Welcome to Spook Lit—an Audiobook Club by Dreary Dendrophile!
Every Monday, paid subscribers receive the next chapter delivered to your inbox, ready for a haunting good time. For those who prefer to read along, I’m including photos of the text at the bottom of each post.
In this chapter (Round the Fire. First Evening.), we explore two stories about ghostly visitations before friends and family are made aware of their loved one’s passing. Sometimes these types of encounters are called “crisis apparitions.” This chapter reminds me of a story I heard on one of my first ghost tours in Pike Place Market.
I moved to the market in 2015 and was eager to soak up all of its history. Back then, the ghost tours were run by Ghost Alley Espresso, owned and operated by Mercedes Yaeger who wrote the book Market Ghost Stories. Apologies, I don’t remember specifics about the people in the story nor the tour guide’s name, so I won’t be able to give them credit.
Pike Place Market is made up of hundreds of stores, cafes, delis, restaurants, produce stands, and fish stalls—permanent fixtures with metal gates that roll down and lock up the shops after closing. We also have acres of tables known locally as “The Crafts Line” where artists, textile workers, herbalists, and flower farmers gather to sell their wares. Each morning begins with a lottery to determine placement, and vendors rotate daily based on seniority—those with the longest market tenure earn the coveted inside spots, sheltered from the wind and rain.
For those in the crafts line, there’s an elevator across the cobblestones tucked in by the “original”1 Starbucks that descends to a basement level beneath the streets. Down there, craftspeople and buskers store their booths and kiosks each night, rather than lugging them back and forth every day2.
As the story goes, there was a man—we’ll call him Frank—who took it upon himself to organize the carts, helping vendors get them out in the morning and stow them away at night for a small fee. If you paid Frank, your booth was likely up and running on time, and you could head home at a reasonable hour. But if you opted to go it alone, you risked getting lost in a maze of kiosks and storage trunks, destined to wait behind the others in Frank’s streamlined system.
