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The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest
In the early twentieth century so many dead bodies surfaced in the rivers around Aberdeen, Washington, that they were nicknamed the “floater fleet.” When Billy Gohl (1873–1927), a powerful union official, was arrested for murder, local newspapers were quick to suggest that he was responsible for many of those deaths, perhaps even dozens—thus launching the legend of the Ghoul of Grays Harbor.More than a true-crime tale, The Port of Missing Men sheds light on the lives of workers who died tragically, illuminating the dehumanizing treatment of sailors and lumber workers and the heated clashes between pro- and anti-union forces. Goings investigates the creation of the myth, exploring how so many people were willing to believe such extraordinary stories about Gohl. He shares the story of a charismatic labor leader—the one man who could shut down the highly profitable Grays Harbor lumber trade—and provides an equally intriguing analysis of the human costs of the Pacific Northwest’s early extraction economy.
- GenresHistoryTrue Crime
293 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 26, 2020
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154 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 22, 2021
Less of a murder mystery and all of a labor history of Grays Harbor during the turn of the 20th century. Very well researched.
November 1, 2023
Holy shit
March 9, 2023
This is an extremely well-researched work of history, that fills a massive gap in the scholarship on the early 19th century Pacific Northwest. Goings essentially exposes the fact that Billy Google, long-considered a prolific serial killer, was not a killer at all, and was in fact framed by anti-labor forces who opposed his powerful Union leadership. The intro and conclusion will give you the gist of the argument, and the rest of the chapters are relatively dense and slow reading; great scholarship doesn’t always translate into page-turning prose. Still, I’d give the is four stars for the truly original and groundbreaking historical research on the part of the author.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 15, 2026
Note: This essay appears in better form with photos on the Bartleby the Sailor Substack.
During a recent trip to Seattle, I visited my former union, the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), at fisherman’s terminal in Ballard. There I reconnected with both the ex-Seattle Port Agent, Vince O’Halloran, who was responsible for me joining the union in 1999,1 and the current Port Agent, Brendan Bohannon, with whom I worked on a couple of occasions over the years. Both are my union brothers, though I am retired and stopped paying dues around 2021. It was great to catch up and wax nostalgic. While chatting, I was immediately reminded that both have physically imposing statures. I wouldn’t want to cross either of them or see them angry.2 Of course, US labor history and particularly US West Coast Maritime labor history is rife with labor strife and violence, particularly in the era from 1900-1935 when shipping companies did their utmost to break union solidarity. During those years an imposing physique with an implicit threat of violence served a port agent well. Younger mariners should be aware of the willingness of these old-time maritime labor organizers to “mix it up,” so to speak. History has shown that non-violent actions work best when there has been either the threat of violence or actual violence to bring about a fair collective bargaining agreement.
In my separate discussions with both Vince and Brendan, Aaron Goings’ 2020 book The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest, which had previously been under my radar, was mentioned. As both a professional mariner and former denizen of the Pacific Northwest for over two decades, I was aware of several mariners who were convicted of being serial killers or egregious brutal psychopathic murderers, e.g. Richard Speck, as well as infamous serial killers hailing from Seattle and nearby PNW environs, e.g. Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.3 It seems like the postal service isn’t the only profession predisposed to the American berserk and that the former remote outpost of the dreary rainy PNW brings out the crazy. And although I am not a true crime aficionado, I was cognizant of Billy Gohl, the “Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” a former SUP port agent of Aberdeen, WA at the turn of the 20th century who allegedly killed countless victims, often sailors, after they were paid off, disposing of the bodies through a trap door in the union hall flooring; the bodies ended up in the Chehalis River, accounting for a “floaters fleet” of corpses, many alleged victims of Gohl.
