University Heights Center

The story

University Heights School, completed in 1902 according to the nomination, opened in September 1903 according to HistoryLink, within walking distance of the University of Washington, just to its north, at the corner of University Way and NE 50th Street in what is now Seattle's University District. The first section was designed by the firm of Bebb & Mendel, working from a design by James Stephen, and, according to HistoryLink, Stephen himself drew the 13-room addition built in 1907 and opened the following year; the nomination says plans on file from January 1902 show Bebb & Mendel as the designers. That addition moved the main entrance from the south side to the east, onto University Way. The result is a two-story, H-shaped wood-frame building on a raised brick basement, in a Mission Revival style marked by shaped parapets on the roofline.

The National Register nomination preserves a number of small details of school life. A row of chestnuts set out along University Way in 1910 was cut down around 1925 when the street was widened for a streetcar line. By 1938 the grounds had a lawn and hedge, and two Japanese cherry trees and a rhododendron stood near the entrance, a gift from the parents of two pupils, May and Frank, in thanks for their schooling. In the 1930s two upstairs classrooms were joined to make an auditorium, a day nursery was improved in 1945, and in 1951 classrooms were adapted for children with hearing impairments. The playfields were paved over in stages in the 1960s and 1970s.

From 1974 the district sought to close the aging school; a 1976 neighborhood lawsuit kept it open for years. It closed on June 20, 1989, according to the nomination (HistoryLink says the early 1980s). It then became a community center. A P-patch community garden was started on the grounds in 1991, and in November 2009 the University Heights Center for the Community Association bought the building from the Seattle School District, with a few of the lots going to the city's parks department. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, and in 2011 Historic Seattle gave the association a preservation award for its careful restoration of the windows, which number more than two hundred.

The legend

University Heights appears on lists of haunted places in Seattle, including a 2017 Curbed Seattle roundup of the city's most haunted sites cited by Wikipedia, but the reputation rests on very little. The community center itself does not promote any ghost story, and no account dated before 2016 is known.

Most of what circulates comes from public ghost hunts run by the group Spooked in Seattle with the team behind the Ghostly Activities blog, first in August 2016 and again in July 2018 and December 2019. The best-known story they relay concerns a boy called "Brian," said to show himself in a classroom on the main floor. Notably, the investigators who tell the story describe it themselves as an urban legend. Their other claims are a male presence in the basement, which was the focus of the 2016 hunt, an adult presence that one investigator sensed in the basement fan room and an unspecified spirit in the former principal's office, and shadow figures that witnesses are said to have seen in the old boys' restroom. During the first hunt the team reported an EVP recording, a sound on tape they heard as the words "Go away!" in the basement. On later visits they logged electromagnetic field spikes near the stage room, the principal's office and Brian's classroom, slight temperature changes, and fluctuating readings in the basement.

What makes this account worth reading is the team's own caution. They captured no apparitions on infrared cameras, their trigger objects never moved, they put the classroom EMF spike down to a likely human-made source, and they acknowledged that field and temperature readings are not proof of a ghost. Their verdict was that the building is "probably" haunted, without evidence to show it. No ghost here has been linked to a documented death or to any real person connected with the school, and no television investigation has been found.

What remains today

Little has changed in the building's layout since the early twentieth century. According to the 2010 nomination, the interior keeps its original hardwood floors, unpainted wood wainscoting and trim, maple stairs with oak rails and balusters, original hall light fixtures, and in many places the old coat hooks and brass name plates. The wide hallways of the classroom wings still lead to open coatroom alcoves in front of the classrooms. The steam heating system, with a boiler made in Tacoma and a ventilation fan with a large wooden wheel made in Seattle, had been in service for more than eighty years at the time of the nomination, converted over the decades from coal to oil to gas. One of the three chimneys was taken down after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The building has weathered five earthquakes in all, and the association has carried out window restoration and other repairs.

Visiting

University Heights Center is an active community center, known locally as UHeights, with classes, events and rooms for rent, and its P-patch garden on the grounds. You can see the building from the surrounding streets in the University District, and the public can enter when attending an event or class. It is not a haunted attraction, so please do not treat it as one: respect the tenants and the people using the rooms, and stay out of areas such as the basement unless you are with an organized group that has permission.

Public ghost hunts have been held in the building by Spooked in Seattle before; whether they still do is unknown, so check with the organizers or the center before planning a visit with that in mind.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #10000995 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #10000995) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : University Heights School (Seattle) — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Seattle, WA 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Seattle, WA 1894 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1894 · Public domain (USGS)
6. Ghost Hunt - University Heights Center in Seattle — Ghostly Activities (Jacob Rice, 29 Aug 2016) — Ghostly Activities (Jacob Rice, 29 Aug 2016, upd. 2019) (weak source
7. Seattle Public Schools: University Heights School — HistoryLink.org — HistoryLink.org
8. University Heights Center (official)
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.