Merchant's Cafe & Saloon

According to the Seattle Times 'Ghost Hunters Guide to Haunted Bars,' Merchant's Cafe is 'riddled with ghosts' with most activity in the basement. The guide cites a Spooked in Seattle tour during which a ghost reportedly slammed the women's restroom door in the basement, and notes the venue has been investigated by AGHOST (Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma, founded 2001, the oldest paranormal investigation group in the Pacific Northwest) and featured twice on the TV series Dead Files.

The most-cited apparition is a man in the basement with severe burns visible on his face, said to be a casualty of a building fire in 1938. The Seattle Times and multiple independent paranormal investigators (AGHOST/Spooked in Seattle; the Paranormal Road Trippers, who documented a first-hand site visit) report that two children are said to have died in the same 1938 fire, with staff, tour guides, and investigators reporting sounds of children laughing, small shadowy figures in the basement, and a doll left by a visitor 'for the little girl downstairs' that staff report moving location overnight. A 1938 fire and associated deaths cannot be independently corroborated through Seattle Times archives accessible online; these events appear in ghost-tour and investigator coverage but lack a newspaper citation. The paranormal tradition itself — independently documented by named investigators and TV productions — is robustly corroborated.

Additional reported phenomena include the apparition of a woman on the upper floors (sometimes described as a former brothel resident), self-opening and self-closing doors, whispered voices, and the movement of bar glasses and bottles behind the bar. The cafe appears on Spooked in Seattle tours (AGHOST-associated) and was featured in HuffPost's 2016 Pioneer Square coverage. The Merchant's Cafe website itself maintains a 'ghost stories' page.

Because the underlying 1938 fire is not independently documented in newspaper archives, the ghost narratives are best framed as paranormal tradition documented by independent investigators rather than as confirmed historical tragedy.