Although my curiosity was piqued back in the 2000’s, I contented myself with uneasy dreams of what it must have been like to have a sit down with Billy Gohl after paying off of a vessel and being offered drinks by him. Never did I question the veracity of the charges against him. Silly me. And never did an SUP member with a better grasp of West Coast maritime labor history set me straight concerning the flimsiness of charges against an erstwhile union brother who rubbed shoulders with mighty Andrew Furuseth, the “Abraham Lincoln of the Sea,” and Harry Lundeberg, the first President of the Seafarers International Union and the SUP Treasurer from 1935 until his death in 1957.4
Aaron Goings spent his formative years around Grays Harbor and is currently a professor and historian based in the Pacific Northwest. The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest is an essential read for comprehending labor and maritime labor history in the Pacific Northwest. His erudition is apparent on every page as he backs up everything he writes with a source, unlike the true crime writers responsible for the continuing infamous reputation of the “Ghoul of Grays Harbor.” Like any historian worth a salt, virtually every paragraph contains an endnote citation. Nevertheless, the book is easy-to-read, engaging and harkens a brutal era when a sailor’s life was worth nary a penny and when the remote inlet outpost Aberdeen, at the time the most active lumber port in the world, was a frontier town enmeshed in vice and labor conflicts.
Goings presents a very compelling case that William “Billy” Gohl was not a serial killer, but also that he was framed for the one murder for which he was convicted and for which he spent almost two decades incarcerated, mostly in the penitentiary in Walla Walla, until his death, unable to defend his reputation as salacious True Crime authors worked towards cementing his reputation as a nefarious serial killer. The true culprits--as is often the case in US history--are the business interests, the respectable citizens who owned the lumber mills, who had the corruptible police chief in their pocket, and who could stack a jury of peers, i.e. peers of the prosecution, not the accused. Goings does an admirable job in parsing the demographics of the town and exactly who could vote or sit on a jury.
William Gohl was a representative laboring man of his era, an assimilated immigrant who was both physically imposing and extremely intelligent. He rose through the ranks of the SUP and made a home as the port agent in Aberdeen, WA, among other responsibilities, where he acted as both a firebrand who once led an armed incursion on a lumber vessel crewed by scabs (for which he was convicted) and as a friend to the maritime brotherhood, where he helped disenfranchised mariners find affordable lodgings. He was a polyglot and autodidact who managed to both marry and have a fulfilling life on land, a rarity in that era particularly for a (former) sailor. Naturally, the lumber interests in Aberdeen, the model citizens, loathed him and eventually pinned a dubious murder on him under the flimsiest of pretenses to be rid of him. The rest is legend, but now—thankfully—with a paragraph on Goings’ book added to the Wikipedia entry on William “Billy” Gohl so that a thinking person might take the charges against him with a grain of salt. Gohl had flaws that were typical of the German or Nordic immigrant of the era, e.g. white supremacy and xenophobia, but a serial killer he was not. If anything, he was a friend to the disenfranchised who was willing to get in the faces of the powers that be. For that, he was silenced.
It behooves all US unlicensed seaman who now live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to be aware for the sacrifices that union brothers made in bygone eras. There is much more to maritime labor history than Bloody Thursday and the Seaman’s Act of 1915. While many labor histories are dry reads and not readily relatable, The Port of Missing Men most assuredly is not one of them. It is utterly captivating and compelling, recreating a world of crimps, armed incursions aboard a vessel to intimidate scab crews, a frontier town with saloons by the dozen, and fat (in one case quite literally) business interests who had no moral qualms about framing a nemesis and dispatching him to Walla Walla as a murderer in order to rid the town of a union agitator, one with the audacity to buy a residence in the better part of town.
-------------------------------
1
Hate mail for this indiscretion may be sent to Vince directly. Yes, he is responsible for “The Librarian.”
2
I was night-mating (PRO work Professional Relief Officer) on the Matson Manoa one 0000-0800 shift around 0530 when the longshore gang could not free a hatch cover for some reason. They were knocking a steal ring with a maul for over a half hour and finally appealed to me to rouse a crewmember. I had no recourse but to wake the Bosun, Brendan. This was highly unusual, and I feared Brendan’s wrath, early AM and pre-caffeine fix, especially in that the Chief Mate might have nixed any OT for the call out on various pretenses. Brendan, to my relief, was very gracious.
