The story
The Butterworth Building rises on First Avenue above Seattle's Pike Place Market district, built in 1903 for the Butterworth & Sons undertaking firm and described as the first building in the country purpose-designed as a mortuary; its floors handled the city's dead through epidemic years and the aftermath of the Klondike era, with an elevator said to be among the city's first serving the sombre traffic between floors. When the mortuary moved on, the building cycled through offices and, at street and basement level, restaurants and bars — most famously Kells Irish pub in later decades — and its ghost lore became Pioneer Square-adjacent Seattle's richest: bartenders, staff and patrons describing a red-haired girl's figure, glasses and bottles moving or shattering, faces in mirrors, voices, and figures in period dress, while upper-floor tenants told of footsteps and doors. Seattle's ghost tours made the building a fixture. These accounts should be presented as staff and tour-era telling around a genuinely funereal history, the real dead it served treated with respect. Current tenants and access vary; confirm before publishing.