Haunted History Tour Nojomo #4

Today started off with an unreasonably expensive breakfast at what was a glorified coffee shop, followed by hitting the book stores on Water St. I found several books from my book projects for reasonable prices. We stopped in the tea shop again and had tea, this time I also had scones with jam and clotted cream. I posted about it online and my coworker Mike was really jealous because he’s from England and misses scones with clotted cream, so when we told the lady at the tea shop and asked if she knew where we could get some clotted cream she said she would just give us some to take to Mike. Mike was super excited and I had to promise to take a picture and put it on facebook for her to see and not eat all the clotted cream myself. It will be difficult. We also stopped by the antique mall and went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch. Afterward we had a little rest in the afternoon in our beautiful Victorian apartment before heading out this evening for a Haunted History Tour.

It started at the Fountain/Staircase at the center back of town and circled around the main downtown area and down an alleyway where once 45 corpses were stacked. Most of the stories from Port Townsend’s sordid past dealt with violence/exploitation of women. We toured the Palace Hotel, which was a brothel for a few decades in the 20’s and 30’s and was built by an awful retired sea captain. I was interested that there was a prostitute reformation league in Port Townsend as there was at one point up to 300 prostitutes in the downtown area. There were a lot of institutions like these and I remembered reading about them in some book or another about Victorian prostitutes.

Also, Shanghai tunnels were a thing here in Port Townsend as well as in Portland. Ships couldn’t leave without a full crew and unscrupulous folk would drug unsuspecting men, drop them through trap doors, and sell them to ship captains as crew. Sometimes if they died in the process of getting them they’d dump their bodies in an alley and the guy from the morgue would come down and sell the bodies in good condition to the university. The ones in not so good condition he dumped in a ditch next to his house, where running water was sent through into the downtown drinking water cistern…

When the tour started a very young deer came out of the bushes by the long staircase and circled around the pavilion, and at the end of our tour a bat took off from the roof of Bishop’s Hotel, which was really neat. We then went to dinner at a restaurant we’ve been to on previous trips that we now know is in the old Elks building, the top floor of which housed the ladies trying to reform prostitutes. We had a nice cheese plate and I had the pepper steak and Reed had some pasta and it was a lovely evening.