3
During my decades in Seattle, I had the pleasure of being neighbors with a woman who knew one of Gary Ridgway’s victims and one of his potential victims (She said, “Gary” stop when he started coking, and the use of his real name flustered him and saved her). A friend I played tennis with regularly dated a woman who knew Ted Bundy’s mother. I also used to hang in a bar where Bundy left with an early victim. The bar had a separate exit by the restroom, making the exit unnoticed. So much on my Six Degrees of Separation. . .
4
Gohl is mentioned once in Hyman Weintraub’s seminal work Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seaman. Lundeberg appears in Goings’ account of Gohl’s murder: “Three months later, Gohl’s successor as union agent, Harry Lundeberg, carried a gun in the courtroom to intimidate witnesses, and, after being expelled from the courtroom, he picked a fight with an important state witness.” (Pg. 165, citation from Grays harbor Washingtonian, May 10, 1910). This considered, it is surprising that more SUP sailors are not aware of the controversy surrounding Gohl’s trial.
During a recent trip to Seattle, I visited my former union, the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP), at fisherman’s terminal in Ballard. There I reconnected with both the ex-Seattle Port Agent, Vince O’Halloran, who was responsible for me joining the union in 1999,1 and the current Port Agent, Brendan Bohannon, with whom I worked on a couple of occasions over the years. Both are my union brothers, though I am retired and stopped paying dues around 2021. It was great to catch up and wax nostalgic. While chatting, I was immediately reminded that both have physically imposing statures. I wouldn’t want to cross either of them or see them angry.2 Of course, US labor history and particularly US West Coast Maritime labor history is rife with labor strife and violence, particularly in the era from 1900-1935 when shipping companies did their utmost to break union solidarity. During those years an imposing physique with an implicit threat of violence served a port agent well. Younger mariners should be aware of the willingness of these old-time maritime labor organizers to “mix it up,” so to speak. History has shown that non-violent actions work best when there has been either the threat of violence or actual violence to bring about a fair collective bargaining agreement.
In my separate discussions with both Vince and Brendan, Aaron Goings’ 2020 book The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest, which had previously been under my radar, was mentioned. As both a professional mariner and former denizen of the Pacific Northwest for over two decades, I was aware of several mariners who were convicted of being serial killers or egregious brutal psychopathic murderers, e.g. Richard Speck, as well as infamous serial killers hailing from Seattle and nearby PNW environs, e.g. Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.3 It seems like the postal service isn’t the only profession predisposed to the American berserk and that the former remote outpost of the dreary rainy PNW brings out the crazy. And although I am not a true crime aficionado, I was cognizant of Billy Gohl, the “Ghoul of Grays Harbor,” a former SUP port agent of Aberdeen, WA at the turn of the 20th century who allegedly killed countless victims, often sailors, after they were paid off, disposing of the bodies through a trap door in the union hall flooring; the bodies ended up in the Chehalis River, accounting for a “floaters fleet” of corpses, many alleged victims of Gohl.
Although my curiosity was piqued back in the 2000’s, I contented myself with uneasy dreams of what it must have been like to have a sit down with Billy Gohl after paying off of a vessel and being offered drinks by him. Never did I question the veracity of the charges against him. Silly me. And never did an SUP member with a better grasp of West Coast maritime labor history set me straight concerning the flimsiness of charges against an erstwhile union brother who rubbed shoulders with mighty Andrew Furuseth, the “Abraham Lincoln of the Sea,” and Harry Lundeberg, the first President of the Seafarers International Union and the SUP Treasurer from 1935 until his death in 1957.4
Aaron Goings spent his formative years around Grays Harbor and is currently a professor and historian based in the Pacific Northwest. The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest is an essential read for comprehending labor and maritime labor history in the Pacific Northwest. His erudition is apparent on every page as he backs up everything he writes with a source, unlike the true crime writers responsible for the continuing infamous reputation of the “Ghoul of Grays Harbor.” Like any historian worth a salt, virtually every paragraph contains an endnote citation. Nevertheless, the book is easy-to-read, engaging and harkens a brutal era when a sailor’s life was worth nary a penny and when the remote inlet outpost Aberdeen, at the time the most active lumber port in the world, was a frontier town enmeshed in vice and labor conflicts.
