As Juneau Drug Manager Brenda Lamas walks down the aisles of toilet paper, allergy medication and hair dryers, it’s clear why she doesn’t like to come down into the basement.
The clacking of her black boots on the tile floor echoes off the walls, the only sound other than the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above her. There’s something eerily sterile and cold about this basement.
Most of it is tiled and contains racks with extra supplies, but there’s another room off to the side. This one is behind a large metal door. Above the door, carved into the wood, is simply “The Room.”
Juneau Drug employees make the trip down here as seldom as possible, Lamas says. She’s worked here since 2015 and has been the manager since August, but still hasn’t investigated the dark corners of the basement.
It’s hard to blame her. This basement did, after all, used to house the dead.
Vampires and makeshift morgues
The stories of the 1918 shipwreck of the Princess Sophia are well traveled in Southeast Alaska.
The coastal liner took off from Skagway on Oct. 23, 1918, carrying 353 passengers. It ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal, where it sat as bad weather impeded rescue boats from getting to it in time.
One man, Auris McQueen, wrote a letter to his mother prior to the ship going down. He didn’t seem concerned in the letter, which was reprinted in the Alaska Daily Empire on Oct. 30, 1918, but he painted an eerie scene.
“The decks are all dry, and this wreck has all the markings of a movie stage setting,” McQueen wrote. “All we lack is the hero and the vampire.”
There’s debate about whether those aboard could have been saved before the ship went down Oct. 25, but today’s story is about the aftermath.
At the time, Juneau was a town of just over 3,000 people. When the Princess Sophia went down, the townspeople sprung to action to help clean up the bodies. The majority of the bodies came quickly. According to authors Ken Coates and Bill Morrison in “The Sinking of the Princess Sophia,” about 180 bodies were recovered before Nov. 1.
Juneau was woefully unprepared to deal with that many bodies. There weren’t enough coffins, there weren’t enough undertakers and not enough embalming fluid. Embalmers from Ketchikan, Skagway and even Seattle came to town, bringing as many supplies with them as they could.
In addition to the lack of manpower and supplies, there wasn’t enough room in the morgue or even a converted warehouse to store all the dead.
Bjorn Dihle, the author of “Haunted Inside Passage,” found in his research for his book that the people of Juneau looked for just about anywhere cool where they could to store the bodies.
One of the solutions was to put bodies in the cellars of downtown businesses. In particular, Front Street businesses held the bodies. In his research for his book, Dihle stopped in a handful of businesses to ask them if they’d had any ghost sightings.
One stop in particular stood out to him: Juneau Drug.
In the basement
A scream will greet anyone who opens the door to “The Room” in the basement of Juneau Drug.
It’s just the old hinges squealing, but the high warble sounds like something other-worldly escaping from the room. The stale, damp space is mostly empty, save for empty tubs of popcorn butter. That’s the only use this room gets, Lamas said.
“I don’t know what else is down there,” Lamas said as she stood by the doorway. “I don’t come down here by myself, so …”
Her voice trailed off as she leaned hesitantly into the room, peering into the darkness. The room is cluttered with items accumulated over the years, like snow shovels and miscellaneous store supplies. Pipes run all around the room and there’s a small stone staircase in the corner that doesn’t appear to lead anywhere. Lamas didn’t even know the staircase was there.
When she started working at the store, she heard stories of co-workers having strange sensations down here and even seeing things. The sightings are especially active this time of year.
Just last year around Halloween, a co-worker of hers was in the basement and accidentally dropped something. She bent down to pick it up, and when she looked back up she saw a little boy standing ahead of her. Lamas has also had ghostly encounters, feeling someone’s hand on her shoulder at one point and getting a phantom electric shock at another point.
Other employees through the years have felt breath on their face, the sensation of getting touched on the arm or even just an overwhelming sense of dread. One person whose story made it into “Haunted Inside Passage” didn’t even make it to the bottom of the stairs before feeling an aggressive, angry presence in the basement.
Dihle said one theory is that when bodies were stored in the basement, one of them was the body of a murderer or someone who had committed a violent crime. The more harmless encounters could stem from other spirits that still occupy the space.
The building, named the Valentine Building after Juneau Fire Department founding father Emery Valentine, was built in 1905 so there’s been plenty of time for the place to collect spirits.
The thing about these hauntings, Lamas said, is that they spike around this time of year. It makes sense, with many of the bodies arriving in the few days after the Oct. 25 shipwreck.
Lamas said she definitely believes in the presence of something ghoulish at Juneau Drug, especially after her own experiences. Dihle, who has been to some of the spookiest places in Southeast Alaska, said the basement of Juneau Drug is one of the very few places that made his skin crawl.
“It’s easy to be, ‘Oh, it’s just your imagination,’ which it probably is,” Dihle said, pausing, “but there’s that part of you that wonders.”
• Reporter Alex McCarthy would like to wish you a spooky and safe Halloween. You can contact him at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com.
