AFTER THE ARTICLE about the paranormal investigation of the Palace Hotel appeared in the Peninsula Daily News on Sunday, Lorraine Ross wrote to relate her experience of its shady history.
Lorraine, who now lives in Port Angeles, was a newlywed in 1940 when her husband was called up by the Washington State National Guard and assigned to Fort Worden. He was a regimental supply clerk for Battery C, 248th Coast Artillery.
She was an unsophisticated 20-year-old who got a part-time job as an assistant to an accountant, Arthur Boren.
Boren, who was active in local politics, had an office on the second floor of a Water Street hotel; she believes it was the Palace.
Boren handled the Rhododendron Festival funds and major clients in the county, Lorraine said, including the Bishop family farms in Chimacum and the American Legion post.
“I remember counting out sacks of tokens for distribution when the first sales tax began at 1 mill,” she writes.
Each token was worth a mill, or a tenth of a cent, and was used to pay taxes.
Lorraine said she was meticulous with figures, always proving her computations, which she did by hand, not machine.
When something didn’t balance, she would show it to Boren, who would take it and “fix” it, she recalls.
For working 8 a.m. to noon weekdays, she was paid $30 a month — $8 more than her husband’s starting pay at the fort SEmD plus lunch.
“Mr. Boren always brought me a sandwich and pop for lunch before leaving,” she wrote.
“My desk was in the lobby window, looking down at the street and down the full length of the hallway of the second story. About noon I would see young women in bathrobes taking turns going to the bathroom. I assume there was only one on the floor as was the custom in old hotels.”
“It was many years later that I realized the girls were evidence of a brothel operation.”
Lorraine adds: “I am 90 years old now and much wiser in the ways of the world.”
Her husband’s enlistment lasted only a year, she said, and they moved back to their home in Snohomish.
The man in the basement
The investigation of the Palace Hotel also has a prologue.
In January, Susan Euro, owner of The Wine Seller with spouse Joe Euro, was putting away boxes of Christmas decorations in the store’s storage area in the basement.
The wine store is next door to the Palace Hotel, and is part of the same building, along with the Tyler Street Café.
The entrance to the basement is at the base of steps in the back of the building, off the parking lot.
Susan was entering the door with the last of four boxes of decorations when she realized there was someone sitting in the workshop area.
It appeared to be an old man, she said, but he was facing away from her, so all she could see was the back of his head, which was bald, and that he was wearing a plaid shirt.
The Wine Seller’s storage shelves are in the opposite corner of the basement but are accessible only by turning left, going around the workshop, then forward to the front wall and turning right.
Susan had already passed the workshop area three times.
“I thought it was strange because nobody had been there before,” she said.
“Then when I looked again, he was gone. I realized when I was coming back from our storage area that I had seen a ghost.”
There was also a chair in the narrow passageway that hadn’t been there before, she said.
She didn’t feel frightened, however, even when she realized the person she saw was not real.
“I got the impression he was a gentle spirit,” she said, “like someone’s grandpa.
When psychic Robin Alexis entered the basement Friday night as part of the paranormal investigation, she encountered a man who appeared to be a vagrant who told her he used to sleep in the basement of the building.
Susan’s description of the man fits the person she saw exactly, said Alexis, who was part of the Paranormal Investigations of Historic America of Monroe investigation team.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or e-mail jjackson@olypen.com.