Spokane has had its share of characters, both current and past. You can meet some of them in a new book from journalist and author Adriana Janovich. Her previous book, “Unique Eats and Eateries of Spokane,” came out last year. Her second tome, “Secret Spokane: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure” has just been released. She’s here to talk about it with SPR’s Kyrsten Weber.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kyrsten Weber: What is the weirdest thing about Spokane that you discovered?
Adriana Janovich: Oh, that is a great question. So there was this man who moved to Spokane from the Midwest in the early 1900s named Willis Ray Willey. And apparently sometime in the mid to late 1910s, he basically stopped wearing clothes. He had lost his farm and moved into a Model T truck that he had rigged into some kind of tiny house on wheels. And he often caught the attention of local police.
He didn't go out completely naked, but he would only wear khaki shorts. So in winter, he might wear galoshes and khaki shorts. And in summer, he might wear a sun visor and khaki shorts.
At some point too, he seems to have stopped getting a haircut and trimming his beard. He had been married and he fathered eight children, but they seem to have stayed behind in Iowa. And when he lived in and around Spokane, his companions were a raccoon named Big Boy, some tame rats, a guinea pig, hairless dogs, and other animals.
He made a living by selling scrap metal and secondhand furniture and posing in and charging for photos, as well as selling postcards of himself in his preferred attire. After he died, somebody wrote a book about him. In the last 10 years, a local band wrote a song about him.
There's a boulder in the Spokane River named for him. There is a mural of him, Willie Willey, shirtless. His hand is resting on the back of this larger than life-size marmot on the Eastern edge of downtown that probably a lot of people walk by or drive by every day, but don't realize it's him.
He had this reputation as being a nature lover and an animal lover. And I don't know if his story is so weird as it is whimsical, but he was certainly eccentric and was kind of this living legend during his time. He was quite a character and he's somebody that I learned about during the course of research and writing this book.
KW: So that brings me to my next question. How involved and time-consuming was the research for a book like this?
AJ: They gave me a year to work on this book, same as the last one. Secret Spokane is my second book with Reedy Press. I wrote Unique Eats and Eateries of Spokane with Reedy Press in 2024. I do have a day job. I'm the associate editor at Washington State Magazine in Pullman at Washington State University.
Washington State Magazine is the research and alumni magazine at WSU. I also sometimes teach at WSU and at the University of Idaho. I worked on the book, both books actually, nights and weekends.
And then the work really picked up in the summer when I wasn't teaching and when I made many photography trips to Spokane. So in addition to research and writing, I also did much of the photography for both of the books. The process involved brainstorming potential story ideas, tracking down historical images that are in the public domain, particularly for this book.
And Spokane Public Library was a big help with that. Reading historical and public documents, as well as old newspaper articles, including some that I actually wrote myself during my time at the Spokesman. It was kind of fun to use those for background for this book.
And then, of course, there was the writing and the rewriting and the editing. There was a lot of paring down. So each of the main stories can only be about 300 words, which is not very long.
Every writer knows it's much harder to write short and tight than long and rambly. And writing is rewriting.
KW: Does this book include any ghost stories?
AJ: Oh, lots. You could write a whole book on haunted Spokane. Actually, I think a few people have already done that. And I have to admit, I have not read them.
I was aware of some, but I didn't want to read them and have it influence my writing. But yes, Spokane has so many haunted sites, theaters, mansions, libraries, cemeteries, grave sites, disaster sites. A few of them are in the book, but it's not just about haunted things.
So a few of the haunted sites include the Bad Seed, which is the restaurant and bar in the old Hillyard Library. It's supposedly haunted by a ghost named Veronica, and there's a cocktail named after her. Another haunted site in the book is the music building on the Gonzaga University campus.
It's an old mansion, and apparently ghostly things have been happening there since the 1970s or so. The Bing Theater is reportedly haunted by not one, but two ghosts. The one that really stands out to me, though, takes place at the Davenport Hotel.
I think there are multiple Davenport ghosts, but the one that really jumps out at me dates to 1920. There was a widowed New York dressmaker staying at the hotel with her sister and a couple of cousins. It was August 17, and they were headed to dinner in the Isabella Room.
That's when Ellen McNamara said she felt unwell and wanted to get some air. She was going to miss dinner. A short time later, just before 7 p.m., she crashed through the skylight that overlooks the lobby. She fell about 30 feet, and about 100 people saw her fall. She was conscious for a few seconds after she hit the floor and reportedly asked, where did I go? She was carried to a nearby couch. She lost consciousness, and she died in her room about an hour later.
And for decades since, guests have reported seeing an apparition of a woman dressed in 1920s attire kind of wandering around the second floor mezzanine above the lobby.
On Saturday, June 6, I'm leading a walking tour of some of the locations in secret Spokane starting at 4 p.m. I'm really excited for the walking tour, and the idea is that it would be about an hour long. We start at the library. We'll probably swing past the spokesman review where I used to work. I call it the Tower of Power in the book. It's one of the 84 entries. Then we'll kind of wind our way east and end up at Auntie's for a book signing and to sell the books.