Haunted things to do in Spokane
Looking for haunted things to do in Spokane? These 5 are the real ones — The Historic Davenport Hotel, Bing Crosby Theater (formerly The Met) and Spokane Ghost Tours (Two Dog City Tours / Chet Caskey) among them — actual dark-history sites and genuinely unsettling places, not a seasonal haunted house with a fog machine. They spread across Downtown Spokane, Downtown & Hillyard, Spokane, Wallace, Idaho and Colfax / Oakesdale, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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The Historic Davenport Hotel
Built by entrepreneur Louis Davenport after the Great Fire of 1889, this opulent 1914 hotel is anchored by a real tragedy: on August 18, 1920, New York widow Ellen McNamara stepped onto the glass panels of the lobby's pagoda skylight and fell to her death. For decades night-shift staff and guests have reported a woman in 1920s dress peering over the mezzanine railing toward the lobby below. The hotel's own communications director has gone on record about the recurring sightings.
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Bing Crosby Theater (formerly The Met)
This 1915 theater opened as the Clemmer movie house, later ran as "The Met," and in 2006 was renamed for Spokane's own Bing Crosby. It carries two long-told resident ghosts. One is a former stage manager said to have died of a heart attack on a backstage ottoman and still glimpsed on the green-room divan; the other is a young woman tied to a fatal plunge from the balcony, said to have jumped after a lover never came to meet her. Local TV stations have aired segments on the sightings, and ghost-tour groups gather beneath the marquee.
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Spokane Ghost Tours (Two Dog City Tours / Chet Caskey)
Run since 2012 by local historian Chet Caskey, this small outfit leads walking and bicycle ghost tours through Downtown and the gritty old Hillyard railroad neighborhood, plus seven different two-hour bus tours of Spokane's cemeteries and historic districts. Caskey is a fixture of local TV, radio and print for his seasonal Ghost Tours, and the tours lean on real Spokane history rather than canned scares. Walking and bike tours book through Spokane Parks & Rec and bus tours through Inland Empire Tours, and tours operate nearly year-round except deep winter and the August heat.
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Sierra Silver Mine Tour
About 80 miles east of Spokane off I-90, Wallace sits in the richest silver district on earth, and this tour sends you underground into the main drift of a real mine led by a retired miner. A classic narrated trolley carries you through historic Wallace, a mining town founded in 1884 and riddled with dangerous, often deadly labor history, before you descend into the rock. The entire town is listed on the National Register, and the dark history of cave-ins and labor wars is woven through the guides' stories.
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Steptoe Butte State Park
Steptoe Butte is a freak of deep time: a 400-million-year-old quartzite island poking up through the much younger basalt and silt of the Palouse, once the literal edge of the North American continent. A narrow road spirals all the way around the cone to a 3,612-foot summit with 200-mile views over the rolling wheat hills, with Mount Spokane visible 70 miles north on clear days. A grand hotel built by eccentric pioneer 'Cashup' Davis once crowned the top before burning down in 1911. Geologists even named the landform type 'steptoe' after it: an old rock outcrop surrounded by newer lava.
Haunted things to do in Spokane — FAQ
Which haunted places & dark-history spots in Spokane are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: The Historic Davenport Hotel, Bing Crosby Theater (formerly The Met) and Spokane Ghost Tours (Two Dog City Tours / Chet Caskey). The Historic Davenport Hotel — Built by entrepreneur Louis Davenport after the Great Fire of 1889, this opulent 1914 hotel is anchored by a real tragedy: on August 18, 1920, New York widow Ellen McNamara stepped onto the glass panels of the lobby's pagoda skylight and fell to her death.
Where in Spokane are they?
Across Downtown Spokane, Downtown & Hillyard, Spokane, Wallace, Idaho and Colfax / Oakesdale. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Spokane?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at The Historic Davenport Hotel, for instance: Order cocktails in the Peacock Room and then wander up to the marble mezzanine to look for the woman who watches the lobby.
How were these haunted places & dark-history spots chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Spokane guide.