Spooked - Skagway - Classic

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

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.STORIESFrances Cori suspects she’s got a second roommate who she can’t see, and who may very well be contacting her from beyond the veil.Lydia The wait staff at the Red Onion Saloon help uncover the sad story of their notorious ghost, Lydia.Thank you to our amazing storytellers for sharing your truth with us! These stories were produced by Eliza Smith, Anna Sussman, and the ghostbusters at Snap Judgment. Original music by Renzo Gorrio, Leon Morimoto, and Pat Mesiti-Miller. Artwork by Sanaa Khan.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. From Snap Judgment's underground layer, you're listening to Spoot Stay. 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. My name is Clint Washington. If you can't have a plan, we travel the world in search of the supernatural. No matter how far away those ghosties and ghoulies may dwell. And today, we're going to 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 boom town. Yeah, we're talking Jack London,

called the wild country. We are the furthest point north along the coast, and we are basically in the armpit of southeast Alaska. Corey Gia Kamazi, 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. I was only there for the summer, which was five months. I was staying up at what used to be known as the Gnome Saloon. And back during the Gold Rush, most two-story buildings were saloons downstairs and brothels upstairs. But at this point, the Gnome Saloon was a gift shop downstairs and an apartment upstairs where Corey and her co-worker lived. They were going out a lot that summer and spent a good deal of time in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready. 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.

Corey's roommate had a guy stay over one night. And in the morning, we were kind of sitting around having coffee and breakfast, and 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. He felt uneasy, but he couldn't really pinpoint why.

And my roommate was like, oh, I slept great. I wonder what it was. 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. and when I'd go to the bathroom, you know, to brush my teeth or whatever, I just expected it. Corey 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 at night. They got into their beds. 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 and I looked and there's this ethereal person.

A woman, young woman, about between 17 and 19 years old, and she had long brown hair kind of wavy, pulled back a little. 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. I was so kind of freaked out. There was a ghost in my room. Corey kept her eyes on the figure in the corner and asked her roommate, Do you see what I see? And she said, you mean that woman in the corner of the room? I said, yes. 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. I didn't want to run. We didn't even leave the room. She wasn't a terrifying presence. She was just like this simple girl. She didn't leave the room.

She didn't disappear through the wall or anything. Just what we saw faded. I feel like it was a more comforting presence. 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. And then, about a week later, Corey was at work in the gift shop. 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's interesting. sounds like Francis. He also didn't ask how I knew who she was. 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. 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. So I thanked him for sharing what he could about her. The man left. And a couple of nights later, we are, again, we're sitting, you know, our respective twin beds, college style, talking about stuff, and she showed up. 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 Francis? 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. Why do you think she appeared to you guys? 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. Maybe you were young enough and curious enough that she felt close to you. Yeah.

Because she was very curious about, like, when we'd get dressed up to go out. When we were putting our, like, doing our makeup to go out, it was like the 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. We're not leaving Skagway yet. No listeners. Because Corey's got another terrifying tale for us. I know ghost stories attached to almost every single old building in town,

but Lydia is the one that has been mentioned most often. Corey quit her job at the souvenir shop and started working at a former Gold Rush brothel and bar called the Red Onion Saloon. 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. I think when you start working at the Red Onion Saloon, everybody knows that it's haunted. It's just common knowledge. 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. When Corey started working at the Red Onion Saloon, it seemed all her co-workers had stories about Lydia, the prostitute who hung herself in the former brothel. And who saw Lydia hanging? That was Madam Spitfire, Billy. Madam Spitfire, or Billy Clem, is a former tour guide and bartender at The Red Onion. She knows everything about the place. During orientation, when I was first becoming a tour guide, she took us on a tour of the Brothel Museum and said, you know, 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. Corey 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. I was precariously perched on this ladder, and I was hanging these heavy pieces of wallpaper that I'd framed in archivally 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, and I went to go, put it on the wall, and I felt this coldness behind me. 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. I think we're good to go. Okay, great. I decided I had to call Billy, the woman who probably knows Lydia better than anyone who's ever worked at the red,

Do you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Billy Clem. I live in Skagway, Alaska. I lived here about 22 years. I came with my mom to see the whales, and I never left. I stayed here. And can you tell me the first time you ever interacted with Lydia?

My very first year. I was originally a bartender, and we used to hear her upstairs. It 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 10 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 heel on them.

And it sounded like somebody was heeled a toe, heeled a toe. Not like clomp, plump, clomp. It was a dainty walk. 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. And then, a couple of weeks later, during Skagway's annual Fourth of July bash,

Billy was upstairs doing inventory. And I kept hearing somebody with, for my name and I thought it was one of the pizza dudes up there. Then I felt somebody tapped me on the shoulder and the room got really, really cold before that happened and it kind of makes your hair stand up on your neck. 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 and I couldn't figure out what she was trying to say

and she had a mark down her right cheek after I saw her hanging from the news I ran downstairs out the front door and I called the boss my boss with the Red Onion Jan I said Jan there is a woman hanging from the news up in the peak 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. 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 just stand there and wait for her to come closer thinking she was going to try to tell me something. But again, I never really got the message. I guess I thought about her when I wasn't there because she was curious, it was curious, you know. Of course, when weird things are

happening, you're going to want to know who's doing it and why they're doing it. I began to assume that she was probably a working girl, that she had probably come there because either her boyfriend or 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. Her spirit is still here. So I'd love to know why it's still here, why she came here, what brought her here. There were stacks, stacks of old moldy newspapers up in the brothel. Billy and Corey 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. 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-reput. Billy and Corey 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. 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. 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. 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. And once she got syphilis, you were done. There was no hope for you. 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.

After Billy and Corey piece Lydia's story together, things changed. 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. Corey felt like the best thing to do was to start acknowledging Lydia, treating her with respect and kindness. And so... 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. Sometimes Billy felt like Lydia was her co-worker, a member of her team. Like she had her back when things got hectic at the bar.

One day I was down at the bar. bar and this man got really violent with a girl with his wife that was sitting there. And 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 going to get up out of his chair, and all of a sudden his chair fell over backwards, and he had a bootmark 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. The last time I actually saw an apparition, saw her fate. 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.

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, like they were never there. I mean, did you feel like you wanted to help these girls be remembered in some way? No, I did. Every day I did a tour, and I talked about them. And to this day, there is still a legacy at the Red Onion that talks about the Good Time Girl and what they did and what they sacrificed. They didn't have much of a life.

Most of them died before they were 30. And you think Lydia was one of those who just... Uh-huh. Stayed behind. Yep, I do. I believe that she, the reason that I think that here's there's 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 a depression down in Laura 48, 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 500 miles more to. in order to get to the gold because there was never any gold in Skyway. It's all 500 miles north of here. 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. They didn't have enough money to get the schemeship 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 for 25 cents a dance. Or they could work work as a good time girl, and then they would make enough money to go home.

And Billy for keeping the tales of Skagway alive. And thanks so much for sharing them here with us on Spook. Listeners, if you want to meet Linda in person, go visit the Red Onion Saloon and tell them that spook sent you. 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 the beat. It'll blow your mind.

Spook just brought to you by the letter A by peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches, along with Mark Ristich. Anna Sussiman, Eliza Smith. Our theme song is composed and performed by Pat McNeely Miller. Original soundscaping for those stories created by the amazing snapshot. 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, listen to me when I tell you.

This is the most important thing. Never, ever, never, ever, matter what they say, never, ever, turn out the lights.