Manresa Castle

Charles died in 1902. Kate Eisenbeis remarried, moved on, and left the castle in a caretaker's keeping for nearly twenty years. A Seattle attorney bought it in 1925 intending a vacation home for teaching nuns — a plan that did not work out — and in June 1927 the Catholic Archdiocese acquired it for the Jesuits, who opened it that September as Manresa Hall, named for the Spanish town associated with Ignatius Loyola. Priests came here for their tertianship, the sixteenth and final year of Jesuit formation, spent studying ascetic theology.

In 1928 the order added a wing with a chapel and thirty private rooms, installed an Otis elevator at a cost of $3,400, and stuccoed over the original brickwork for a uniform look — which is why the castle no longer shows the brick Charles was so proud of. The Jesuits sold on October 26, 1968, and the building has operated as a hotel ever since, through four owners and serial renovations, trading under a name welded from both pasts: Manresa Castle.

The named legends are two, and the hotel itself files them under hearsay. In Room 306, the story goes, a young woman named Kate — a visitor when the house was still a private residence — learned her fiancé had been lost at sea and threw herself from the window. Some retellings add the Victorian twist: the fiancé later proved to be alive. In the turret above Room 302, legend holds, a monk hanged himself during the Jesuit years.

The archive notes the counter-file. The Olympic Peninsula Paranormal Society could find no historical evidence for either death, and more than one published account traces the tales to a bartender who once worked the hotel lounge. If the castle's ghosts were invented, they were invented recently — which has done nothing to make the rooms easier to book, or easier to avoid.

The reports, by contrast, come with names. A Pennsylvania couple profiled by the Peninsula Daily News in 2002 described Manresa as having "more activity on a reliable basis than any other place" they had investigated, and kept booking Rooms 302 and 306. A housekeeper told the Ghost Adventures crew she was struck in the face by something unseen and photographed a bruise — small, she said, like a child's fist — on her leg.

That detail matters to investigators because of a documented oddity: a child's coffin and body were found in the Eisenbeis family crypt, identity unexplained. The Travel Channel episode, filmed over three days and aired in September 2015, logged a door swinging open, a chair tipping unaided, and footsteps with no visible source.

The castle still takes guests, and the two rooms flanking the attic staircase remain the file's center of gravity. The record gives a mayor, a brickyard, a $3,400 elevator and a sale date in 1968. The legend gives a bride and a monk with no paperwork. The reports give everything since. The dossier keeps all three columns, and declines to total them.