Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
The Bush House opened in Index in 1898 as a mining-and-railroad hotel, granite on a Skykomish River town that existed because the mountains were being emptied of ore and the Great Northern needed a hole through the Cascades. Index is still small. The inn still takes guests. That combination — granite, a river, a working porch — is why the building survived the mines.
Room 9 is Annabelle’s room, or Anabel’s, depending on the brochure. The story as it is usually told: she was informed that her miner was dead in a flood; she killed herself; he walked in alive. Some versions kill him too, for symmetry. The inn’s own timeline, the part that can be checked against registers and town histories, does not confirm her. She is a room number and a plot. The plot is older than Index. It attaches to coastal and mountain hotels wherever a man could drown and a woman could be left with the news.
Perfume and cigars and furniture that is not where it was left are the supporting reports, the sensory leftover of a house that has been taking strangers since McKinley was president. They do not become Annabelle. They become the smell of an old hotel. Sometimes that is the same sentence in a guest book.
The tale circulated through innkeepers, then through the mountain-loop haunt lists, then through the comparison — which the house cannot fully escape — to every other “bride who jumped” room on the Sound. Manresa Castle’s Room 306 is the same plot with salt water. That does not mean nobody died in Index. It means the story is a type, and Room 9 is where this type sits. The 1898 granite house was a miners’ and railroad hotel before it was a destination inn; the Skykomish did drown men, and the mines did kill them, and news in a river town traveled at the speed of whoever walked into the lobby. That is enough weather to grow an Annabelle. It is not the same as a register line.
What is unknown is whether an Annabelle or Anabel in the 1898–1910 registers matches the suicide. Floods on the Skykomish are real. Mining deaths are real. A particular woman’s particular mistake about a particular man is the part the inn has not nailed to a year.
Index is still a granite town with a hotel. Book a room if you want a room. Ask for 9 if you want the story. The river will still be loud enough to explain a great deal of what people hear at night.