The bar Chapel on Capitol Hill hasn’t always been a place for
spirits of the drinking kind. The gorgeous room—leaded
glass windows and enormous mirrors, ornate dark woodwork, vaulted
ceiling, antique fixtures—was built in the 1920s as the chapel
for the adjoining Butterworth’s Mortuary. Here the living ushered souls
to the other side, contemplating their time on this earth, mourning
their departure. The blank eyes of Chapel’s windowpanes have looked
upon much death where people now toast to life, celebrating the fact
that it’s Friday, or someone’s survival of another year, or an
evening’s various corporeal prospects. The bar’s cool, white stone,
where martinis now momentarily rest, was salvaged from the mausoleum.
The acoustics—meant for eulogies and bent-headed
prayer—mean that when Chapel fills up with less-than-sober
revelers, there’s an ungodly, joyous din.
On a crowded night at Chapel, the room’s somber past seems distant,
but rumor has it that Chapel is haunted. A former employee who
wished to remain nameless reported that on one occasion, someone
witnessed a glass fly straight up into the air, then come down with a
smash onto the dishwasher. Furthermore, once two “pretty credible”
people were there all alone and saw someone in the balcony. “We had a
toilet that flushed by itself,” she continued, “but, you know, that
could just be a plumbing issue.” (One of the bathrooms at Chapel is
a tiny, beautifully designed cubby, like a lavatory on a very
high-class airplane. Any ghost in its right mind would want to use
it.)
A current Chapel employee (she, too, wished to remain
nameless—she’s also a teacher, and, she said, it’s frightening
what your students can find out about you online) told tales of
close encounters of the first-person kind. She herself, along with
several others, has seen a woman in a dress appear in the balcony. “I
have—I have!” she said, sounding surprised. “I wasn’t looking for
things… I’ve been here alone a lot at like four o’clock in the
morning, closing up, and there would be people just kind of walking
around. You just feel them.” What? “It was always very peaceful,
though—never scary.” And back when Chapel first opened, she and
her colleagues all saw a fire burning downstairs through a grate in the
floor—downstairs, where the crematorium was. “I saw it,” she averred. “There were four or five of us standing around the
grate, looking at this fire that didn’t exist.”
That dishwasher that a glass smashed down onto? That, the fire-seer
says, is in the exact place where Bruce Lee’s body was laid out.
(He was not cremated, but buried at Lake View Cemetery up on 15th
Avenue East.) “I sometimes think about that when I’m doing dishes,” she
said.
October 31 is Chapel’s sixth anniversary.
Haunted? I wouldn’t step foot in Chapel. For anyone who visited Chapel before it was bar, the space is hardly comfortable, but not because it’s scary. Rather, it’s a place where we remember saying goodbye to people we loved, and for that reason it’s just a very sad place. So if you’re convinced Chapel is haunted, you’ve probably seen too many scary movies, and you’ve probably never had to go to a funeral home to say goodbye to someone you love. Or maybe you’ve just had one too many drinks…
As a paranormal investigator, I can believe the stories there hold validity. Considering the history of the building, there is a high probability that there would be a lot of residual activity in the building.