Ghosts of Everett

Editor’s Note: Originally Published October 25, 2016. Republished October 27,2022.

Jerri, Catholic Community Services
Everett Avenue & Lombard

She shuffles silently down dim halls that should squeak underfoot. Somebody once saw ghost-Jerri fishing for cigarettes in her pocket, grumbling. She was always that way in life: a high-stress manager on the move, a strong personality lumbering to the next task.

Jerri is one of the spirits that reportedly haunts the century-old Catholic Community Services building in Downtown Everett.

One night, a supervisor was working late at the office. He brought his terrier for company. Around midnight, the office grew suddenly cold. The man’s dog started barking and running up and down the hall. The supervisor scooped up the anxious pet, locked up, and went home, leaving the lights on in his haste. He thought he had been alone in the building…

Those who knew Jerri in life say that she poured her spirit into her job. She was a social worker who dedicated all her energy to others, the kind of boss who took her team of nineteen employees out to Anthony’s at Christmas and picked up the tab.

Years of black coffee, Pall Malls, and crisis management caught up with Jerri. Now it seems she can’t get away from her work.

George, the (old) YMCA
California St. and Rockefeller

He was a janitor. That’s all anyone seems to know about his life.

A fire in the 1920s burned part of the original YMCA building on the corner of California and Rockefeller. George was able to help several children escape the flames. He tragically died in the fire, but that didn’t seem to be the end of George.

His voice can sometimes be heard indistinctly over the intercom at the YMCA. He moves punching bags and drops weights in empty rooms, seemingly restless or clumsy. Several employees have witnessed his bumps and thuds around the building.

Paranormal investigators visited the Everett YMCA in 2012 hoping to document George. They waited until night, set up ectoplasmic detectors and video cameras with infrared vision. The investigators searched “Ghost town”, an abandoned section of the Y that used to be a hostel.

Morning came. Results were inconclusive.

Is George a hoax? Is he the power of suggestion? Could so many of his eyewitnesses be wrong? Or is George just a camera-shy phantasm, wandering his haunt, awkwardly bumping into things with his broom?

The City

Is Everett haunted? I don’t have a ghost of an idea.

But. Sometimes at night I hear the lonely shriek of an underground train. Maybe that’s the spirit of our industrial heritage, the undying internal life force of a city built on mills, docks, and smelted ore. A place built on the sweat and broken backs of men.

If Everett is haunted it’s by this: the force of latent history around us. Buildings that held, for a time, men and women who worked and dreamed and laughed. Their stories are everywhere.

Some stories, like Jerri and George, get remembered.