.

• 28:16Glynn Washington?

  Thank you to Cory and Billy for keeping the tales of Skagway alive, and thanks so much for sharing them here with us on Spooked. Listeners, if you want to meet Linda in person, go visit the Red Onion Saloon and tell them that Spook sent you. Yeah, yes, know this, more Spook awaits exactly where you found this one. But if you like stories without ghosts as well, subscribe to our sister podcast, The Amazing Snap Judgment Storytelling with a Beat. It'll blow your mind. Spooked is brought to you by the letter A, by peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches,

• 29:01Glynn Washington?

  along with Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith. Our theme song is composed and performed by Pat Messina Miller. Original soundscaping for those stories created by the amazing Snap chief. Now, you might think that you've been vigilant, that you've been careful for a long time, that it's okay to take a little break every once in a while, right? No. No, listen to me when I tell you. This is the most important thing. Never. Ever. Never ever. Never, never, never, ever, no matter what they say. Never, ever. Turn out. The lights.