Boo.

Do you believe in GHOSTS?
In a way...I do...and don't...all at once. If that makes sense. Which it does. Somehow. You'd have to be me.
After the Chinese New Year extravaganza on Saturday, our time in Seattle wasn't quite over. We had bought tickets to the 3:00pm tour of the Seattle Underground...or "Sin City" as they like to call it (don't quote me on that). Our friends Nicole and Damien joined us for Chinese food and then for the tour. I think we all had different expectations and visions of what the tour would look like. I personally was envisioning going down multiple cob-webby staircases to a huge open cavern with whole buildings towering inside...completely blocked from the sun besides some little overhead grates that let in tiny streams of light. This was, however, very far from the truth. This is not a complaint though. The tour was very fascinating, entertaining, and at times, surprising. At the beginning of the tour, our guide made it clear that this was not a glitzy glammy disney tour with lots of redone sets. It was all real. And the art of story-telling was the foundation for the tour so it all took a lot of imagination-skills to really envision how Seattle must have been like before the infamous fire. We went through 3 series of underground "sidewalks" and buildings, surviving the expansion of the new Seattle above, almost completely forgotten below. They said the sidewalks and basements were meant to be filled in eventually but obviously that never happened.
My favorite parts of the tour were the skylights. Installed on the sidewalks here and there in Pioneer Square (I am a poet and yes I did know it) are skylights to the underground. They were said to originally be clear but experienced a chemical reaction when exposed to sunlight and they are now purple in color. It was very cool seeing them from below and seeing the sunlight shining through down to the tunnels. I remember walking over them and always wondering why they were there.
The third segment of underground tunnels was said to be haunted. In fact, Ghost Hunters did an episode on it. The ghost is said to guard the vault where a bank once was. And supposedly because of the "ghost" activity, that certain tunnel happens to be much colder than the others. As we began to descend the stairs to get to this part of the tour, a man in a top hat with a red feather in it smiled at us and told us to watch out for spiders. I secretly suspected he was the ghost...out for an afternoon stroll away from the hustle and bustle of the Underground Tour. Hmm...