Downtown Anchorage's busiest breakfast cafe — housed in the building where travel-agency owner Muriel Pfeil worked before her 1976 car-bomb murder, the only car bombing in Alaska's history.
1034 West 4th Avenue, Anchorage, AK 99501
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Counter-service breakfast and brunch; entrees typically $12-$18. Walk-in only — no reservations.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Single ground floor with paved sidewalk approach; accessible restrooms
Equipment
Photos OK
The wood-frame commercial building at the corner of 4th Avenue and L Street in downtown Anchorage has had several lives. From the early 1970s it housed a travel agency owned by Muriel Pfeil, Jr. — by most accounts the first travel agency in Anchorage. Since 1998, the building has been home to Snow City Cafe, which has grown into one of the busiest breakfast and brunch restaurants in the city, regularly cited in regional and national press coverage of Anchorage's food scene.
The building is best known historically for what happened in front of it. On the morning of September 30, 1976, Muriel Pfeil parked her Volvo station wagon in the public lot across L Street from her office. She crossed to the agency, worked for roughly two hours, then went back to the car to retrieve a new coat she wanted to show her employees. When she opened the door and entered, a bomb planted underneath the hood detonated. The force of the explosion was directed back through the passenger compartment, killing the 41-year-old Pfeil instantly. It was the first — and as of 2026 the only — car bombing in the history of Alaska.
The investigation drew the Anchorage Police Department, the Alaska State Troopers, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the FBI. The primary suspect was Pfeil's ex-husband, Neil Mackay, a prominent Anchorage attorney who had recently lost a custody dispute over the couple's son and had filed for expanded visitation rights only weeks before the bombing. No charges were ever filed in Muriel's death. In 1985, Pfeil's brother Robert — who had pursued his own line of inquiry into the case — was shot three times by hired gunmen and later died of complications; Mackay was tried for arranging the shooting and acquitted. The Muriel Pfeil case remains officially open and unsolved.
The cafe and the building's owners have not commercialized the Pfeil story. The Anchorage Daily News published a long-form retrospective on the case in 2021, and downtown ghost-tour operators include the site on their itineraries with the parking lot across the street as the actual bombing location.
Sources
The Snow City Cafe ghost story is one of the most-told paranormal accounts in Anchorage, and one of the gentlest. According to multiple downtown ghost-tour operators and the Haunt Jaunts feature on the cafe, the haunting is attributed to Muriel Pfeil, the building's pre-1976 occupant. The phenomena are domestic and water-focused: faucets in the kitchen and restrooms that turn themselves on after closing, dripping that resumes after a tap has been firmly shut off, and an intermittent sense of someone working alongside the closing crew.
A longtime closing employee, referenced in both Haunt Jaunts and local ghost-tour patter, is said to have routinely talked to 'Ms. Muriel' aloud during cleanup — most often a fond, mild reprimand to stop playing with the water. The behavior is consistent enough across years of accounts that it has become part of the cafe's informal lore among staff, even as the ownership has never marketed the building's haunted reputation.
The paranormal narrative is anchored in a real and unresolved act of violence: the 1976 car-bomb murder of a mother of three in the parking lot across L Street, almost certainly arranged by a domestic partner from whom she had separated. Ghost-tour operators who tell the story generally do so with restraint, naming Muriel, naming her ex-husband, naming the children who survived her, and pointing to the bombing site across the street rather than dramatizing the explosion. The case is a cold case, not a campfire story. Visitors interested in the broader context can read the Anchorage Daily News's 2021 retrospective and the long-form coverage by Alaska true-crime writers Lizbeth Meredith and Leland Hale.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk in for breakfast or brunch at Snow City Cafe, which has occupied this corner of 4th Avenue and L Street since 1998. The building's earlier life as Muriel Pfeil's travel agency, and the 1976 car bombing in the parking lot across the street, are openly discussed by long-time staff if asked.
Snow City Cafe is one of the most-cited stops on downtown Anchorage ghost-walking tours. Operators tell the Pfeil cold-case story on the sidewalk outside, with the parking lot across L Street — the actual bombing site — as the visual reference point.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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