Lydia Upstairs: Skagway’s Red Onion Saloon

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 16, 2026 · How we verify

Walk up Broadway in Skagway and the Red Onion Saloon announces itself before you reach the door: a false-fronted survivor from the late 1800s, still pouring drinks in a town that Alaska’s gold rush built and then very nearly abandoned. It opened as a saloon and brothel for men who had come north with nothing but a grubstake and an idea, and it has spent the century since being almost everything else. The ghost stories attached to it are told by staff and visitors rather than written into any record, and that distinction is worth keeping in mind from the start.

The Red Onion at a Glance

• Where: 205 Broadway Street, Skagway, Alaska
• Original use: saloon and brothel during the late 1800s gold rush
• Later lives: boarding house, bakery, grocery store
• Restored: 1982, back to its saloon configuration
• Today: a working bar and living museum offering guided tours
• Most-told ghost: Lydia, said to be a former resident of the upstairs rooms

A Brothel on Broadway During the Gold Rush

Skagway in the late 1800s was a boom town in the fullest sense: a port at the edge of the wilderness that filled suddenly with prospectors headed for the gold fields, and emptied nearly as fast when the fever broke. The Red Onion sat at the center of that churn. Downstairs it sold drinks. Upstairs it sold company.

That arrangement was not unusual for the period. Saloons across the American West served a clientele of “fur trappers, cowboys, soldiers, lumberjacks, businessmen, lawmen, outlaws, miners, and gamblers,” and entertainment in such places commonly meant dancing girls who, as one general account of the era puts it, “occasionally or routinely doubled as prostitutes,” alongside games of chance such as faro, poker and three-card monte. The batwing doors that hang in a thousand Western movies were a real and distinctive feature of the type. So was the free lunch, a meal thrown in with the purchase of at least one drink, on the sound commercial bet that nobody buys only one. Beer was usually served at room temperature, because refrigeration was mostly unavailable.

None of that detail is specific to the Red Onion, and the building’s own records are thinner than the legend. What it does establish is the kind of business the saloon was running and the kind of men it was running it for.

Boarding House, Bakery, Grocery Store

When the gold ran thin and the stampeders moved on, the Red Onion adapted rather than closed. Through the twentieth century the building worked as a boarding house, then a bakery, then a grocery store, each use matching whatever Skagway’s dwindling year-round population actually needed. It is an unglamorous stretch of the building’s history and probably the reason the structure is still standing at all. Buildings that stay useful tend to stay upright.

The saloon came back in 1982, when the Red Onion was restored to its original form and reopened as both a bar and a living museum. Visitors can order a drink in a room staged to read as it did when the gold rush crowd was in it, which is a large part of the appeal and, it should be said, a large part of why the ghost stories land as well as they do.

Lydia and the Perfume That Arrives Without Anyone Wearing It

The figure at the center of the Red Onion’s reputation is Lydia, described in local tradition as a former resident of the upstairs rooms. Staff and visitors credit her with the bulk of the activity reported in the building, and the accounts tend toward the playful rather than the menacing.

Reported phenomena at the saloon include:

• Sudden, brief scents of old-fashioned perfume with no source in the room
• Abrupt cold spots
• Small objects found moved or rearranged
• Footsteps overhead and voices with no speaker attached
• Apparitions described as wearing gold rush era clothing

Paranormal investigators who have worked the building report EVP recordings they interpret as voices. Like all EVP work, that depends entirely on what you accept as a voice in a noisy audio file, and it is evidence of an experience rather than of a presence.

It is worth saying plainly: none of this is documented history. There is no verified death behind the Lydia story that the saloon’s own account produces, and a wooden building more than a century old in a coastal Alaskan climate supplies plenty of ordinary candidates for footsteps, drafts and cold spots. The perfume reports are the hardest to explain away and also the easiest to suggest to a room full of people who have just been told a ghost wears perfume. Both of those things can be true at once.

Visiting the Red Onion Saloon

The Red Onion is a functioning bar, so the lowest-effort visit is simply to walk in off Broadway and order something. Beyond that, the saloon runs guided tours of the building and its brothel history, and it offers paranormal-focused experiences for anyone who wants the ghost material handled directly rather than as bar-room chat. Food and drink lean on local ingredients and traditional recipes.

Getting to Skagway is the part that takes planning. The town is reached by cruise ship, by plane, or by ferry from Juneau, and the rhythm of the place follows the ships. Cruise days mean a full saloon and a busy tour schedule; the shoulder seasons mean a quieter room and a better chance of actually hearing the building.

Come for the history as much as the hauntings. A gold rush brothel that outlived the gold, sold bread and groceries to survive, and got its old name and old job back in 1982 is a good story on its own, with or without Lydia on the stairs.

See Red Onion Saloon for Yourself

Sources

• saloon
• Saloon Doors, Petticoats and Pistols
• Home | Cowboys, Native American, American History, Wild West, American Indians
• Wyatt Earp
• Eagle City – Idaho Ghost Town
• Wikipedia: Western saloon

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