Bon Marche Building
A historic commercial building in Ketchikan, Alaska, Bon Marche Building is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Mission Street building with a former worker’s after-hours account. HauntHunt files it with haunting claims. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Bon Marche Building haunted?
The record holds 1 claim — filed as reported, not verified. The heaviest filing is classed reported experience. The archive documents the claim; it takes no position on the ghost.
The record — long form
The Bon Marche Building on Mission Street is one of downtown Ketchikan's early-twentieth-century commercial survivors — the preservation record puts its construction at 1912 or 1913, and the file keeps both dates pending verification. It sits across the street from the old hospital, which is how it came to earn its place in the ghost-tour circuit.
The building's claim in the archive comes from local journalism rather than folklore books — a 2017 Alaska Public Media report on Ketchikan's ghost tours.
The after-hours account
On that report's tour, an unnamed woman told her own story about working in the former Bon Marche in the late 1990s. Her crew worked belowground, and after hours they would hear kids running around upstairs. More than once they went up to see who had gotten into the building — and found no one.
'To the point where nobody worked after hours by themselves,' she said. It is filed as a reported experience: one witness, one building, footsteps on an upper floor — the kind of small, stubborn account that keeps a file open.
The record of claims
An unnamed former employee recounts hearing children running upstairs after hours in the late 1990s. The reports concentrate at Upper floor. The reports at Bon Marche Building are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. The claim rests on experience rather than evidence, and the file says so. Heard rather than seen: the report that keeps the file open.
Sources on file
- 01AK: The mystery behind Ketchikan ghost toursAlaska Public Media / KRBD · local journalism · A3
- 02Yates Memorial Hospital historic building reportHistoric Ketchikan · historical society · A2
Field notes & open questions
Preservation report supplies adjacent-building identity; construction dates appear as 1912 and 1913 in different parts, so year_built remains null. Current use and address require verification.