Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
Pike Place Market opened in 1907 because Seattle wanted a place to buy produce without a middleman. Frank and Thomas Goodwin put the stalls on the hill above the waterfront. Arthur Goodwin, Frank’s nephew, later ran the place. The Market is still a market. That is the first fact, and it is the one the haunt industry keeps having to walk around. Fish still fly. The hill still drops to Western. The Butterworth Building, the mortuary file already on this site, still sits in the same grade. A city that put a funeral house and a public market on the same slope should not be surprised that October found the address.
Kikisoblu was a real woman. She was the eldest daughter of Si’ahl, the Suquamish and Duwamish leader the city is named for, and of a Duwamish woman named Ladalia. Catherine Maynard decided Kikisoblu was too good-looking to keep her own name and christened her Princess Angeline, which tells you more about 1850s Seattle than it does about her. She washed laundry. She sold baskets. She stayed in town after the Treaty of Point Elliott told Duwamish people to leave. She died on May 31, 1896, in a cabin on Western Avenue between Pike and Pine. Amos Brown had built her a later house there in 1891. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery, in a canoe-shaped coffin, near Henry Yesler, as she asked. The Market opened eleven years after she was in the ground. Tours put her on the lower stairs because the cabin stood on that slope. They describe a slow-moving figure, sometimes a smell. That is tour copy. She is not a Market mascot, and her life is not a haunting this page gets to close. If Duwamish or Suquamish people ask us to take her off a haunt page, we will.
The rest is stall lore, and it is thinner. A 1993 Seattle Times walk with Michael Yaeger’s Market Ghost Tour — later Mercedes Yaeger’s — stops at Arthur Goodwin in a second-floor library window, a boy in a bead shop who plays with marionettes, and a barber on the lower level who is supposed to have fallen through rotten boards. Lynn Hancock, who ran the Bead Shop, told the Times she had seen a Native woman and a boy, hired a shaman in 1982, and afterward still had the boy. Shakespeare & Co. had a book that would not stay shelved, and baseball cards that vanished behind a deadbolt and then came home. None of that is in a civic record. It is what a stacked market collects when the lower levels are dim and a tour wants a body in every hallway. Linda Hazzard starved people at Olalla. She does not belong in a Market stall just because a tour needed another victim.
The haunt stories spread the usual way: the Yaeger family, newspaper features, Seattle Met, then national lists that treat every public market as a ghost mall. Each retelling adds a corpse. Correcting the Butterworth basement did not slow them down. Treating Kikisoblu as a person instead of a scent will not either. The Market’s own history is the thicker account: the Goodwins, the farmers, the Japanese American stallholders and the internment that emptied those stalls, the 1970s fight to save the Market. That history is also less convenient at 8 p.m. on a Saturday.
What we do not know is the usual Market unknown: whether any particular stall death is the child in the beads, whether anyone ever reported seeing Goodwin in that window before the tours, whether the barber existed outside a script. A working market holds thousands of lives. That does not put all of them in the lower level after closing.
Walk it for the fish. Walk it because the hill is steep and the stalls are still open. The old mortuary is a pub in a former wagon basement. Kikisoblu’s grave is at Lake View, not under a cold column of air. You do not need a ghost ticket to go to the Market.