HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Alaska's oldest building, a c.1808 Russian warehouse
101 Marine Way East, Kodiak, AK 99615
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Museum admission; children typically admitted free. See the museum website for current rates and hours.
Access
Limited Access
Historic two-story log-and-frame building on the Kodiak waterfront; interior stairs to the upper floor.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1808 · Oldest Standing Building in Alaska · Russian-American Company History · National Historic Landmark
The building that houses the Kodiak History Museum was raised by the Russian-American Company between roughly 1805 and 1808 as a magazin, a warehouse for the sea-otter pelts that drove the Russian fur trade in Alaska. It is the oldest standing building in the state and one of the oldest structures of the Russian colonial period in North America. For decades it served the company's operations on Kodiak Island, the early center of Russian activity in Alaska.
After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, the building passed to the Alaska Commercial Company and continued as a trading station. In the early twentieth century, around 1911, it became the home of the Erskine family, and it is from that period that the alternative name Erskine House comes. The Erskines lived in the building for years before it eventually transitioned into a museum.
The museum today interprets Alutiiq culture and the Russian-American and American commercial periods of Kodiak's history. It operated for many years as the Baranov Museum, named for Alexander Baranov, the first chief manager of Russian America, before adopting the Kodiak History Museum name. The building's age and its waterfront setting on Marine Way make it the anchor of Kodiak's historic district.
Sources
The Kodiak History Museum's haunting account centers on a documented killing. In 1886, when the building served as an Alaska Commercial Company station, Benjamin McIntyre was eating dinner with visitors when he was shot from behind through a dining-room window. According to the museum's collections manager, Michael Bach, the killer was never identified; one theory held that the shooter was a trapper McIntyre had declined to outfit after two failed expeditions.
The case gained a second chapter years later. According to historian Susan Jeffrey's account and the memoir of Carolyn Erskine Andrews, a human skeleton was found in the woods some time after the murder, with a weapon nearby, though the discovery never conclusively closed the case. The story became attached to the building, and Natalia Pestrikoff, a housekeeper for the Erskine family, reportedly did not want to be in the building after dark because of talk of McIntyre's ghost.
The museum does not present itself as a paranormal attraction. Bach attributes the building's atmosphere to its age, the settling of an old log structure, and wind, rather than to anything supernatural. The McIntyre story is told as part of the building's history, an unsolved nineteenth-century killing in the oldest standing structure in Alaska.
Notable Entities
Tour the oldest standing building in Alaska, built by the Russian-American Company as a sea-otter-pelt warehouse. Exhibits cover Alutiiq and Russian-American history, the building's later life as the Erskine family home, and the 1886 killing of Benjamin McIntyre on the site.
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