The Alaskan Hotel & Bar finishes a frightening fifth in USA Today’s Best Haunted Hotel contest
- Mark Sabbatini
- Oct 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 5
Historic downtown Juneau landmark outspooks Lizzie Borden’s house, the hotel from "The Shining" and 13 other finalists to make the top five
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Another heart-stopping moment in the hallowed history of The Alaskan Hotel & Bar arose this week as the 112-year-old establishment finished fifth in USA Today’s Best Haunted Hotel competition decided by online voters.
The downtown Juneau hotel, one of 20 finalists in the 30-day competition that ended Sept. 22, finished ahead of other nationally known contenders such as the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, and The Stanley Hotel in Colorado that was the inspiration for "The Shining." The top 10 finishers were announced Wednesday.
"It’s no surprise that the oldest operating hotel in Juneau, Alaska, is also known for being haunted," USA Today’s description of the hotel notes. "This historic Alaskan Hotel & Bar has a storied past, having served as a speakeasy and a brothel, and it was once shut down and even condemned. Several legends exist about the hotel, including one about Room 315. The story goes that the room was found to be covered in blood after a Navy soldier jumped out the window (no one ever found out what caused all the blood in the first place)."
Another Juneau business, Hearthside Books and Toys finished eighth in the newspaper’s "10 Best Independent Bookstores" poll when the results were announced in June.
It’s the first time the hotel has appeared on the newspaper’s list of winners in the haunted hotel contest that has been conducted every year since 2018 (plus an inaugural year in 2015).
"I was humbled because in the beginning there was just the fact that I didn't know anything about it," Bettye Adams, owner of The Alaskan for nearly 50 years, said in a phone interview Friday night. "When I saw our competitors I was just like, ‘Oh, dear — what am I doing in this group, you know?’"
Adams said she was haunted during the month of voting as she saw the hotel drop from third during the initial days to fifth before live updates of vote totals stopped appearing during the final days.
"I thought, ‘Oh, no, you know what? What if we just didn't make it at all?’" she said. "And so it just bothered me, and so I had to just quit thinking about it entirely, or I would obsess over that."
When Adams got an email letting her know the outcome a couple of days before the results were publicly announced she said the primary feeling was relief. She still hasn’t quite figured out what the hotel will do to celebrate the win — although her staff does now have Halloween decorations up for the spooky month ahead.
Finishing first in this year’s contest was the Fainting Goat Island Inn in Nichols, New York, where guests of the railroad hotel built in the 1800s "have reported numerous ghostly encounters, like being woken in the night by voices, or seeing two women sitting for tea in the Fainting Room."
The Alaskan, which opened in 1913, has plenty of similarly spooky stories. Among them is the 1917 story of "Alice," reportedly murdered in Room 219 by a jealous husband who returned from the gold fields after a prolonged absence and discovered she was working as a prostitute to survive. Much more recently, a video posted on YouTube on April 7 of this year purports to show security cameras picking up "a mysterious whisper."
Adams and her husband, Mike, purchased The Alaskan in 1977. The hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Among the establishment’s TV appearances are the Travel Channel’s reality makeover show "Hotel Impossible" in 2014 and the channel’s series "Portals to Hell" in 2019.
In perhaps an eerie coincidence, Joshua Adams — Bettye’s son and a hotel shareholder — was interviewed this week for The West London Witch podcast where, its creators state, "we share real personal stories of those moments where we find ourselves very much, not alone."
"We talked about paranormal activity in the hotel, what I knew about a lot of my experiences there," he said. "And I think the most important thing to say is just that it's been a really inspirational experience for all of us and a bit humbling, really."
Joshua Adams said he’s already written one book about the hotel’s history that was published in 2004 and more recent experiences have inspired him to write a second about the hotel’s ghosts that he hopes to complete next year.
"There is a lot of paranormal activity in Alaska, and West London Witches are not the first people to take note of this, on the fact that there is just a lot of paranormal activity in the downtown region of Juneau, and a lot of people surmise that it has something to do with its geographic location," he said.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
