Emerald City Halloween: Seattle's historic obsession with spirits

Tomorrow is Halloween, which means ghosts and the supernatural are back in the spotlight. Now more than a century ago, Spiritualism it was all the rage amongst many in the Emerald City here. And tonight we are taking you back to a time when Seattle was just as fascinated with the afterlife as it was with the future. One of Seattle's founding most prominent families were spiritualists into free love seances talking to the dead. Would I love to have been like a fly on the wall for those seances. Imagine stepping into the parlor of a stately Seattle mansion more than a century ago. A home fit for someone like millionaire mayor Henry Yesler. I have to imagine folks would be in their best, in their top hats, in their furs, in their jewels. Bulls. but the most anticipated guests have not arrived, at least not from this world. Kind of what you see on movies, people sitting around a round table. There at the center, a medium. Someone believed to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. Seems far-fetched, right? In today's skyscraper-lined Seattle, but back then. Spiritualism was really popular in America between the 1850s to about the 1920s, 1930s. A lot of mediums and people that practiced alternative medicine, they were kind of intermeshed with each other, would rent rooms in the hotels down here in Pioneer Square. Author and historian Brad Holden says you could open the post Post-Intelligencer and spot them. Clairvoyance, one after another. Right beneath church announcements, psychic societies. The basic tenet of spiritualism is that after you die, your soul becomes a spirit and lives on, and that people that are still living can communicate with those in the spirit world. And as Abby Armato with the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation explains. And spiritualism too at its core is about grief and about connecting to people that we've loved and lost. And it is believed that This is how Henry and Sarah Yesler got involved. So the Yeslers were a very unconventional couple, especially for back then. The couple came under the influence of an astrologer named William Henry Chaney. They eventually fell under his spell after their son died. They had a 15-year-old son who died. They were grief-stricken. So it was an easy belief for them to follow. And his connection to the Yeslers, it led to one more unexpected chapter. Chaney became involved with a friend of Sarah's who later followed him to San Francisco. They had a son together. He eventually abandoned the family, but the son would later grow up to be Jack London. Yes. The future author of The Call of the Wild. It's a story full of astonishing connections. But more than a century later, there's one link that still hits close to home. And in some ways I feel like maybe we haven't moved as far away from it as we maybe feel like we have or thought we had. I think about the Ouija board, which came out of the spiritualism movement and then became a mass marketed game. Beyond the parlor tricks and ghost stories, there's something more human at the heart of it all. For the Yeslers, it was the loss of their son and the hope that, well, maybe death didn't have to mean goodbye. And so I think to take those, what I feel like are often natural human instincts to want to be whisked away from reality and then adding that layer of grief for the Esslers, I feel like, why not? Reporting in Seattle, Lauren Donovan, Fox 13 News. You are courting danger messing with that Ouija board. I know. Well, I was just telling David something we haven't shared before is we had a little moment doing that Ouija board, and it was in the old Stimson Green Mansion. Right now, there's only about four or five remaining mansions in the First Hill neighborhood. It used to be littered with mansions, and this one is fully intact, and it's very spooky. And I did attend a mock seance there a couple nights ago. Okay, what did the Ouija board say? I don't know. It didn't seem very happy. I'll just say that David. You're messing with demons. Look out. Great story. You can't be messing with demons. Happy Halloween.