Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
The Quinby Building sits on the 1000 block of Harris in Fairhaven, a commercial pile that backs the Village Green. Jalapeño’s, Sweet Bellingham, and a rotation of offices have used the floors. It is the kind of block that looks settled from the green and busy from the sidewalk. The cornice is older than the current tenants. That is true of most of Harris.
Matthew Thuney, who has taught a paranormal class at Whatcom Community College and written the Fairhaven circuit for the Herald, is the named collector of the Quinby reports. Chairs move. Keyboards and printers go on without a hand. Babies crying in a building that is not a nursery. A clock left the wall and hit an employee; the telling is careful to say it was not an earthquake. Those are staff stories, which is to say they are the stories a working building tells about itself when the register is closed.
None of the public versions attach a historical death to a particular suite with a file that would satisfy a skeptic. The Quinby is a commercial address with a long Fairhaven life, not a ruin and not a single-family tragedy with a plaque. The Village Green behind it is a civic lawn. The combination — offices, food, a green — is ordinary. The reports are what make the address travel.
The tale circulated through Thuney’s class and columns, then through employees who had already been exchanging the clock story, then onto the same haunted-Fairhaven lists that harvest anything on Harris. A flying clock is a good object. It is physical. It hit someone. It still is not a biography of the dead. Fairhaven’s 1000 block has been retail and offices long enough that a printer firing at midnight can be a power strip or a story, and the building has not been required to decide. Jalapeño’s and Sweet Bellingham are present-tense shops. The Village Green is a lawn with a view of the brick backs. The Quinby sits in that ordinary arrangement and leaks ordinary office weirdness into Thuney’s notes.
What is unknown is the usual commercial unknown: whether the building has a nineteenth-century incident that would explain a crying infant, whether the printers are a power issue, whether the clock had a bad nail. Thuney’s role is documentation of talk, not a coroner’s annex.
Harris Street’s 1000 block is open for lunch. The green is for sitting. The Quinby’s interior life, if it includes a clock that will not stay hung, is a tenant problem and a local legend in that order.