Goings presents a very compelling case that William “Billy” Gohl was not a serial killer, but also that he was framed for the one murder for which he was convicted and for which he spent almost two decades incarcerated, mostly in the penitentiary in Walla Walla, until his death, unable to defend his reputation as salacious True Crime authors worked towards cementing his reputation as a nefarious serial killer. The true culprits--as is often the case in US history--are the business interests, the respectable citizens who owned the lumber mills, who had the corruptible police chief in their pocket, and who could stack a jury of peers, i.e. peers of the prosecution, not the accused. Goings does an admirable job in parsing the demographics of the town and exactly who could vote or sit on a jury.
William Gohl was a representative laboring man of his era, an assimilated immigrant who was both physically imposing and extremely intelligent. He rose through the ranks of the SUP and made a home as the port agent in Aberdeen, WA, among other responsibilities, where he acted as both a firebrand who once led an armed incursion on a lumber vessel crewed by scabs (for which he was convicted) and as a friend to the maritime brotherhood, where he helped disenfranchised mariners find affordable lodgings. He was a polyglot and autodidact who managed to both marry and have a fulfilling life on land, a rarity in that era particularly for a (former) sailor. Naturally, the lumber interests in Aberdeen, the model citizens, loathed him and eventually pinned a dubious murder on him under the flimsiest of pretenses to be rid of him. The rest is legend, but now—thankfully—with a paragraph on Goings’ book added to the Wikipedia entry on William “Billy” Gohl so that a thinking person might take the charges against him with a grain of salt. Gohl had flaws that were typical of the German or Nordic immigrant of the era, e.g. white supremacy and xenophobia, but a serial killer he was not. If anything, he was a friend to the disenfranchised who was willing to get in the faces of the powers that be. For that, he was silenced.
It behooves all US unlicensed seaman who now live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to be aware for the sacrifices that union brothers made in bygone eras. There is much more to maritime labor history than Bloody Thursday and the Seaman’s Act of 1915. While many labor histories are dry reads and not readily relatable, The Port of Missing Men most assuredly is not one of them. It is utterly captivating and compelling, recreating a world of crimps, armed incursions aboard a vessel to intimidate scab crews, a frontier town with saloons by the dozen, and fat (in one case quite literally) business interests who had no moral qualms about framing a nemesis and dispatching him to Walla Walla as a murderer in order to rid the town of a union agitator, one with the audacity to buy a residence in the better part of town.
-------------------------------
1
Hate mail for this indiscretion may be sent to Vince directly. Yes, he is responsible for “The Librarian.”
2
I was night-mating (PRO work Professional Relief Officer) on the Matson Manoa one 0000-0800 shift around 0530 when the longshore gang could not free a hatch cover for some reason. They were knocking a steal ring with a maul for over a half hour and finally appealed to me to rouse a crewmember. I had no recourse but to wake the Bosun, Brendan. This was highly unusual, and I feared Brendan’s wrath, early AM and pre-caffeine fix, especially in that the Chief Mate might have nixed any OT for the call out on various pretenses. Brendan, to my relief, was very gracious.
3
During my decades in Seattle, I had the pleasure of being neighbors with a woman who knew one of Gary Ridgway’s victims and one of his potential victims (She said, “Gary” stop when he started coking, and the use of his real name flustered him and saved her). A friend I played tennis with regularly dated a woman who knew Ted Bundy’s mother. I also used to hang in a bar where Bundy left with an early victim. The bar had a separate exit by the restroom, making the exit unnoticed. So much on my Six Degrees of Separation. . .
