Bellingham

The Sehome Mine ran until 1878; the coal, the mills, the canneries and the railroads built four competing downtowns before the mergers collapsed them into one — the surviving interim name, New Whatcom, lasted until the legislature outlawed 'New' in town names in 1903. What remains of the rivalry is architectural: Fairhaven's 1890s brick blocks, Old Town's Whatcom core, the Pickett House — the city's oldest building, put up in 1856 for Captain George Pickett, later of Gettysburg — and, above downtown, the Mount Baker Theatre.

The theatre opened April 29, 1927 to sirens, streetcar bells, and a searchlight borrowed from the battleship Oregon throwing beams sixteen miles across the county. It is the last of five Whatcom County movie palaces built between 1914 and 1930. A few blocks over, the Hotel Leo — the old Leopold on Cornwall Avenue, a fixture since 1929 — anchors the other end of the file's haunted ledger.

The theatre's resident is named Judy, and reports of her go back at least to the 1970s. The legend comes in variants — her house burned or was razed for the theatre, or she was a construction worker's daughter killed on the site — while the demolition record, unhelpfully, confirms only that two houses and a church came down for the building. Staff describe her assigned beat as the corridor from balcony to mezzanine: cold spots, a hand on the back, names called to men working alone at night. She keeps company in the file — a feral cat reported in the basement, a Geoffry in a pin-striped suit, and Michael Chervenock, a stagehand who died in 1992 and, per the accounts, did not entirely clock out.

The Hotel Leo collects its own reports: a woman's voice on the library stairs telling an unseen someone to get out, a figure in the ballroom window, a gong struck with no one near it, doorknobs turning under nobody's hand, children heard running through a ballroom found empty. Fairhaven has its own chronicler — Taimi Dunn Gorman's 'Haunted Fairhaven' — for the south side's share of the ledger.

The file's named collective is the miners, which is fair enough: the city was founded on a coal seam, and four towns' worth of the dead are filed under one name now. The theatre is city-owned and still sells tickets; Judy, per a century of employees, prefers the audience male, solitary, and working late.