Ketchikan's boardwalk red-light district and ghost-walk centerpiece
Creek Street, Ketchikan, AK 99901
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to walk the public boardwalk; individual museums and the evening ghost walk are ticketed separately.
Access
Limited Access
Elevated wooden boardwalk on pilings over Ketchikan Creek, with stairs connecting to street level.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1903 · Ketchikan Red-Light District · Prohibition Smuggling History · Historic Boardwalk
Creek Street grew up over Ketchikan Creek as the salmon-canning and timber town expanded in the early twentieth century. The buildings stand on pilings above the tidal creek, linked by a boardwalk rather than a street, which is the origin of the local joke that it is the only place where both the fish and the fishermen went up the creek to spawn. For roughly the first half of the century the district operated as Ketchikan's red-light area, with more than two dozen brothels working along the boardwalk.
Prohibition added a second economy to the district. Several of the buildings were fitted with trap doors and hidden spaces used to move bootlegged liquor up the creek by boat at high tide. The combination of the brothels and the smuggling gave Creek Street a reputation that outlasted both. The district's working houses were closed in 1954 when Alaska shut down the legal red-light trade.
After 1954 the buildings passed into other uses. The most famous of them, Dolly's House at No. 24, became a museum preserving the interior of a working brothel. Others became shops, galleries, and small attractions. The boardwalk is now a centerpiece of Ketchikan's cruise-season tourism and a fixed stop on the city's evening ghost walk, which uses the red-light history as its narrative spine.
Sources
The Creek Street ghost stories follow the district's red-light history. On the American Ghost Walks tour, guides describe the spirits of former sporting women remaining among the old brothels, naming figures they call Big Dolly and Black Mary along with, in their phrasing, countless others. The narrative leans on the documented social history of the district rather than on any single dramatic incident.
Local coverage of the ghost walk, including reporting by KTOO and KRBD when the tour launched in 2017, records the more concrete claims that circulate among the boardwalk's current shopkeepers. The most repeated is that displays and small objects in the converted brothels are sometimes found moved or rearranged overnight, with staff describing shadows and noises in the buildings. One guide quoted in the coverage described a general weird energy along the boardwalk.
The phenomena are presented as part of the tour experience and the shopkeepers' anecdotes rather than as investigated events. What gives the stories their hold is the setting: a boardwalk of preserved brothels on pilings over a tidal creek, told after dark, where the history itself supplies most of the atmosphere.
Notable Entities
American Ghost Walks runs an evening walking tour that uses Creek Street as a centerpiece, covering the red-light district's history and the spirits guides associate with the converted brothels, including figures called Big Dolly and Black Mary. The tour meets downtown and runs roughly two hours.
Walk the elevated boardwalk over Ketchikan Creek past the converted brothels, now shops and small museums. Interpretive signs cover the district's red-light era and the salmon that run up the creek below.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Galveston, TX
The Strand Historic District in Galveston was established as the city's commercial core beginning in the 1840s and became one of the most important commercial centers in Texas by the 1870s. The surviving 1877-era iron-front commercial buildings along the Strand survived the September 8, 1900 hurricane that killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in Galveston and destroyed most residential structures on the island. During the recovery period, the Strand district buildings served as mass morgues, triage stations, and temporary housing for survivors, a role documented in local newspaper accounts from September and October 1900.
Cottonwood, AZ
Old Town Cottonwood grew up along the Verde River in central Arizona as a supply and social hub for the copper towns of Jerome and Clarkdale. Its Main Street strip of saloons, hotels, and storefronts boomed during the early 20th century and again during Prohibition, when the district earned a reputation for bootlegging and vice. The historic core has since been restored and is the setting for several locally run ghost walks.
Bowling Green, KY
Bowling Green, established in 1798 as the Warren County seat, carries a Civil War legacy as the Confederate capital of Kentucky from October 1861 to February 1862. The city saw extensive fortification and destruction during the war before its evacuation by Confederate forces ahead of advancing Union troops.