Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore

According to their website: «After Sat. May 18^th the museum will be shifting to an
Online Museum only with occassional tours and events»

In a city filled with quirky attractions, the NW Museum of Legends and Lore may take the cake. Difficult to visit — call first, because the place is staffed by volunteers. Although it opens at 12:00 p.m. during the week, when I called at noon, the volunteer told me that the museum wouldn’t likely open until 1:00 p.m.
I suspect they don’t get many visitors. When you arrive at the building, you need to buzz the volunteer and wait for a few minutes as she walks to the main entrance to let you in. The museum itself is one large «living room» filled with random memorabilia. A theremin machine, a model of the World’s Fair grounds, Bigfoot casts. ..
One bookcase is devoted to Hollywood stars Bruce Lee and Frances Farmer. There’s a display dedicated to D.B. Cooper (Don’t mention the movie starring Treat Williams — as I was told that it romanticized the story). They have a wax model of D.B. Cooper’s head, commissioned by the museum based on eyewitness observations. Another «display» is devoted a local nurse who starved her patients to death.
The museum is obviously a labor of love. Photographs are permitted and the suggested donation of $ 3 is not aggressively enforced.

Ok, went here and the best part was the big foot out front. When the 4 of us walked in, it became crowed because that’s how small this place was. LOL museum, NOT! They had copies of articles in frames and books. To me this is a library. They had an oxygen machine. LMAO! the oxygen tube was yellow in color from it being old and used! The lady, who was very nice, seem high and stuttered. If you are looking to go and read a book on Mysteries, this is your place. We went June 5,2009.

My friends and I decided that doing the Museum of Mysteries Saturday night lock-​in was the perfect way to spend our Valentines Day. And we couldn’t have been happier with our choice! $ 5 for 2 hours of silly, weird, ghost related fun. We went on a ghost tour, played poker «with a ghost», and ended the evening by splitting into two groups and going on ghost hunts with a video camera and ghost detecting device. The scariest part of it was probably the dead rat we found in a closet, but we still had a blast none-​the-​less.

I came across this place by accident. I have a book called «Walking Seattle» and the Broadway District walk will have you pass this place. With a name like «Museum of Mysteries» and a low admission price of $ 2 how could I not go in? The two people who were working here are nice. They let me join a ghost tour for free. It’s a short tour, and you really only walk across the street because the surrounding buildings are old. The museum itself is small and consists of a room with a bunch of books and newspaper articles about UFO’s and Big Foot. If I had more time, I would have sat down and read the entire book section they have on Tesla. It’s a fun place to learn more about Seattle’s history. I highly recommend this place if you like the Science Fiction museum or are a fan of TV shows like «Twin Peaks» and «X-​files».

Grandpa was a Bigfoot Hunter, and Grandma was a Psychic so finding a place like this reminds me of my family… which is both unsettling and familiar.
I like to play the Psychic card game here. They go through the deck and count how many cards you can mystically predict… I’m perfectly horrible at it… but I enjoy watching how seriously the employees take it.
I was on a date with a bi-​polar girl and she got 85% correct which was totally freaky… I mean, not as freaky as our lunch together, when she told me voices were telling her to stab me with her table knife… but freaky.

K so we did the whole ghost tour thing in what the museum calls a lock in. You basically meet in the museum (which has a giant Sasquatch out front) just before 10 pm on Saturday and they go through a pretty interesting history of the darker side of Seattle’s past. Speakeasy’s and deaths and local haunts. We didn’t see any ghosts but they did play a game of fake poker to try to set the mood for a regular that apparently haunts the museum. There is no staged scare tactics along the way, only real history, research and unlimited amounts of resources.
They do take you on a short walking tour of the theater next door and give you the background on the place. It is still beautiful and used today and you may not get the same experience just going alone. The tour guide leader really knew her stuff and she had a few enthusiastic «assistants» … if you want to call them that… mostly a few irritating girls and their friends that acted like this was their personal party and were pretty rude and distracting to the whole group… but about ¾ of the way through they «reveled» that they were able to see the ghosts so apparently they had a purpose. I am giving the tour and the sheer fact that they know more about real northwest history than most of us have ever even heard about!
My recommendation is this is a must do for an interesting Saturday evening. Its very inexpensive and you can always hang out in Capitol Hill after. One thing I would say is call ahead to RSVP your spot because while they will take as many as they can fit they place is really small and a big group can get uncomfortable.
(I’d previously rated too low as a result of other participants, and that was completely unfair to judge this group for people not involved in the actual business. All thumbs up for the museum)

Black curtains. Comfortable chairs. Shelves filled with tomes of esoteric lore from Time-​Life books. A DVD player running documentaries and spooky films. Plaster casts of Bigfoot prints. Tarot cards, Ouija boards, and ESP tests. Bruce Lee & Kurt Cobain memorabilia. A smattering of history. A theremin. An oxygen bar?!
Okay, I don’t have a theremin or an oxygen bar, but I do have cats running around. That puts my living room on roughly equal footing with the Museum of the Mysteries, and I don’t charge $ 2 for entry.
I don’t want to be too negative, though. The staff was pleasant, and it seems to function as a kind of Mystic Brotherhood Reading Room. Perhaps I am just spoiled by Miami, where every block you can find a bustling botanica.

