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- [00:02]
Glenn Washington
The mistake that some people in our stories make is that if you are going to be terrified, alone, wary, fearful, wide eyed, petrified on the edge of nowhere, what you don't want to be is cold. From Snap Judgment's underground lair. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. I'm from Michigan and Michigan up north, it gets cold. Colder than cold. Bitter cold to the bone. Cold cold. And when you have to be that cold, what you better have. More important than the hats, more important than the fancy ski gloves or the Christmas socks that granny got for you. Now what you better have is a plan. The problem, of course, is that the cold knows there are some things that you can't plan for. My name is Glenn Washington. And if you can't have a plan, at least have a plan B. Spook starts now. Now on Spooked, we travel the world in search of the supernatural, no matter how far away those ghosties and ghoulies may dwell. And today we're gonna journey far, far up north to Alaska. So come with me now to this place called Skagway, where back in the day it was a gold rush boom town. Yeah, we're talking Jack London. Call it a wild country.
- [02:19]
Corey Giacomazzi
We are the furthest point north along the coast and we are basically in the armpit of southeast Alaska.
- [02:30]
Glenn Washington
Corey Giacomazzi. She's lived in Skagway for going on two decades. In fact, she's something of an expert on the place. But she told spook producer Eliza Smith that when she first arrived, she didn't plan on staying.
- [02:47]
Corey Giacomazzi
I was only there for the summer, which was five months. I was staying up at what is what used to be known as the Gnome Saloon. And back during the gold rush, most two story buildings were saloons downstairs and brothels upstairs.
- [03:10]
Billy Clem
But at this point, the Gnome Saloon was a gift shop downstairs and an apartment upstairs where Corey and her co worker lived. They were going out a lot that summer and spent a good deal of time in front of the bathroom mirror getting ready.
- [03:24]
Corey Giacomazzi
So we'd be standing in front of the mirror and you just got this sense that somebody was standing behind you watching. But in the mirror you didn't see anything. So you turn around and there's nobody there. It was just a sense that somebody was behind you. It totally unnerved me, but I thought I was just being paranoid or, you know, uncomfortable in a new surrounding and I could have been making it up, who knows? But it happened enough times that it was definitely not being made up.
- [04:00]
Billy Clem
Corey's roommate had a guy Stay over one night.
- [04:04]
Corey Giacomazzi
And in the morning we were kind of sitting around having coffee and breakfast and. And he was talking about how he didn't sleep last night. Like how he just tossed and turned and tossed and turned. And yet he had been so tired. He felt like there was something not letting him sleep. He felt uneasy, but he couldn't really pinpoint why. And my roommate was like, oh, I slept great. I wonder what it was. I did get a little creeped out because I didn't know who or what the presence was. But I didn't feel like it was harmful. It was more just this presence that I couldn't see. But I knew there was something there. And when I'd go to the bathroom, you know, to brush my teeth or whatever, I just expected it.
- [05:05]
Billy Clem
Corey and her roommate shared a bedroom. It was kind of like a dorm room with two twin beds on either wall and a door in between. A month or so after moving in, they were settling down for the evening. It was about 10 at night. They got into their beds.
- [05:20]
Corey Giacomazzi
We started talking about, hey, do you ever get this creeped out feeling when you're like somebody's watching you when you're brushing your teeth or combing your hair or putting your makeup on? And we had never talked about our experiences prior to that moment. We were talking, and then all of a sudden I looked and there's this ethereal person. A woman, young woman, about between 17 and 19 years old. And she had long brown hair, kind of wavy, pulled back a little bit at the nape of the neck. And then she had a little cotton dress on, long sleeve, like a tan color with some darker flowers on it. She also looked sickly. She was very thin. She was not smiling like a big old smile, but like a whimsical. She looked whimsical. I was so kind of freaked out. There was a ghost in my room.
- [06:34]
Billy Clem
Corey kept her eyes on the figure in the corner and asked her roommate.
- [06:39]
Corey Giacomazzi
Do you see what I see? And she said, you mean that woman in the corner of the room? I said, yes, describe her to me, please. Like, tell me what you're seeing. Because I wanted to make sure that we were seeing the same thing. And so as she described it, I was like, oh, my God, that's exactly what I'm seeing. I didn't want to run. We didn't even leave the room. She wasn't. She wasn't a terrifying presence. She was just like this simple girl. She didn't leave the room. She didn't disappear through the wall or anything. Just what we saw faded. I feel like it was a more comforting presence, like knowing that, okay, what we have been feeling while we're in front of the mirror getting ready. This person behind you, There she is. Now we know who it is.
