9 RESTLESS Alaska Ghosts: A Guide to Alaska's Most Haunted Places

Boo!!! Alaska Ghosts // photo illustration by AlaskaExplored.com

Article Overview: Alaska Ghosts and the Last Frontier’s Most Haunted Places

Alaska has a lot of empty buildings. Gold rush boomtowns that emptied within a couple of seasons, mining camps that were abandoned to the spruce, military bases that housed ten thousand and now house almost nobody, shipwrecks that took everyone aboard down within sight of land. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Alaska ghosts have become a small genre of their own. Locals will tell you that some of the state’s most beautiful places are also its most haunted, and after a winter or two in a cabin where the wind doesn’t stop, you might start to agree.

This guide covers nine Alaska ghosts and the places that hold them, ranked loosely by how seriously the locals there take the story. Keep reading for the haunted hotel that maintains an actual ghost log, the gold rush con man who allegedly never left Skagway, the steamship that took more than 350 people down off Juneau, and the abandoned naval base where I spent a week and never quite slept right.

Why Trust Us When Tracking Down Alaska Ghosts

Whether you are planning a Halloween-season trip up north, putting together a Klondike history road trip, or just morbidly curious about what happens to towns when everybody leaves, the right ghost story at the right place can be the most memorable part of your visit. Alaska Explored writes from the position of working insiders. Years of filming, living, and traveling in the 49th state, not a one-week research trip with a notebook.

My Experience with Alaska Ghosts

I have not personally seen a ghost in Alaska. I want to put that on the record before anybody clicks away. But I have had my share of creepy encounters. Around every corner of this state is rich history and quietly eerie places. Once you have stopped at enough of them, the line between “haunted” and “this place is just heavy” gets blurry fast.

A Lunch on the Wrong Island

Years ago, while filming near Prince of Wales Island, my crew and I stopped on a small island to eat lunch. Walking around afterwards, we came across dozens of gravestones. They probably date to the 1918 to 1920 flu pandemic, which hit Southeast Alaska Native villages especially hard. We did not stay long. Respectfully and quietly, we got back in the boat and got off the island. That is not a ghost story. It is the kind of moment that makes you understand why people who live here have ghost stories.

A Decade in the Empty Places

Over the past decade I have filmed unscripted shows in some of the emptiest parts of the state. Five years living in Homer. Multiple weeks in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). A particularly memorable week on Adak for the Discovery Channel. (We covered that trip in detail in our Adak Alaska guide, if you want the full version.)

I have slept in cabins where the original owner walked out decades ago and never came back. In Adak, one of the locals there collected rats from the tunnels under the old officers’ quarters. He turned the tails into art. Alive and well or not, the offer to come help him was unsettling.

So when locals tell me about Alaska ghosts, I take it seriously. Not because I think every flickering light is a haunting. The state has too much empty space and too much hard history to dismiss the stories out of hand.

The Historic Anchorage Hotel
The Red Onion Saloon (Skagway)
Soapy Smith’s Skagway
The SS Princess Sophia
Kennecott Copper Ghost Town
The Kodiak History Museum (formerly the Baranov Museum)
Independence Mine, Hatcher Pass
Eagle and the Yukon Ghost Towns
The Abandoned Naval Base at Adak
A Note on Alaska Native Traditions
Pro Tips for Visiting Alaska Ghosts and Haunted Places
FAQ

1. The Historic Anchorage Hotel

A quick caveat. I do not spend a lot of time in Anchorage. Usually I am just traveling through, or stuck for a few days en route to a remote shoot. So I have never personally seen a ghost in the city. And no, I have never stayed at the Historic Anchorage Hotel either. What I have done is spend too many nights in shitty production-company-owned Airbnbs run by absentee slumlords. Some of those rentals can feel haunted in their own right. Between the smell, the wiring, and the noises you would rather not identify, the building does most of the work.

That said, if there is a single building most associated with Alaska ghosts, this is it. The Historic Anchorage Hotel opened in 1916 on Third Avenue. It survived the 1964 earthquake and has spent the last century collecting paranormal stories. The hotel maintains an actual ghost log at the front desk. Guests write in their experiences voluntarily. The book holds decades of entries.

The Story of Police Chief Sturgus

The recurring stories include phantom calls from empty rooms, flickering lights, and the apparition of John “Jack” Sturgus. Housekeeping even has a working theory about which floor is responsible for the calls. Sturgus was Anchorage’s first police chief. Locals found him shot dead in the alley right next to the hotel in February 1921. The official inquest at the time ruled it a murder. Recent research argues it was a suicide. A 2021 dig by local historians says contemporaries covered it up to protect his widow’s life-insurance claim. Either way, the ghost story stuck. The alley where they found him is the closing stop on most Anchorage walking tours.

