The Ghost of Ballast Island
A laborer’s body washes up on the Seattle waterfront, leaving a trail of questions about a midnight splash and a missing man with a light overcoat.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The badly decomposed body of C. K. Sundstrom, an odd-job man aged 40 years who had been missing since mid-February, was discovered on the rocks of Ballast Island at daylight yesterday. Whether Sundstrom was murdered remains an open question, as the remains were too far gone for a coroner to determine the cause of death. However, a local engineer, Joe Crow, provided a chilling account. On the night of February 17, while returning to the steamer Clara Brown docked at Ocean Dock, Crow heard a distinct sound in the water—a splash followed by a deep, pained groan. He then witnessed a well-dressed man in a light overcoat hurrying along the opposite side of the dock before disappearing into the shadows of the fish stands. Sundstrom’s body was found just 300 feet from where Crow heard the struggle. While some argue Sundstrom may have simply fallen in during a drunken spree, the presence of his purse containing $25.50 on his person has led authorities to question the standard 'accidental drowning' narrative.
“Suddenly there was a splashing in the water, a deep groan and then all was still as death.”
Ballast Island, once a man-made dumping ground for ship ballast on the Seattle waterfront, has long since been buried under modern land reclamation projects like the Alaskan Way seawall. This mystery echoes the historical vulnerability of the transient labor force in early Seattle—a population often 'mislaid' by the city's rapid expansion.
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