- [07:47]
Billy Clem
And then about a week later, Corey was at work in the gift shop.
- [07:53]
Corey Giacomazzi
It was a typical day. It wasn't super busy. A man came into the store, and he happened to walk up to me and said, I used to live here when it was a kid's home back in the 50s. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I said, do you know this woman? And so I described her to him. You know, what she looked like when she appeared to us? And he said, yeah, that sounds like Frances. He also didn't ask how I knew who she was. I guess he was about 7 years old when he lived there, when it was a kid's home and the older kids were responsible for the younger ones, and she was responsible for him. So he knew her quite well. So I asked him to tell me a little bit about her. And he spoke very fondly of her. You know, she was really kind and gentle. When I described her to him, I said, she kind of looked sickly. He was like, yeah, I think she had some. She was sickly. She had something that was going on, like a pneumonia or tuberculosis or something. He didn't know, though, what it was because he was a little kid. So he assumed that she had died. So I thanked him for sharing what he could about her.
- [09:16]
Billy Clem
The man left, and a couple of.
- [09:18]
Corey Giacomazzi
Nights later, we again were sitting in our respective twin beds, college style, talking about stuff, and she showed up. She looked pale. I remember her hair. It was kind of pulled back at the nape of her neck. There were some tendrils that were coming over her shoulder. And that's when we were like, hey, is your name Frances? And she smiled at us and faded away. She never appeared to us again. But she would let us know if our apartment got too dirty. She'd get upset and throw the laundry around, and then we'd have to pick it up.
- [10:34]
Eliza Smith
Why do you think she appeared to you guys?
- [10:37]
Corey Giacomazzi
I'm guessing why she chose to appear to us was because we were young women. We were a little bit older than she would have been when she passed.
- [10:47]
Eliza Smith
Maybe you were young enough and curious enough that she felt close to you.
- [10:54]
Corey Giacomazzi
Yeah, because she was very curious about, like, when we'd get dressed up to go out, when we were putting our, like, doing our makeup to go out. It was like, the sense of curiosity that she had, because I'm guessing she didn't really get that opportunity because she died so young. She was about 17 or 18 when she died.
- [11:22]
Glenn Washington
We're not leaving Skagway yet. No, listeners, because Corey's got another terrifying tale for us.
- [11:32]
Corey Giacomazzi
I know ghost stories attach to almost every single old building in town, but Lydia is the one that has been mentioned most often.
- [11:44]
Billy Clem
Corey quit her job at the souvenir shop and started working at a former Gold Rush brothel and bar called the Red Onion Saloon.
- [11:53]
Corey Giacomazzi
So during the Gold Rush, it was one of the best saloons and dance halls and one of the finest, most expensive brothels in town. I think when you start working at the Red Onions Saloon, everybody knows that it's haunted. It's just common knowledge. Lydia's not the only ghost that is hanging out up there. She's just the most active one and the one that wants to be known.
- [12:23]
Billy Clem
When Corey started working at the Red Onion Saloon, it seemed all her co workers had stories about Lydia, the prostitute who hung herself in the former brothel.
- [12:34]
Eliza Smith
And who saw Lydia hanging.
- [12:37]
Corey Giacomazzi
That was Madam Spitfire. Billy.
- [12:41]
Billy Clem
Madam Spitfire, or Billy Clem, is a former tour guide and bartender at the Red Onion. She knows everything about the place.
- [12:54]
Corey Giacomazzi
During orientation, when I was first becoming a tour guide, she took us on a tour of the brothel museum and said, you know, and starts. She just starts talking about the stuff, stories, and about her experiences. She pointed to the corner where she saw Lydia hanging and said, oh, yeah, and by the way, this is where I saw Lydia. This is how we figured out how she died, because she showed me right here hanging in this corner.
- [13:22]
Billy Clem
Corey spent her days sorting through old garter belts, tattered quilts, even old bras. The brothel was left the way it had been the day it closed. One day, she and Billie were working on a new display.