There is also a “ghost bride” story, tied to a young woman who allegedly drowned on her wedding day. The documentation on that one is thin.

The hotel still operates as a real hotel. You can book a room. The staff will tell you about the log if you ask. They will not pretend it does not exist.

2. The Red Onion Saloon, Skagway

Skagway during the Klondike Gold Rush (1897 to 1899) was, by every contemporary account, an unhinged place. Tens of thousands of would-be miners passed through the port on their way to the Yukon, and the town that grew up to serve them was heavy on saloons, gambling halls, and the kind of hospitality businesses that didn’t advertise their services in the daytime newspaper.

The Red Onion Saloon was one of the busiest brothels of the era. It still stands, still operates as a bar, and now hosts a brothel museum upstairs. Its signature Alaska ghost is “Lydia,” a former working girl whose presence the staff report regularly. Standard stories include footsteps on empty upstairs floors and the smell of perfume in rooms that have been closed for the night. Lamps swing without anybody touching them. Guests describe brushed shoulders in hallways where nobody else is standing.

Today the Red Onion runs as a working bar with a kitchen, so you can show up, get a drink, take the upstairs tour, and decide for yourself. Of all the Skagway ghost tours, the Red Onion’s is the one the locals point to first.

3. Soapy Smith’s Skagway

Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith ran Skagway during the gold rush the way a small-time mob boss runs a docks neighborhood. His operation included a fake telegraph office (the wires went nowhere) and a fixed gambling parlor. A network of con artists relieved miners of their gold on the way in or out of the territory. Vigilantes shot him in a confrontation on the Juneau Wharf on July 8, 1898. The man credited with shooting him, Skagway’s city engineer Frank Reid, was hit himself and died twelve days later.

Both men’s graves sit in the Skagway Pioneer Cemetery, and locals say both are still around. Soapy’s old saloon (Jeff Smith’s Parlor, now operated as a museum by the National Park Service) is the standard stop on local Alaska ghosts tours. Visitors describe cold spots, the smell of cigar smoke in a building that hasn’t allowed smoking in over fifty years, and the feeling of being watched from the back of the bar. Frank Reid’s grave gets visitors too, although his ghost is reportedly the more polite of the two.

The whole town leans into this in the most respectful way it can. Skagway has more documented gold rush history per square foot than almost anywhere in North America. The ghost tours here are more historically grounded than most.

4. The SS Princess Sophia

The most haunted Alaska ghost story is also the most factual. In late October 1918, the SS Princess Sophia ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef in the Lynn Canal during a snowstorm. The Canadian Pacific steamship was carrying more than 350 people from Skagway south for the winter. She sat on the reef for roughly forty hours within sight of would-be rescuers, who could not safely come alongside her in the weather. On the second night, a rising storm drove her off the reef. Everybody aboard died. One English Setter survived, found alive in Auke Bay days later. Historians cite it as the worst maritime disaster in the history of the West Coast.

Vanderbilt Reef is still out there, between Juneau and Haines, and the Sophia is still on the bottom of the Lynn Canal. Pilots and fishermen working that stretch of water sometimes report unexplained lights moving over the reef at night. Others describe voices on radio frequencies that should be empty. Experienced Alaska boat captains do not generally admit to the unease in public unless they trust you.

There is no tour for this one. It is a working maritime corridor. But if you take the Alaska Marine Highway between Juneau and Skagway, you cross right over the wreck site, and the captains will sometimes mention it on the loudspeaker.

5. Kennecott Copper Ghost Town

Deep in the Wrangell-St. Elias wilderness, the abandoned Kennecott copper mine looms over the valley like a cathedral. Somebody built it to commemorate hard work and then walked away from it, and the spruce has been reclaiming it ever since. The mine and mill operated from 1911 to 1938. Mines closed in sequence through that final year (the Mother Lode in July, then Erie, Jumbo, and Bonanza in September). The last train out of Kennecott left on November 10, 1938. Residents left in a hurry. Some buildings still hold possessions the workers left behind, although the popular “dishes still on the tables” version owes a lot to retelling. What is true is that the buildings still stand. The fourteen-story mill is structurally remarkable. The whole site sits in one of the most beautiful valleys in North America.

The standard Alaska ghosts experiences at Kennecott include footsteps on upper floors of the mill, voices in empty bunkhouses, and the very specific feeling of being watched from windows that have not held glass in eighty years. Even people who don’t believe in ghosts tend to come back from Kennecott a little quiet.