:) I hate to say it, but if you discover this place though Unilocal it won’t be as cool. You’re experience is much better if you just stumble across this place and wander in off the street accidentally.
They do weird/​fun things like ouji board poker night where they deal in a ghost hand and also they have regular ghost tours around the neighborhood, which is a pretty good history of the local area.
I love that it’s a paranormal/​bigfoot/​Bruce Lee museum!
Plus afterwards you can get great food next door because the area is restaurant heaven.

Thanks to Alyson L for mentioning Museum of the Mysteries. Otherwise we wouldn’t even know this place existed. Located in the Capitol Hill, I felt like I was back in SF’s Haight-​Ashbury area, but much much cleaner and much less bums. My fiancé said he kept expecting to see Amoeba Records at the corner of the street. Unfortunately there was no Amoeba, but we did go to a used CD/​DVD place and bought South Park the movie.
The museum itself is not really a museum. More like someone’s living room full of personal collection of books, videos and news/​magazine clippings about anything paranormal. Admission/​donation is $ 2, but if you get the $ 12 pass, you get access to the oxygen bar once a week, I think.
Once inside, you are welcome to look around, read books and clippings and play DVDs if no one is using it. Exhibits include Bigfoot, crop circles, D.B. Cooper, etc. They also hold «museum lock-​in» a couple times a week where you spend a couple hours from 10-​midnight inside the museum and play ghost poker. I think they have ghost tours too, but I didn’t really look into that. Very fascinating place to visit, especially if you’re a paranormal/​sci-​fi geek. I’ve heard the phrase «I used to have this book as a child!» at least twice while I was there.
There’s also a little hallway of fame dedicated to Bruce Lee. The lady is such a Bruce Lee fan that when we told her that we’re from SF, she lighted up and said «Oh! That’s Bruce Lee territory!». I thought that was cute.
Do find some time to visit this place at least once. Feed your inner geek!

Went here based on Alyson L. We took the $ 3 guided tour. It was interesting. They have a lot of resource material and are good talkers.
That being said, they had little in the way of museum pieces and our guide got way carried away on Bruce Lee, and Frances Farmer. She didn’t talk about Nikola Tesla, whom they evidently have some stuff on and would be a very interesting subject. (Look him up on wikipedia
and go from there, especially if you are into weird physics. In his later years he became somewhat of a «Mad Scientist»)
They have information on Bigfoot, UFO sightings around the area. They didn’t get into Native American legends /​stories about UFO’s though.
The «guided tour» was worth the $ 3, and a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. For an additional 2 bucks, you can go on the Capitol Hill Ghost Tour (my wife wouldn’t go — she was a bit annoyed after our guide diverted a lot of attention to Bruce Lee and Francis Farmer.)

OH MY GAWD! I’m the first to review this place? Unreal.
If you haven’t gone to the Museum of Mysteries, you must — ASAP. Or the next time they have an interesting event there.
They are (from their web-​site)
«Washington State’s only Paranormal Science Museum»
Come explore the Legends and Lore of the Northwest
UFO History, Bigfoot and Ghost Museum
Seattle’s only Oxygen Bar
Ghost Tour — Capitol Hill Historical Ghost Tour
I had noticed this place in my travels around Broadway when I lived on the hill in my younger days, but my first venture inside was when I saw a most intriguing blurb in the section in The Stranger where they always mention the swinger parties and bdsm stuff (have you noticed the innocuous events they sneak in there between the dirty stuff?). Anywhoo, they claimed they were going to have a screening of the Wizard of Oz, synced with The Wall and an actual interview with one of the Lollipop dudes AND they would discuss the rumors about one of the cast hanging himself on set… Seriously, how could you pass that up? AND it was only a few dollars as a «suggested donation» to get in.
After some explanation about the theories and yada, yada, and watching the videotaped interview with a former cast member and dispelling the rumor about the hanging and talking to one of the members of the ridiculously huge fan club (and author of his own Oz books — apparently you can do that) and handing out the breakdown of where things seemed to match up in the movie, they actually got to the part where they play the movie. It only took them like 5 tries and 20 minutes to get it started. I would’ve stayed to watch the whole thing, but me and my also-​not-​tall companion were sitting behind a gargantuan couple that seemed to know every time we leaned to see around them and shifted to block the previously open view.
Alright, now for my second trip to the Museum, I decided to go whole hog and went for the guided tour. This place is about as big as most of the basements I’ve been in, but it was worth every penny of the $ 3 I paid to get in. Your best bet is to go when the co-​director Philip Lipson is working — it will be an experience you will NEVER forget.
Seriously, if you live in Seattle and haven’t been here yet you’re crazy. Or just totally missing out.
It’s a little hard to find — it’s between Roy and Mercer on the North end of Broadway
in the lower atrium beneath Aoki Sushi, once you look down the stairs you’ll know you’ve found the place.