It was a barista who first told me about the ghost.
‘We think it’s wretchedly haunted,’ I recall her saying. This was back in 2014, inside the Bulldog Edition, the espresso bar inside the Ace Hotel, where I happened to be staying. The hotel’s spook status centered around the untimely death of its founder Alex Calderwood, who died on the third floor in the previous autumn, a few weeks after trading commenced.
‘It’s like you feel someone else with you when you’re there by yourself,’ she continued, describing a sense of unease. The presence of something unseen. People have said that they felt this too, on the front steps of the hotel, or in the hotel lobby, where the stereo system had the unexplained habit of turning itself on some mornings for a sharp blast of six seconds, at the very highest decibel imaginable, to blast dance music before abruptly stopping into silence.
The bar staff had checked the wiring, the barista told me. They’d called the sound guy. It couldn’t be explained. And it kept happening.
‘The Ace Hotel guy fucking died here and now it’s a bloody ghost hotel.’
Of course, as I discovered recently, there’s far more to the story.
You might understand Alex Calderwood best as a sort of Gen X answer to César Ritz. In some ways, Calderwood’s venture echoed the status hotels occupied at the turn of the previous century, when grand lodgings like The Savoy, The Biltmore, Raffles, and The Plaza Hotel defined public urban life in major cities around the world. Calderwood’s Ace Hotels took this idea and flipped it on its head, furnishing rooms with original fringe art and vinyl hi-fi systems, plunking down locations in the off-cut parts of city after city. At its zenith, Ace Hotel boasted properties on four continents, with locations in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, New York City, Kyoto, Pittsburgh, Panama City, Palm Springs and London.
Calderwood was born in a suburb of Seattle, and fell headfirst into the city’s 1990s scene. He ran event nights at dance clubs, owned his own design consultancy and launched a chain of influential barber shops; the sorts of places where the desk girl would smoke cigarettes and pull tarot cards while accepting your booking for a trim. He was gay; his romantic partners were often his business partners, and together they built up a juggernaut conglomerate centered in and around Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