The town is now part of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and you can take a guided tour through the mill (recommended, both for safety reasons and because the engineering is genuinely incredible). McCarthy is the small town just down the road. It still has a year-round population, a couple of restaurants, and the kind of local-bar character that makes the whole side trip worth it.

6. The Kodiak History Museum (formerly the Baranov Museum)

Kodiak Island was the original Russian capital of Alaska, and a handful of buildings dating to the Russian-America era are still standing. The Russian-American Magazin, built around 1808 as a warehouse for sea otter pelts, is the oldest standing building in the entire state and the oldest documented Russian-built structure in the United States. (For context, that is 59 years before the United States bought Alaska from Russia.) For decades it was known as the Erskine House, after the family that lived there from 1911 to 1948. It opened as the Baranov Museum in 1967 and was renamed the Kodiak History Museum in 2019.

The McIntyre Story

The building is also reportedly haunted. The most documented story involves a man named McIntyre, who died inside in 1886 when the building still housed the Alaska Commercial Company station. Searchers later turned up a skeleton and the murder weapon in the woods. According to museum staff, Natalia Pestrikoff worked for the Erskine family during their years in the building. She refused to be in the place alone after dark, citing rumors that McIntyre’s ghost still walked the halls in the evenings. Current staff describe creaks, voices, and the kind of after-hours unease that gets a building this old talked about.

Given the brutality of the early Russian fur trade era and the Alutiiq communities that bore the worst of it, the lingering presence here, if you take the stories at face value, has more to it than a simple haunted-museum anecdote.

7. Independence Mine, Hatcher Pass

Hatcher Pass is one of the most accessible places to see a piece of Alaska’s mining-era past. About an hour and a half north of Anchorage, the Independence Mine State Historical Park preserves an abandoned hardrock gold mine that operated through the 1930s and 1940s. The bunkhouses, mess hall, mill, and supporting buildings are still standing, and you can walk through several of them on a self-guided tour.

The Alaska ghost stories at Independence are quieter than the Kennecott or Skagway ones. (No big-personality character like Soapy Smith at the center.) What people report is more atmospheric. Footsteps on the wooden boardwalks when nobody is on them. Lights in the manager’s house (the one with the green roof) that flicker in patterns that don’t match the wind. The persistent feeling, especially in the autumn shoulder season when the visitor numbers drop, that the buildings have not entirely accepted that the workers are gone.

Hatcher Pass is also genuinely beautiful. So if you are not the ghost-tourism type, the drive is worth it for the alpine views and the wildflowers in summer regardless. If you are the ghost-tourism type, go in late September after the crowds thin out.

8. Eagle and the Yukon Ghost Towns

Along the Yukon River, dozens of small settlements boomed and busted during the gold rush. Most of them are gone. A few of them, including Eagle (still inhabited, around 80 people), Forty Mile, and the various smaller camps along the upper river, are caught somewhere in between living town and ghost town. The cabins of the people who left are still standing. The boreal forest is steadily reclaiming them.

Travelers who paddle the Yukon describe lights in windows of cabins long abandoned, smoke from chimneys with no one tending the fire, and the unmistakable sound of voices carried over the water from places no living person should be. (Sound travels weirdly on a river that wide. So does explanation.)

This is the kind of trip where the Alaska ghosts are a function of the landscape itself. Eagle is reachable by road in summer (the Taylor Highway, end of the line), so you do not need to be a serious paddler to get a feel for it. The Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve visitor center in Eagle is a good first stop, and the National Park Service rangers there have heard most of the stories.

9. The Abandoned Naval Base at Adak

If you have ever seen the show The Walking Dead, then you already know what Adak feels like. From the moment you walk out of the airport, you feel like you are on one of the show’s sets. Virtually no people. An entirely abandoned town. A decommissioned naval base sprawling out in every direction. It is the most haunted place I have ever been, and it is the one entry on this list I can speak to firsthand.

Adak sits in the middle of the Aleutian chain, closer to Russia than to most of the lower 48. It used to house ten thousand US Navy personnel during the Cold War. The base shut down in 1997. About 80 people live there now, surrounded by the hulks of empty barracks, abandoned officers’ housing, an enormous decommissioned hospital, a mess hall, a chapel, a movie theater, and a network of underground tunnels where the locals politely encouraged me to enter, and which I politely declined.