4
Gohl is mentioned once in Hyman Weintraub’s seminal work Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seaman. Lundeberg appears in Goings’ account of Gohl’s murder: “Three months later, Gohl’s successor as union agent, Harry Lundeberg, carried a gun in the courtroom to intimidate witnesses, and, after being expelled from the courtroom, he picked a fight with an important state witness.” (Pg. 165, citation from Grays harbor Washingtonian, May 10, 1910). This considered, it is surprising that more SUP sailors are not aware of the controversy surrounding Gohl’s trial.
July 23, 2023
Read this for work, but it was honestly pretty interesting! If you’re wanting to know more about unions in the early 1900s or you just want to hear the story of Billy Gohl, a union leader who was thought to have killed over 100 people, then you might like this! It’s not a massive page turner, but I didn’t find myself bored. Goings casts doubt on Gohl’s reputation as a serial killer, instead showing that he probably didn’t kill anyone at all.
Very educational 🤓
Very educational 🤓
July 16, 2024
I loved this work of labor history which looks hard at the mythmaking around Pacific Northwest identity and how scapegoating labor organizers for social problems in the early 20th century allowed timber and railroad bosses to consolidate power in early colonial extraction economies that still shape our forestry and fishing industries today.
Pushing back against true-crime sensationalism and taking a hard look at "the ghoul of Grays Harbor", Goings points out that there is no evidence that Billy Gohl, a shop steward for stevedores in the bustling timber ports of Aberdeen, killed any of the men he was accused of murdering. Rather, the "floater fleet" in Aberdeen's waters was probably produced by a combination of press-gangs gone wrong in local taverns, unsafe docks at night, rampant alcoholism, and interpersonal violence between isolated, desperate working men without community. Because Gohl, who confronted scabs and fought back against strikebreakers and who was enormously popular within working mens' community, threatened the power of bosses, he had to go. Blaming him helped manage social unrest related to the high death rate -- though, as Goings pointed out, the deaths didn't stop after Gohl was sent to Walla Walla. While Gohl is the entry point into this world and the hinge on which the story turns, this functions as a broad social history of white working class PNW residents-- including their heroism (standing up to sailing captains who would keep men in indefinite forced labor) and villainy (rampant racism: Gohl, while not a serial killer, advocated banning all Asian laborers from all of Washington). The human portraits that emerge, as well as the picture of money-run media of the early 1910s, helps us understand police brutality and attacks on labor today. I grew up in Olympia; this story helps me know more about the place I knew which I was not taught.
Pushing back against true-crime sensationalism and taking a hard look at "the ghoul of Grays Harbor", Goings points out that there is no evidence that Billy Gohl, a shop steward for stevedores in the bustling timber ports of Aberdeen, killed any of the men he was accused of murdering. Rather, the "floater fleet" in Aberdeen's waters was probably produced by a combination of press-gangs gone wrong in local taverns, unsafe docks at night, rampant alcoholism, and interpersonal violence between isolated, desperate working men without community. Because Gohl, who confronted scabs and fought back against strikebreakers and who was enormously popular within working mens' community, threatened the power of bosses, he had to go. Blaming him helped manage social unrest related to the high death rate -- though, as Goings pointed out, the deaths didn't stop after Gohl was sent to Walla Walla. While Gohl is the entry point into this world and the hinge on which the story turns, this functions as a broad social history of white working class PNW residents-- including their heroism (standing up to sailing captains who would keep men in indefinite forced labor) and villainy (rampant racism: Gohl, while not a serial killer, advocated banning all Asian laborers from all of Washington). The human portraits that emerge, as well as the picture of money-run media of the early 1910s, helps us understand police brutality and attacks on labor today. I grew up in Olympia; this story helps me know more about the place I knew which I was not taught.
March 17, 2021
An interesting story about an Aberdeen legend. A lot of back history helps explain some of the goings on.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews