Seattle, 1911: a phantom card player in a bay window.

What the paper reported

Neighbors at Eastlake and John Street said that in the big bay window of the second house from the corner you could see a man in profile, with a shade over his eyes, dealing cards. Four officers rang the bell. Two elderly women let them in and said they didn’t know what caused it either.

Exhibit A · Transcription

Ghost Mystery Baffles ’Em

[Cartoon captions:] “Methinks I hear a slight rustling of yon atmosphere.” “Hist!” Sherlock. Gumshoe.

Later in the same article (not in the image)

Do you want to see a ghost—a real, distinguishable phantom that will give you the proper chilly temperature, and all the necessary shivers that belong to a well-mannered ghost?

Later in the same article (not in the image)

Well, just drop off at the corner of Eastlake and John St. this evening. Second house from the corner as you come from down town—that’s the place. At a certain point on the opposite side of the street, take a peep into the big bay window, and then— You may well believe that the spirits are in the air. If you’re at all timid, you’ll have the right to entertain 643,875,694 shivers, trembles, chills, creeps, and all the rest of those kind of things, you know. For this is what you’ll see: The profile of a man outlined in the

Later in the same article (not in the image)

window, with a shade over his eyes, and his hands appearing to deal cards. … Four officers of the law, determined to solve the mysterious apparition, rang the door bell last night. The neighbors had told them they had not seen anyone emerge from the house for many moons. But the door opened, and two kindly, elderly women asked the sleuths in. “We do not know what causes it,” they said. … It’s still a mystery.

Transcribed from the page image, spelling as printed; line-end hyphens joined. The image shows the headline and the cartoon; the article text below it is transcribed as the later passages. “…” marks words we left out. Checked word by word against the Library of Congress’s OCR text (the cartoon’s hand-lettered captions aren’t in the OCR).

Newspaper

The Seattle Star

Published in

Seattle, Washington

Headline

Ghost Mystery Baffles ’Em

Date

November 11, 1911

Page

1

Permalink

www.loc.gov/resource/sn87093407/1911-11-11/ed-1/?sp=1

Source

Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain (published 1911).