- [13:37]
Corey Giacomazzi
I was precariously perched on this ladder, and I was hanging these heavy pieces of wallpaper that I'd framed and archivally, so that we could show people the different layers of wallpaper that have come off the walls upstairs in the brothel. And Billy was helping me, and I went to go put it on the wall, and I felt this coldness behind me and this hand on my shoulder, and I'm, you know, four feet up in the air, off the ground, and I was just. It froze me for a second. And Billy's like, yep. I didn't even get the words out of my mouth before Billy's like, yep, Lydia's standing right behind you. And I'm like, I know.
- [14:35]
Eliza Smith
Hey. Okay. I think we're good to go. Okay, great.
- [14:41]
Billy Clem
I decided I had to call Billy, the woman who probably knows Lydia better than anyone who's ever worked at the Red Onion.
- [14:49]
Eliza Smith
Could you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Billy Clem. I live in Skagway, Alaska. Lived here about 22 years. I came with my mom to see the whales, and I never left. I stayed here. And can you tell me the first time you ever interacted with Lydia? My very first year. I was originally a bartender, and we used to hear her upstairs. There was a staircase that was in the very back of the building, and it went over the beer couch, and you would climb up the staircase, just this really narrow staircase that went to the top. And then it opened up into the 10 rooms that the girls used to work out of. It was very evident that it was a woman because of her boots. It sounded like those little boots that we wore when we were in costumes, the little, you know, Victorian boots with the two he with the heel on them. And it sounded like somebody was heeled a toe, heeled a doe. Not like clomp, clomp, clomp. It was a dainty walk. And so we would hear her walk upstairs. And, you know, I had kind of heard the stories about Lydia, but I was pretty skeptical.
- [16:09]
Billy Clem
And then a couple of weeks later, during Skagway's annual fourth of July bash, Billy was upstairs doing inventory.
- [16:19]
Eliza Smith
And I kept hearing somebody whisper my name, and I thought it was one of the pizza dudes up there. Then I felt somebody tap me on the shoulder. And the room got really, really cold before that happened. And I kind of. It kind of makes your hair stand up on your neck. And I looked up, and I saw her hanging from a noose from the ceiling. And I got really scared, and I stepped down off of there, and she was looking at me. She was trying to say something. And I couldn't figure out what she was trying to say. And she had a mark down her right cheek. And after I saw her hanging from the noose, I ran downstairs out the front door, and I called the boss, my boss with the red onion, Jan. I said, jan, there is a woman hanging from the noose up in the pizza dude's kitchen. And she says, billy, calm down. Calm down. Tell me exactly what you saw. And so I explained it to her. She goes, oh, that's Lydia. That's the ghost. And I said, well, you know, those are things that you could have told me before when she appeared to me. She appeared to me often. Then, like, you know, when I was walking down the Hallway. I turn and she'd be standing there, and she'd walk closer to me. And so I just stand there and wait for her to come closer, thinking she was going to try to tell me something. But again, I never really got the message. I guess I thought about her when I wasn't there because she was curious. It was curious. You know, of course, when weird things are happening, you're going to want to know who's doing it and why they're doing it. I began to assume that she was probably a working girl, that she had probably come there because either her boyfriend or husband, somebody left her there and. Or she was trying to get to Dawson City where the gold was, but she got stuck in Skagway.
- [18:39]
Corey Giacomazzi
Her spirit is still here. So I'd love to know why it's still here, why she came here, what brought her here.
- [18:50]
Billy Clem
There were stacks and stacks of old moldy newspapers up in the brothel. Billy and Corey rifled through the them, reading obituaries and looking for any mention of the girls at the Red Onion Saloon, or the Soiled Doves, as the papers like to call them. They needed to know who had Lydia been when she was alive.
- [19:38]
Eliza Smith
We pieced it together over time, and we went through the stories about the people that had died and where they died and how they died. And we did lots of papers in the floors and in the walls. And she found 27 pieces of wallpaper. And we did find a woman had died in that property. So I figured that was Lydia. And they never called them by names in the newspapers. They called them the Soiled Dove or the Fairies or, you know, women of ill repute.
- [20:13]
Billy Clem
Billy and Corey also took into account all of the stories people had told them over the years about seeing Lydia drinkers down in the saloon, the regulars, the bartenders and the waitresses, people that.
- [20:26]
Corey Giacomazzi
Have seen her have always seen her dressed as a proper Victorian woman. So that's the side that she's showing us, is that she was a proper Victorian woman. She didn't come up here to be a prostitute. It was something that happened as a result of her circumstances. And this was not a life she chose. It was a necessity to survive.
