HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
A 1906 high school carved from the gutted shell of an 1891 railroad hotel, with paid interior tours and a ghost tied to the widows once displaced from the ravine below.
111 N E St, Tacoma, WA 98403
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Approximately $35 per person for the 90-minute interior tour through Pretty Gritty Tours; attic and sub-basement not ADA accessible.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-story building; attic and sub-basement areas require ducking, climbing, and are not elevator-accessible. Lower floors accessible.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1906 · Originally designed in 1891 as a luxury Châteauesque hotel for the Northern Pacific Railway · Gutted by fire on October 11, 1898; walls survived · Converted to Tacoma High School by architect Frederick Heath, opening September 10, 1906 · Stadium Bowl created in 1910 by filling Old Woman's Gulch with 147 feet of hydraulic fill · Featured in 1999 film '10 Things I Hate About You'
The building now known as Stadium High School began as something else entirely. In 1891, the Northern Pacific Railway and Tacoma Land Company commissioned architects Hewitt and Hewitt to design a grand Châteauesque hotel overlooking Puget Sound. Construction started, but the Panic of 1893 collapsed the financial backers and the project was abandoned, leaving an enormous masonry shell sitting incomplete on a bluff above a ravine locals called Old Woman's Gulch.
On October 11, 1898, a major fire gutted the building. The walls remained standing but the interior was destroyed; the Northern Pacific salvaged roughly 40,000 Roman bricks manufactured by Gladding McBean and repurposed them for train stations in Montana and Idaho.
The Tacoma School District purchased the ruins on February 19, 1904, for conversion into a public high school. Architect Frederick Heath oversaw the redesign, adapting the French chateau exterior around a conventional school interior. The school opened September 10, 1906, as Tacoma High School. The adjacent ravine was filled with 147 feet of earth via hydraulic sluicing to create the Stadium Bowl in 1910, displacing a community of elderly women — widows of fishermen and longshoremen — who had been squatting in shanties along the gulch.
The building has been in continuous use as a public high school ever since. A major renovation in 2005-2006 included seismic upgrades and historical restoration. It gained a wider cultural profile as a filming location for the 1999 film "10 Things I Hate About You." Pretty Gritty Tours has offered ticketed interior tours of the 195,000-square-foot building since at least 2015.
Sources
The haunting associated with Stadium High School is not located inside the building but in the geography immediately below it. Old Woman's Gulch — the forested ravine that was filled in 1910 to create the Stadium Bowl — had been home to a loose community of women described in period sources as fishermen's widows. When Frederick Heath's stadium plan required hydraulic fill, the residents were evicted; according to a Grit City Magazine account, at least one woman refused to leave until the mud poured in through her back door.
Local tradition, documented in US Ghost Adventures coverage and elsewhere, holds that a woman in black appears near the bottom of the bluff below the school, at the edge of what was the gulch. Witnesses describe seeing the figure for a few seconds before she disappears. The figure is connected narratively to the widows — women who, the story goes, had spent years watching the water for ships that never returned.
Pretty Gritty Tours' Stadium High School tour covers the building's interior, including the attic and sub-basement, and touches on the ghost lore alongside the architectural history. The paranormal claims are folkloric rather than tied to a documented death on the property.
Notable Entities
Where this legend is told
Pretty Gritty Tours leads groups through the building from basement to attic, including the swimming pool, underground tunnels, and four-story attic. The tour covers the building's history from failed railroad hotel to active high school. Children under 10 are not permitted in the attics.
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