Tokeland Hotel

The story

Set on Toke Point, a wind-exposed spit of land along the northern edge of Willapa Bay in Pacific County, Washington, with the open Pacific to the west, the Tokeland Hotel bills itself as Washington's oldest hotel; Wikipedia calls it the state's oldest resort hotel, and the 1977 National Register nomination one of the oldest resort hotels in Washington.

Its story begins with a pioneer family. George H. Brown, a Philadelphian who had tried his luck in the California gold fields and then worked as a butcher in Portland, settled on Toke Point in 1858 with his wife Charlotte and two sons. The point was named after Toke, a chief of the Shoalwater people, and was then rich in oysters. The Browns farmed, kept livestock and traded with their Native neighbors. Their daughter Elizabeth, always called Lizzie, was born in 1862 and grew up with Native children as her playmates, speaking both English and Chinook Jargon; she later assembled a collection of baskets and artifacts which remained on show at the hotel until she died in 1931.

In 1880 Lizzie married William Kindred, born in 1857 in Clatsop County, Oregon, whom she had met while he was helping build the North Cove lifesaving station. In December 1884 William bought his father-in-law's homestead, given as 900 acres in the nomination, together with the dairy and oyster business. In 1885 the couple put up a two-story wooden farmhouse under a gabled roof, with a brick fireplace set into its north wall; it is still the south wing of the hotel. As travelers kept arriving, they enlarged the house with a second two-story wing in 1899 and opened it as the Kindred Inn, soon renamed the Tokeland Hotel. William served as Tokeland's postmaster from 1898 to 1915, with the hotel doubling as the post office. A north wing completed in 1910 gave the building essentially its present shape.

As the timber industry grew around Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor, Tokeland became a quiet summer retreat for the "sawdust aristocracy", a contrast to the saloons and brothels of the mill towns. Guests came from as far as Idaho and California for oysters, razor clams, crab and fish, and the resort added a clubhouse, a gun club and a golf course; visitors were already playing makeshift golf on the grounds by 1910. Willapa Bay's remoteness meant Prohibition was loosely felt, and the hotel reportedly offered more than food and lodging. Maude Kindred modernized the interior through the 1920s and 1930s, and after repeal in 1933 she moved the clubhouse next door as a tavern and dance hall. One source says a storm damaged part of the building in 1932.

The Kindreds kept the hotel until William's death in 1943. From 1950 it served mainly as a restaurant, closed for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was being restored when it joined the National Register on April 11, 1978. Katherine and Scott White ran it from 1989 to 2018.

The legend

The hotel's best-known ghost is "Charley" (sometimes spelled Charlie). According to the story, he was a Chinese immigrant brought illegally into the United States in the early twentieth century as railroad labor. He jumped ship, swam ashore and ran from the smugglers chasing him, and the Kindreds hid him in a space behind the parlor fireplace. While he waited for the danger to pass, he suffocated. He is said to wander the hallways and to spin dinner plates in the restaurant, and he is generally pictured as good-natured, watchful over the building and now and then hungry for attention. No document has been found showing that Charley existed, and no date for the first telling of his story is known; it should be treated as oral legend.

Most of the detailed accounts come from the White years. Scott White told a travel writer about a fisherman whose plate lifted, spun and settled back on the table. Katherine White described a cloud-like shape drifting in a second-floor hallway, and being shut inside a first-floor storeroom when the door latched from outside and her flashlight and the light switch both failed; on a different day, a heavy roller skate fell from a shelf and narrowly missed her. Scott White and an employee reported a pale light on the floorboards that threw no shadow. There are also nighttime sounds like coat hangers sliding on rails from the top floor, where nothing but storage is kept, and a flickering stairwell bulb. The writer, a self-described nonbeliever, looked for ordinary explanations, such as the floor, the shelf, the latch and the damp coastal air, and found none that settled the matter.

The second ghost has a real name behind it. On the grounds stand the headstones of two of Lizzie's half-brothers, relocated from the Cedar River cemetery when erosion threatened it. Albert Brown, born in 1856, drowned in May 1866 at the age of 10 after getting stuck in the mud of Teal Duck Slough as the tide came in, when Lizzie was three. Leonidus Norris died in a shooting accident in 1873, aged 24. Albert is rumored to haunt the halls, though only one source mentions this. Guests have also described a ghost cat walking across their beds, a claim even Wikipedia flags as unsourced.

The haunted rooms are not consistently identified: Wikipedia says the hotel's website once named rooms 4 and 7, while the travel article cites rooms 3 and 7. Paranormal enthusiasts visit regularly hoping to meet Charley, and a clairvoyant, Teresa Carol, is quoted as saying she sensed "a lot of secrets hidden in the walls". No named investigation team or television episode has been documented.

What remains today

The hotel keeps much of its historic character. In 1977 it had about thirty rooms, each with at least one large window, including eighteen bedrooms upstairs, and much of its original furniture survived: oak bedroom sets, dining tables and chairs. The dining room has hand-painted murals, dark-stained woodwork and tongue-and-groove wainscoting. The barn-red paint was applied in 1974. The family headstones of Albert Brown and Leonidus Norris remain on the grounds.

Visiting

The Tokeland Hotel is an operating hotel and restaurant with 17 guest rooms upstairs, so you can stay or dine legally; check the official website for current hours and bookings. No organized ghost tour was found. If you visit the headstones, remember they mark a real family's children and treat them with respect.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #78002766 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #78002766) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Tokeland Hotel, Washington — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Hoquiam, WA 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for South Bend, WA 1938 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1938 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "History" — Tokeland Hotel (official site) — Tokeland Hotel (official site
7. "The haunted historic Tokeland Hotel" — Life Other Than (travel site; interviews with the Whites) — Life Other Than (travel site; interviews with the Whites
8. Tokeland Hotel home page (official site)
9. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.