A 1926 Belltown Hotel Where the Jazz Never Stopped
2000 4th Ave, Seattle, WA 98121
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Room rates vary seasonally. Check hotelandra.com for current pricing. No additional charge for the haunted reputation.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved, urban hotel with elevator access
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1926 · Prohibition-Era History · Seattle Hospitality Heritage · Women's Army Corps WWII
The building at 2000 4th Avenue opened in 1926 as the Claremont Hotel, positioned at the heart of what was then Seattle's most dynamic commercial district. Belltown in the 1920s and early 1930s occupied a peculiar cultural position: legitimately fashionable and simultaneously a conduit for the bootlegging networks that supplied Prohibition-era Seattle with Canadian whiskey.
The Claremont catered to both worlds without apparent embarrassment. Seattle's upper class used the hotel as a gathering point; so did the gangsters and rumrunners who moved liquor down from British Columbia. The hotel's documented history from this period is sparse — Prohibition-era establishments rarely kept meticulous records of their less legal amenities — but its reputation as a jazz-era social hub is well-established.
During World War II, the building served as a transfer station for the Women's Army Corps, shifting its character entirely. After the war, it returned to hotel use and operated under various identities for decades before new ownership brought significant renovation. In 2004, the hotel was renamed Hotel Ändra and refurbished with a Scandinavian design vocabulary — wool textiles, warm wood tones, and clean architectural lines that contrast deliberately with the building's more turbulent past.
Today the hotel is part of the Accor MGallery collection. It sits six blocks from Pike Place Market and adjacent to the Seattle Art Museum's sculpture park, making it a practical base for visitors to the city's downtown core.
Sources
The phenomena at Hotel Ändra are concentrated on the ninth floor and consistent enough across unconnected witnesses that the hotel's own staff have developed informal protocols for responding to them.
Guests file noise complaints. Staff respond, go to the ninth floor, find nothing. The noise resumes after they leave. This pattern has repeated over multiple years and across multiple management regimes. The sounds are described specifically: not a vague ambient disturbance, but a recognizable social gathering — voices, what sounds like swing jazz being played live, and occasionally the sharp crack of breaking glass.
Paranormal researchers who have investigated the site characterize the phenomenon as a residual imprint — a replay of a specific past event rather than an intelligent presence. The original Claremont's Prohibition-era parties would have been boisterous enough, and the building's construction date aligns with the era the sounds supposedly reproduce.
A separate, more individual account involves an apparition described as a woman in 1920s dress — a flapper, in the parlance of the witnesses — seen alone on the ninth floor, disconnected from the party sounds. She appears and does not interact.
The paperweight incident is more difficult to categorize. A visitor reported watching a paperweight lift off a glass-topped desk and crash back down onto the surface hard enough to make a sharp sound. The account comes from a single witness.
The death of a female employee who fell from the hotel's upper floors in the 1960s adds a documented human tragedy to the site's history. The circumstances were not publicly elaborated at the time, and no further detail has emerged from available records.
Notable Entities
Book a room at this Scandinavian-themed boutique hotel in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, formerly the Claremont Hotel — a 1926 building where Seattle's upper class mingled with Prohibition-era rumrunners. The ninth floor is where most of the reported activity concentrates: guests and staff describe hearing fragments of a riotous party, period jazz music, and the sound of breaking glass emanating from empty rooms.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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