- [20:56]
Billy Clem
Turning to the world's oldest profession seemed to have taken a toll on Lydia. Remember how when Billy first saw Lydia hanging in the brothel, she had a mark on her cheek.
- [21:09]
Corey Giacomazzi
Typically, back then, if a woman contracted a disease like syphilis, the madam or the Pamp would scar their cheek as a warning to anybody else so that she was basically untouchable.
- [21:26]
Eliza Smith
And once you got syphilis, you were done. There was no hope for you, and.
- [21:32]
Corey Giacomazzi
She could never work again as a prostitute. So Lydia took her own life since I guess she didn't see another way out.
- [21:44]
Billy Clem
After Billy and Corey pieced Lydia's story together, things changed.
- [21:50]
Corey Giacomazzi
And once we started recognizing that, it seemed to make things a little bit easier. You wouldn't be sitting there or you wouldn't be doing something. And all of a sudden, boom, there's Lydia. She wasn't as. She wasn't as scary, I guess is the word.
- [22:12]
Billy Clem
Corey felt like the best thing to do was to start acknowledging Lydia, treating her with respect and kindness.
- [22:19]
Corey Giacomazzi
And so I went into the brothel and just started talking and yep, you feel silly doing it, but just saying hi to her every day, that was a big deal. Saying hi to her every day makes her much more pleasant to work with.
- [22:41]
Billy Clem
Sometimes Billie felt like Lydia was her co worker, a member of her team, like she had her back when things got hectic at the bar.
- [22:50]
Eliza Smith
One day I was down at the bar and this man got really violent with a girl with his wife that was sitting there. And I told him, you are not allowed to act that way here. You will stop and cease right now or I'm calling the police. And he was going to get up out of his chair and all of a sudden his chair fell over backwards and he had a boot mark right on the front of his chest in dirt. And I was thinking to myself, thanks a lot, Lydia. I needed that. That was really cool. Thank you. And the last time I actually saw an apparition, saw her face, she was standing behind this man in the brothel and I was in the madam's room and she was right between the doorways and she looked in at me and I acknowledged her and continued on my tour. And then I looked back there and she was gone. I don't think I ever seen saw her again. Did you ever feel like, you know, a lot of these girls, like you said in the newspapers, their names were never recorded. They were kind of forgotten in a lot of ways, almost like they were never there. I mean, did you feel like you wanted to help these girls be remembered in some way? Oh, I. I did. Every day. I did a tour and I talked about them and I talked. And to this day, there is still a legacy at the Red Onion that talks about the good Time girls and what they did and what they sacrificed. They didn't have much of a life. Most of them died before they were 30. And you think Lydia was one of those who Just stayed behind. Yep. I do. I believe that she. The reason that I think that spirits there's so many haunted buildings in Skagway is because this was the place that people came to get their. To realize their dreams. You know, we were in the middle of a depression down in lower 48. Nobody had any money. They scraped together everything they had just to get a steam ship ticket to come to Skagway. And then they realized that they have to go another 500 miles north of them in order to get to the gold because there was never any golden skagway. It's all 500 miles north of here. So if they didn't have the money to get the ton of goods that they had to carry over the path, they were stuck here. They didn't have enough money to get the scheme shipped back down. So lots of the women would find out that they could wash dishes for 10 cents a week, or they could work in a dance hall for 25 cents a dance, or they could work as a good time girl, and then they would make enough money to go home.
- [26:19]
Glenn Washington
Thank you to Corey and Billy for keeping the tales of Skagway alive. And thanks so much for sharing them here with us on spook listeners. If you want to meet Linda in person, go visit the Red onion saloon and tell them that spook sent you. Yeah. Yes. Know this. More spook awaits exactly where you found this one. But if you like stories without ghosts as well, subscribe to our sister podcast, the amazing Snapchat. Judgment. Storytelling with the beat It'll blow your mind. Spooked is brought to you by the letter A by peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches along with Mark Ristich. An assessment, Eliza Smith. Our theme song is composed and performed by Pat Mercede Miller. Original soundscaping for those stories created by the amazing Snapchat. Now, you might think that you've been vigilant, that you've been careful for a long time, that it's okay to take a little break every once in a while, right? No, no. Listen to me when I tell you this is the most important thing. Never ever, never ever, never, never, never ever. No matter what they say, never ever turn out the light.
- [27:45]
Eliza Smith
It.