Walrus Heads and a Fifth-Floor Window: Seattle’s Arctic Club

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Look up from the corner of Third Avenue and Cherry Street in downtown Seattle and twenty-seven terra cotta walruses stare back. Seattle’s Arctic Club, a ten-story hotel in Washington that began life as the clubhouse of men who came home rich from the Klondike, is one of the strangest-looking buildings in the city and one of the most persistently ghost-storied. The reputation rests almost entirely on a single afternoon in 1936, when a sitting congressman went out a fifth-floor window.

Quick Orientation for the Arctic Club Building

• Ten stories, 128 feet, Beaux-Arts, at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and Cherry Street.
• Designed by Seattle architect A. Warren Gould; James Moses was the builder.
• Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
• Restored and adapted as a luxury hotel in 2008; it operates today as the Arctic Club Hotel, a DoubleTree by Hilton property, so anyone can book a room and walk the halls.

Before the Walruses: A Chief Justice, a Theatre and a Vanished Rooftop

The land had a life before the club did. It was originally owned by Joseph R. Lewis, Chief Justice of Washington Territory and a direct descendant of George Washington’s sister Elizabeth “Betty” Lewis. The house Lewis built there in 1875 was considered one of the finest in Seattle at the time. It came down in 1892 and was replaced by the three-story brick Seattle Theatre, designed by the firm of Saunders and Lawton. The newly formed Rainier Club took the office portion of that building. Theatre and offices alike were cleared to make way for the Arctic Building.

One club-era feature is gone too. The rooftop garden the members used was replaced during the 2008 conversion by a penthouse office suite.

A Club Built on Klondike Gold

The Arctic Club was formed in 1908 by successful veterans of the Klondike Gold Rush, absorbing the existing Alaska Club the same year. In Seattle it functioned as a fraternal men’s club for businessmen with Gold Rush or Alaska connections. A separate Arctic Club in New York City based its membership on Arctic wilderness exploration instead.

The Seattle group first set up in 1909 at Third Avenue and Jefferson Street, inside the Morrison Hotel, which was also known at the time as the Arctic Club Building. In 1914, following a dispute with that building’s owner, the Arctic Construction Company, the board decided to move. Members commissioned Gould to design a purpose-built headquarters at Third and Cherry. The departure produced the best-documented piece of mischief in the club’s history: during the move, members surreptitiously removed the bar from the original location by hoisting it out of a window.

Behind the walruses, the club offered its members the sort of amenities that money from the north could buy, including private dining rooms and rooms set aside for cards and billiards. The club occupied the building from construction until it dissolved in 1971.

Reading the Terra Cotta

The exterior is entirely faced in cream white terra cotta with submarine blue and orange-brown accents, and it is considered one of the finest examples of multi-colored matte glaze terra cotta work in Seattle. The walrus heads lining the third floor are a pun on the club’s name, and the material came from a local supplier, the Denny-Renton Clay and Coal Company, which produced terra cotta for many Seattle buildings of the same period. Inside, the polar bear in the Polar Bar, the hotel’s bar and cocktail lounge, carries the theme through to the drinks list.

August 7, 1936: Marion Zioncheck

Marion Zioncheck was a U.S. congressman elected in 1932, known for outspoken leftist politics and a career trailed by scandal and public incident. On August 7, 1936, he took his own life by jumping from the window of his campaign office on the Arctic Building’s fifth floor. His body struck the pavement directly in front of a car occupied by his wife.

That is the documented record, and it is grim enough without embellishment. Everything that follows below is reported experience, not established fact.

What People Say Happens on the Fifth Floor

Guests and staff have described unexplained cold spots, footsteps in corridors with nobody in them, and faint voices, with the fifth floor named more often than any other part of the building. The other recurring claim moves outside: accounts of a figure resembling Zioncheck seen on the sidewalk where he landed, said to vanish when approached.

No verified evidence supports any of this, and the concentration of stories on one floor of a busy downtown hotel is exactly what you would expect once a famous death attaches itself to a specific window. A 1914-era steel and terra cotta building settles, its plumbing knocks, and its corridors carry sound. Whether that accounts for everything reported here is left to the visitor.

Staying at the Arctic Club Hotel

This is one of the easier haunted buildings in the country to experience honestly, because it is a working hotel rather than a tour stop or a closed landmark. Rooms can be booked, the Polar Bar is open to the public, and the lobby and public spaces preserve much of the club’s character. The exterior costs nothing at all: stand on Cherry Street and count the walruses, then look up to the fifth floor.

See The Arctic Club for Yourself

Sources

• Landmarks and Designation
• The hidden history of the Arctic Building
• The Historic Arctic Building in Seattle Being Transformed into a 120-room Hotel; Arctic Club Hotel Seattle Will Be Managed by The Hotel Group / April 2007
• About History Luxury Downtown Seattle Hotel Washington
• Arctic Building (Seattle)
• Wikipedia: Arctic Building

Address: 700 Third Avenue

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