When Terry Pardee bought the Chisel Building, he heard rumors that the place was haunted.
“There was supposed to be a spook running around in there somewhere,” he said.
But Pardee, who ran Porcupine Pete’s restaurant out of the building in the 80s and 90s, said it was only a rumor. “Just a story I’d heard once or twice,” he said.
The Chisel Building has certainly had enough history to acquire a few ghost stories. This year, the concrete structure on the corner of Second Avenue and Main Street celebrates its one hundredth birthday.
The building is named for Joseph Chisel, its builder and original owner. Chisel, who changed his name from Schisel, was a Bavarian immigrant who moved to Alaska during the 1897 gold rush.
He built what became known as the Chisel Building alone, mixing cement in wheelbarrows and pushing it up temporary construction ramps. It was the first concrete building in Haines.
Cindy Jones, former director of the Sheldon Museum, said the building is a unique part of Haines history.
“There aren’t too many four-story buildings that can boast of being built by somebody mixing cement in a wheelbarrow and pushing it up scaffolding to pour,” Jones said. “To me, it’s one of the most interesting buildings.”
Betsy Anne Galloway, a former Haines resident, said Chisel used a number of unconventional techniques to build his store and hotel.
“At that time there wasn’t any rebar for reinforcement, so he used whatever he could find in the metal department,” Galloway said. “Old bedsprings, iron pipes.” Even entire metal bedframes were used, she said.
At first, the structure held Chisel’s general store and a hotel—though, apparently, renting a room there was no easy feat.
In a 1953 memoir, Cheechako First Class, writer Keith Rieder described when she and her husband stayed at Chisel’s hotel. At that time, she wrote, Haines looked like nothing so much as “two nondescript buildings half hidden by trees.”
“There were no spare rooms” in Chisel’s building, Rieder writes. “Each room in the hotel was piled to the ceiling with junk—forty years’ accumulation of the Chisels’ possessions.”
After finally securing a room, Chisel showed Rieder another Haines first in the hotel—the town’s first elevator.
“The elevator was a board platform with no sides. When the door was closed it was so dark I felt as though I were wrapped in tarpaper,” Rieder wrote.
“We had jerked and banged long enough to be through the roof of the Empire State, when suddenly my feet left the platform,” she continued. “We had started to drop. ‘Oops, wrong rope,’ said Mr. Chisel.”
After Chisel sold the building in 1947, a Jack Gucker took ownership. The building was, at that time, estimated to be worth $12,500. In 1953, Jack Ward bought the building for $33,000. Ward ran a grocery store and his own hospitality business, the Jack Ward Hotel, out of the building. Renting a room was $3.50 a day.
Judy Ward Weir, Jack Ward’s daughter, remembers helping out in her father’s hotel. “We were too young to do much,” Weir said. “But we would help Mom fold laundry, or once in a while make beds.”
Marge Ward, the daughter-in-law of Jack Ward, came to Haines when she was 24. When she first arrived, she said, she found work cleaning buildings—among them, the Chisel Building. Marge Ward said she recalls hearing ghost stories about the place.
“Sure, we heard things like that,” she said. “I never saw anything.”
Annette Smith, another longtime resident of Haines, said she, too, has vague memories of a ghost story about the building.
“Someone might’ve said they heard Mrs. Chisel playing the piano,” she said. “It’s in my memory box.”
In the next half-century, the building passed through the hands of several owners, including Charles Burnett, Clifford Reeves, and the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes. The building has housed apartments, hotels, stores selling groceries, outdoor equipment, and furniture, and two pizza parlors.
When Pardee, who ran Porcupine Pete’s restaurant, bought the building in the early 80s, the building was apparently home to some rougher tenants.
“(I) had some problems with people upstairs,” Pardee said. “Skinned my knuckles on one of those guys.”
The Chisel Building is currently owned by Ira Henry, who bought it in a state of disrepair around 2003 from First National Bank.
“When I bought it, the roof was completely in shambles,” Henry said. “It was a cool building. I thought it had potential to be more than what it was.”
Today, the Chisel Building is home to four apartments, La Loft consignment store, and Alaska Rod’s gift shop. But, Henry said, there are no ghosts.
When fixing up the roof, “I worked in that building at midnight, at two in the morning,” Henry said. “Sometimes I didn’t have a flashlight.” While working, he said, he saw nothing supernatural.
“I don’t know if I believe in haunted buildings anyway,” he added.