Anchorage's Oldest Hotel, Built When the City Was a Tent Camp
330 E Street, Anchorage, AK 99501
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Overnight rates typically $150-$250 depending on season. Walk-in lobby visits are free.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved downtown sidewalk; multi-floor building with elevator
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1916 · National Register of Historic Places · Anchorage's Oldest Hotel · Alaska Railroad Era · Unsolved 1921 Sturgus Murder
Anchorage was less than a year old when the original Anchorage Hotel opened in September 1916. The Alaska Engineering Commission, which was building the Alaska Railroad, had laid out the townsite the previous summer. The first iteration of the hotel was a wood-frame structure intended as the central social and meeting space for the new town.
The Annex — the building that operates as a hotel today — was completed in 1936 in the Art Deco style. It served as expansion lodging for the original hotel until the original 1916 wood structure was demolished in the 1980s. The Annex was rehabilitated and reopened as the Historic Anchorage Hotel and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
The hotel's most consequential historical event occurred outside its doors. On the evening of February 20, 1921, John J. Sturgus, the city's first chief of police, was found shot with his own service revolver in an alley behind the Anchorage Drug store and Liberty Cafe, near 4th Avenue and E Street, a few yards from the hotel entrance. Witnesses reported hearing only one shot, but the revolver held two empty cartridges; Sturgus had left his billy club, handcuffs, money, and identification at home that day. The case was treated as Alaska's oldest open homicide for nearly a century. In 2024, Ghost Tours of Anchorage owner Rick Goodfellow and historian Laura Koenig published research concluding that the evidence is most consistent with suicide that was contemporaneously covered up. The case is no longer formally classified as an unsolved murder by the historians who reopened it, though it remains technically open in Anchorage Police Department records.
The Annex operates today as a 26-room boutique hotel in downtown Anchorage and maintains a guest-contributed ghost log at the front desk.
Sources
The Anchorage Daily News covered a 2012 paranormal investigation at the hotel in which a visiting psychic estimated thirty-six distinct presences in the building. The investigators worked with hotel staff and recorded sessions in several second-floor rooms. The story remains the most cited contemporary news coverage of the hotel's reputation.
Rooms 215 and 217 produce the most consistent guest reports. The phenomena are unusually domestic: televisions cycling on and off, the bathroom faucet starting unprompted, the shower curtain swaying when no draft is present. Staff direct curious guests to the ghost log at the front desk, where these events are recorded by guests over years of stays.
A young girl in period dress is the figure most often described in the second-floor hallway. Her identity is not known. A separate male figure is associated with the lobby and front-door area; he is most often connected to the 1921 Sturgus shooting in the adjacent alley.
The staff approaches the hotel's reputation with restraint. The lore is part of the property's character but is not used as a primary marketing pitch, and concierge staff will assist guests interested in either the hotel's ghost stories or its conventional history of early-Anchorage hospitality.
Notable Entities
Book a room in the surviving 1936 annex of the city's oldest operating hotel. Rooms 215 and 217 are most often cited in the hotel's ghost log, where guests record televisions turning on and off, water faucets running, and a young girl seen in the second-floor hallway. The hotel encourages guests to read and contribute to the log at the front desk.
US Ghost Adventures and other operators include the Historic Anchorage Hotel as a stop on a downtown ghost-walking tour that covers the 1921 unsolved murder of Police Chief John J. Sturgus and other early Anchorage hauntings.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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