Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
The Mason Block went up in 1890 on the Fairhaven side of the bay, a four-story brick pile meant to look permanent in a town that was still arguing with itself about how long the boom would last. The first tenants were the kind of businesses a new city wanted on a letterhead: Fagan’s, the Great Northern Express office, Fairhaven Pharmacy on the street, doctors and club rooms above. The Cascade Club took space upstairs. Captain Grahame, who had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade and then somehow survived Fairhaven, was among the members. On August 14, 1895, after a lecture at the Fairhaven Hotel, Mark Twain came through the club rooms. The building has been a lot of things since. It is Sycamore Square now. The Black Cat occupies the corner that used to sell dry goods and later sold crepes.
Flora Blakely died in the building on March 15, 1892. She was thirty-three. She lived on the fourth floor with her husband, town marshal Joseph Blakely, and their son Roy. Their daughter Kay had died in 1890, at ten, in Brownsville, Oregon, the same year the family moved north. Flora’s sister Retta had died in 1888 in an Oregon institution. The Fairhaven paper ran a thin obituary. The coroner wrote “disease of the brain.” The illness had lasted about a week. Unlike neighboring entries in the same register, no attending physician is named. The funeral was held in the Mason Block. Those are the lines that survive. The rest is the space people have been talking into for more than a century.
Joseph remarried. Roy was sent to grandparents in Oregon. Joseph later served as sheriff in Pendleton. None of that is a verdict. People who like a closed story have wondered, out loud and in print, whether a marshal’s household on the fourth floor of a new brick building should have produced a thicker file. Wondering is not evidence. The record does not say that anyone killed Flora Blakely. It says she died after a short illness, that the coroner used a phrase that covered a great deal of nineteenth-century uncertainty, and that the town buried her from the same address where she had lived.
The green lady arrives later, as these figures do, once the building has had time to change hands and the original tenants are names on a plaque. Kitchen staff at the Black Cat have described a woman in period clothes, sometimes specified as a green velvet dress, standing where the old residential floors would have looked toward the bay. Chairs in one of the upper rooms are said to end the night facing the water no matter how they were left. Two psychics, working separately and years apart, told versions of the same image: a woman in green leaving the fourth-floor balcony, falling or jumping. Independent is not the same as documented. It is how the tale hardened into a costume.
Matthew Thuney, writing in the Herald about the Fairhaven circuit, added a second figure that has nothing to do with Flora: a phantom bartender at the Black Cat, the sort of after-hours employee who is always just leaving the room you entered. Tour talk braids the two. The building can hold both without either becoming a proof. The Cascade Club is gone. The pharmacy is gone. The doctors who rented the upper halls are gone. What remains is a brick address that has been in continuous commercial use since the railroad still mattered, and a death notice that is shorter than the gossip it generated.
Walk the square in daylight and you get brick, a restaurant, and a view that Fairhaven sold hard in 1890. The green dress came later. So did the story that she left from the balcony. Flora Blakely’s week in March 1892 is the only part in a public record, and even that record is thin. The rest is what a port town does with a death it never fully explained.