Downtown Everett’s Ghost Town

Editor’s Note: Originally published January 9, 2019.

There is a dissonant feeling I always get at the Everett YMCA. It’s the feeling of walking in a labyrinth, the feeling of climbing up a staircase with many doors and passages.

Like a dream.

Nowhere is this disorienting feeling more palpable than the chilly passages of the YMCA’s “Ghost Town.” Ghost Town is two floors of dormitories in the original 1920s building— one floor for ladies, the other for men.

You have never seen Ghost Town because it is locked up.

Richard Porter

The floor is littered with crumbled plaster, peeled wallpaper, and discarded brochures.

Each floor of Ghost Town has about thirty rooms that line narrow corridors. The dormitories have internal interconnecting doors that have been removed.

You’re never quite sure where one room ends and another begins.

I kept turning around to discover another drafty passage behind me.

Richard Porter

I saw abandoned kitchens with vintage refrigerators left ajar, old shower rooms with cracked tile, and jumbled piles of discarded chairs. Some of the rooms have great views of the cityscape and the Cascade mountains. Other rooms are windowless, dark, and shoved full of cardboard boxes spilling glossy old YMCA camp photos.

Ghost Town transports you to a different era, a time when you could arrive in Milltown and put down a few dollars for a room at the Y.

A shower, a television, steam heat, an indoor pool, and a place to lay your head.

Ghost Town was renovated in the 1960s and closed in 1978. I am not sure why it was closed. I can't seem to find a reason. The old building has been cut up many times for renovations, resulting in those confusing passages, random-seeming corridors and a few staircases that lead to nowhere.

The closed dormitories of Ghost Town were used as a haunted house in the 1980s. There is graffiti on some of the walls, holes intentionally punched through the lathe and plaster, cracked sinks splattered in red paint to simulate blood.

I’m not sure why this historic structure was turned into a corny teenage funhouse.

“Bloody” sinks // Richard Porter

“Rob and Heather 85” graffiti // Richard Porter

The downtown YMCA closed in late 2019 when a new building opened in the Glacier View Neighborhood. The ultimate fate of Ghost Town was uncertain until July 2020 when the YMCA property was purchased by Seattle-based Trent Development.

Ghost Town, long a temporary residence for transitory souls, is a non-landmarked, non-protected old building, but it seems Trent Development is planning to retrofit the building and then renovate it for commercial use. It occupies prime property in the heart of Downtown Everett, within a two-block radius of Funko, Narrative Coffee, and The Village Theatre.

Will the spirit(s) of the old Y linger in our shifting cityscape? Are lonesome souls attached to a building, or do they occupy the space that surrounds their haunting grounds?

Perhaps the true answer is the answer that’s the hardest to consider: cities change and time marches on, making ghosts of everything left in its wake.