What the Island Feels Like

The whole island feels like it is half between worlds. You walk past two-story buildings with the curtains still in the windows. The wind never stops. Fog rolls in fast enough that you can be in clear sun and lose all visibility in the time it takes to walk to your truck. Signs warn about unexploded ordnance from the WWII era. We filmed there for a week and I left a little jumpier than when I arrived.

I do not know if there are Alaska ghosts on Adak in the technical sense. What I know is that the locals have stories, that the old hospital in particular is a building nobody wants to be inside alone, and that I would not want to spend a night in any of those structures by myself. (The full Adak story, including the rat-tail artist and the bar we went to once, is in our Adak guide.)

A Note on Alaska Native Traditions

Many Alaska Native traditions, across Iñupiat, Yup’ik, Athabaskan, Tlingit, Haida, Aleut, and Alutiiq cultures, hold that the land remembers. Places carry presence and memory. The boundary between the living and the dead is thinner than the standard Western framing assumes.

It would be a mistake to flatten those beliefs into the same category as a haunted-hotel anecdote. They are not folklore. These are still-living traditions held by people who are still here. So a quick note. If you visit any of these places, treat them as somebody’s home, somebody’s history, and somebody’s grief. The ghost-tourism framing works best when it stays in its lane (gold rush characters, military bases, abandoned mines) and steps carefully around anything that is genuinely sacred to the people who were here first.

The best Alaska ghosts stories, in my experience, are not the ones you go looking for. They are the ones the place chooses to tell you.

Pro Tips for Visiting Alaska Ghosts and Haunted Places

Late September through mid-October is the practical sweet spot. Most ghost tours run through Halloween. Winter shuts a lot of them down. Summer is too bright (Alaska sun in July does not cooperate with a haunted vibe).
Skagway is the best single base if you want a concentrated ghost-tourism trip. The Red Onion, Soapy Smith’s parlor, and the Pioneer Cemetery are all walkable from each other.
The Anchorage Hotel is the easiest starting point if you are flying in. Book a room, ask about the log, walk over to Snow City Cafe for breakfast. (We also have a piece on Anchorage Airport restaurants if you have a long layover before the rest of your trip.)
For the genuinely remote sites (Kennecott, Eagle, Adak), plan ahead. These are not weekend trips. Adak in particular is logistically serious, expensive to reach, and the weather does what it wants.
Bring a layer more than you think you’ll need. The cold in these places is not always weather.
For broader context on Alaska’s myths, legends, and folk history, our 100 Fun Facts About Alaska piece has a section dedicated to it that pairs well with this one.

FAQ: Alaska Ghosts

What is the most famous of the Alaska ghosts?

The most famous Alaska ghost story is probably the one tied to the Historic Anchorage Hotel, which has maintained a guest-written ghost log for decades. The single most documented event, however, is the sinking of the SS Princess Sophia in 1918, in which more than 350 people aboard died and which is still tied to reports of unexplained activity over the wreck site.

Are Alaska ghosts real, or is this just tourism?

It is both. Alaska has a documented hard history (gold rush violence, maritime disasters, abandoned military bases, indigenous displacement) that produces the kind of stories ghost tours are built on. Whether you believe in literal Alaska ghosts or you read this as folklore tied to real places, the underlying history is genuine, and the experience of standing in these buildings is genuine.

Are there guided Alaska ghosts tours?

Yes. The most established are in Skagway (the Red Onion Saloon and the National Park Service’s Soapy Smith parlor anchor multiple walking tours) and Anchorage (where local operators run downtown ghost walks that include the Historic Anchorage Hotel). Fairbanks and Juneau also have seasonal tours. Most of them run from Memorial Day weekend through Halloween.

What town in Alaska has the most ghosts?

By concentration of stories per resident, Skagway is the standard answer. Population around 1,200, more documented gold rush ghost stories than most cities ten times its size, and an entire downtown that looks more or less the way it did in 1899.

Is Kennecott safe to visit?

Yes. The site is now part of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, and the National Park Service runs guided tours of the mill that handle the safety concerns. Going inside the buildings on your own is not allowed for good reason. (Some of those structures are over a century old and have not been heated since 1938.) The town of McCarthy nearby has lodging and food.

Can you visit the abandoned naval base on Adak?

You can visit Adak. The flight from Anchorage runs a few times a week on Alaska Airlines, and the Adak Island Inn is the main lodging option. Walking around most of the abandoned base buildings is not encouraged for safety reasons (asbestos, structural decay, unexploded ordnance in marked areas). The full breakdown, including what is and is not advisable, is in our Adak guide.

Article Overview: Alaska Ghosts and the Last Frontier’s Most Haunted Places

Why Trust Us When Tracking Down Alaska Ghosts