One of the most impressive buildings in Skagway is the Golden North Hotel. When the Corringtons bought it several years ago, they did a complete restoration to return it to its most historic and beautiful appearance – the late 1800s. It has not been open as a hotel for a few years, but it is still in great shape, and they recently gave us a tour.
It was built in 1898 as a 2-story hotel. After the gold rush was over, the city decided to consolidate the remaining business on Broadway Street. So in 1908 the hotel was moved to its present location on Broadway, a third story was added, it was renamed as the Golden North Hotel, and the old hotel that had been called the Golden North was moved elsewhere.
The restored hotel is really beautiful. Each room is dedicated to a famous Skagway family, and every room is decorated differently. They have beautiful floral wallpaper, and there are vases of flowers and mirrors everywhere. Most of the rooms have attached baths with claw-footed tubs, pedestal sinks and china bowl-and-ewer sets.
President Harding stayed here in Room 22 when he visited Alaska in 1923, about two weeks before he died. The legend about that visit is that he brought his mistress (instead of or in addition to his wife), then died mysteriously of “food poisoning” right afterwards.
There is one room dedicated to Jefferson “Soapy” Smith and one dedicated to Frank Reid (who shot and killed each other) - and those rooms share a bathroom.
The Gold North’s main claim to fame is its ghost, Mary. She was a young lady who came to the original Golden North to wait for her fiancé, who was looking for gold. She either got a deadly case of pneumonia, or she learned her fiancé had died and lost her grip on reality. Either way, she stayed in the hotel room until she died - maybe a year or so. And apparently she’s still there. Of course the current Golden North isn’t the actual hotel she would have stayed in, but the theory is that she's here because is the physical location where she said she would wait for her true love. Mary seems to be friendly – there aren’t any stories of her trying to scare anyone, although sometimes someone feels like they are almost choking for breath – sort of like a young woman might feel if she had pneumonia. There are, in fact, some stories of her doing good. One time someone decided to move a bucket of water that had been sitting on the floor for several days. She started downstairs with the bucket but found her path blocked by stuff, so she turned to go another way. As she opened the door to that staircase, she saw the banister catch on fire, from a carelessly disposed-of cigarette. Because she was at just the right place at just the right time and just happened to have a bucket of water, she was able to put out the fire before it could spread. Some people assumed that Mary helped set in motion a chain of events that saved “her” hotel, although personally I'd be more inclined to attribute it to the grace of God.
Mary's room was restored using a wallpaper that she may have picked out herself. The developers left a book of wallpaper patterns in what seems to be her room while they were doing something else. When they walked back into the room, the book was open to a specific page, so that's what they used. Here's Mary's room:
There was an exorcism in one of the other rooms, but not for Mary. Apparently there were a couple of ghosts that weren’t as friendly as Mary, so they were invited to leave.
