public

Heavily Investigated

Two rooms at Manresa hold the darkest reputations. In 306, guests say a young woman named Kate — her lover lost, her grief unbearable — threw herself from the window, and something of her stayed: lights flicker without cause, the TV switches on in an empty room, and the air feels wrong in a way you notice before you can name it. Down the hall in 302, a Jesuit monk is said to have hanged himself in the bell tower; footsteps cross the attic overhead when no one is up there. In the old chapel-turned-café, glasses have shattered mid-air and turned themselves upside down.

Charles Eisenbeis, a Prussian immigrant who'd built his fortune brick by brick — quite literally, from his own brickworks — completed this 30-room mansion in 1892. He became Port Townsend's first mayor; locals called the place Eisenbeis Castle, which seemed fitting. After his death in 1902, the property passed to nuns (1925), then Jesuits (1927), who renamed it Manresa Hall and added a chapel wing. The priests departed in 1968, and it became a hotel — one that, perhaps conveniently, developed ghost stories. Some former staff have claimed the legends were invented; the guests who've heard footsteps overhead tend to disagree.