A Glimpse of the Ghostly: E. Michael Lewis

The Black Beacon Book of Ghosts will send shivers up your spine this Halloween. The Kindle version is already available for pre-order at just $1.99 instead of $3.99 and you can add the anthology to your Goodreads "want to read" list today. The anthology will be officially released on the 11th of October 2024. To get you in the mood and give you a little insight into the workings of their minds, our contributing authors are sharing their own haunting experiences with you. Read on, if you're not fainthearted!

Alfred’s Café - E. Michael Lewis

When Cameron asked us to write a blog post about a haunted location, I immediately thought of Alfred’s Café, a place I’ve visited but that has flown under the radar of most haunted location websites and ghost tours in Tacoma, Washington—coincidentally, where my story, A Passage in Time, takes place.

The building that houses Alfred’s Café was built in 1888, two years before Washington was even a state. It probably started as a dormitory for railroad workers. Tacoma was (and still is) a railway town, being perhaps the only municipality in America to own its own railroad (Tacoma Rail). In 1907, the building was rolled on logs down the hill to it’s present location, to make room for an expanded freight depot. By 1918 it was known as the Brunswick Hotel. The space on the first floor has long held bars, restaurants, barbershops and the like. In 1959, Alfred G. Perella opened Alfred’s Restaurant, which over the years became known as Alfred’s cafe. While the downstairs has been renovated several times over the years, the upper floors have been relatively untouched. Several rooms upstairs are described as small and narrow, with, according to one owner, only room for a twin bed and a box of Kleenex. This plays into the suspicion that the building may have once housed a bordello.

Some people have seen, looking out from an upstairs window, a young girl in old fashioned clothes, gazing out over the parking lot next to the restaurant, her face a tableau of infinite sadness.

The story goes that the working girls who lived in the upper floors would send their little girls to school in a house next door, located where the parking lot is today. One day, a little girl was kept home because she was sick, and a fire broke out at the school. It burned down, killing everyone inside, while the little girl and all the working mothers watched helplessly from next door. How much truth there is to the story is unclear, since the event can’t be confirmed. However, across the lot is the Bullseye indoor gun range, which in recent memory was the home of Bullseye Gunshop, notorious for, among other reasons, as the origin of the rifle used by The DC sniper, John Allen Muhammad, and his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo.

But it’s not just the shade of the little girl that haunts the place. Past owners and employees will tell you about coffee pots flying off the shelf, or people’s hair being pulled, or the figure of an old woman said to haunt a dark corner around closing time.

The current owner hopes to renovate the upper floors and turn the space into an AirBNB. The location, only a few blocks from the Tacoma Dome, would provide a great landing pad for anyone traveling to see a concert there.

Alfred’s café has seen much and survived much, including the pandemic, which created it’s own ghosts. I recommend the Eggs Benedict or the Monte Christo.