Washoe Club

The building itself is older than the club — the fabric dates to the early 1860s, with the Crystal Bar below — and it outlasted the 1875 fire that leveled every other saloon on the street. That fire was the worst in Nevada history, some two thousand structures gone from a single morning's work, and the club's resurrection on the ruins was the town's prosperity in miniature. The club itself faded as the lode faded through the 1880s and 1890s.

In the 1920s the Crystal Bar moved a block north, and the Washoe Club name came downstairs to the saloon, where it remains; the original club rooms above went dark. The building contributes to the Virginia City Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1966.

Its signature artifact is the spiral staircase — the Millionaires' Staircase — a freestanding helix with no central support pole, famous enough to earn a Ripley's Believe It or Not entry as the longest of its kind. Behind the bar, a brick room that kept its low temperature served the town as an overflow morgue in the mining heyday, which the file includes because the ghost tour includes it.

The club's documented spirit is the Lady in Blue — called Lena or Jeni depending on the telling — an apparition in a blue dress seen at the top of the spiral staircase, identified by local lore as a prostitute murdered in the building. A male shadow figure on the upper floors gets cast as her killer. Reports add cold spots on the stairs, children's laughter, footsteps and knocking in the sealed upper floors.

The Washoe Club owes its national reputation to one film: the original Ghost Adventures documentary, shot here before the series existed, which captured what its crew billed as a full-bodied apparition crossing an upper-floor room. Syfy's Ghost Hunters followed. The footage made the staircase arguably the most-investigated feature in Nevada.

The club now operates openly as what it became: saloon downstairs, museum and rented investigation venue upstairs — daily ghost tours, overnight lock-ins, the crypt included. The file's honest summary: a millionaires' club that survived fire, Prohibition and the end of silver, now paying its upkeep with the ghosts its members never recorded.