The marker was a small reminder that issues of gender identity are not new and that drag shows existed here in Bellingham at the turn of the previous century. The marker has been lost, and the historical record of Joseph Noel’s life is sparse. We can keep telling what we know of his story: Mr. Noel wore a dress and welcomed the guests.

Bayview Cemetery was founded in 1887 when the town of Whatcom purchased a 10-acre plot on the outskirts of town on “the wagon road to the lake.” We’ll discuss what came before, how the cemetery got started and how it’s grown over time. We’ll explore the older sections of the cemetery and visit some of the most intriguing monuments. We’ll say hello to a lot of interesting folks who were laid to eternal rest over a century ago.

The Good Time Girls are ready to roll out our 2022 tour season, bringing you all the BellingHistory tours you love and more. Our public tours will start May 13 and run through the end of October.

Fall has certainly fallen and we are here for it. We’ve launched or seasonal Gore and Lore Tours, and now we are very excited to bring you tours involving another sort of spirits… boooooo-ooze! Corny jokes aside, we are super excited to partner once again with the fabulous folks at Chuckanut Bay Distillery to bring you tours of their amazing facility.

We feel like fall is falling early this year… maybe it’s the bout of rainy weather, maybe it’s the gloom of this never-ending pandemic… but we’re getting A LOT of inquiries about GORE AND LORE TOURS. Y’all are in a DARK MOOD already…. LET’S DO IT. WE ARE STARTING OUR GORE AND LORE TOURS EARLY THIS YEAR! THESE ARE ALWAYS OUR MOST POPULAR TOURS, SO WE JUST DECIDED TO BRING IT ON! BOOKABLE NOW DATES STARTING MID-SEPTEMBER THROUGH HALLOWEEN….

Get outside with us and explore Bellingham’s past with free guided tours of Downtown and Fairhaven, hosted weekly throughout the summer by the City of Bellingham. The tours are part of the City’s efforts to highlight history and support economic recovery by bringing people into Bellingham’s historic commercial districts. We are excited to be able to help in these efforts and to make local history more accessible this summer with these brand new tours. We’ll take you back in time to explore Bellingham’s historic people, buildings, sites and landscapes…

Being purveyors of good times here in Bellingham, we’ve compiled a list of suggestions to engage all your senses this St. Valentine’s Day! Whether your joining us for our Lonely Tart’s Club Virtual Valentine’s event, or doing your own thing, read on for cocktail recipes from our own mix-mistress Sarah, our favorite take-out offerings around town, and a specially curated Valentine’s Day inspired playlist with songs of love and lament (and everything in-between).

Well 2021 is off to a rollicking start! We are doing our best to keep moving forward, onward and upward... We hope everyone is staying safe and sane during the midst of these historic times.

We appreciate everyone’s patience while we update our offerings for this new year.

We will continue to offer small private in-person tours in 2021, until it is safe to again congregate in larger groups.  We now have private tours of Bayview Cemetery available, and more new tours in the works.

We’ve reached the end of the season and we recorded a bonus episode to Answer all the Qs! We requested questions from YOU, the listeners and you sent them! Thanks for asking! In this episode you will here us to attempt to answer the following…

As we wind up 2020 and Season 2 of the City of Subdued BAD TOWN podcast, we are reflecting on all that this year has been, and boy has it been a doozy.

As you probably know, Good Time Girls Kolby, Marissa and Wren teamed up with the City of Subdued Hostesses with the mostesses Annika and Maria to bring you a season of the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!  If you have questions about anything you heard on the podcast, now is your chance to ask and get answers!

In this week’s FINAL episode we get into the “vintage” era of the 1970s and 1980s and Bellingham’s divey waterfront scene with a discussion of our legendary “Serial Killer Bar” as well as a crazy unsolved mystery of a body found in the former Georgia Pacific mill complex. That’s right, it’s another podcast companion blog update for episode 12 of season 2 of the City of Subdued... BAD TOWN. The Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you a season of the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!

If you have been following the podcast collaboration we’ve been doing with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast, this post is in reference to season 2 (BAD TOWN), episode 11 where we continue our discussion from episode 10 and introduce the story of the MAPLE FALLS MURDER FARM! We discuss the creepy murderer who took the blame for the death of Frederick Dames (episode 10) … and while he was perhaps Whatcom County’s first serial killer… did he really butcher the butcher? You be the judge!

In this week’s episode, we get into one of our favorite Bellingham true-crime stories, an unsolved mystery and murder of a local butcher. The victim was Frederick Dames, a civil war veteran who opened a meat market on Elk Street (now State Street) where he was found brutally murdered in 1905… Content warning for extremely gruesome descriptions of this particularly heinous murder.

This year the Good Time Girls’ annual celebration of holiday themed Belling-history and seasonal fun is going virtual!

Once again, If you didn’t already know - the Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baddest parts of Bellingham History! This week’s episode is particularly dark and oppressive. We discuss the history of the Ku Klux Klan, aka the KKK, here in Bellingham, Whatcom County and the PNW.

This week in episode 8 we get into prohibition era Bad-Town, complete with rum running, bootlegging and speak-easies (aka Blind Pigs). AND a story straight from the LaBree family vaults. …I discovered the story of the D’Aprile brothers when searching the Bellingham Herald archives and found my great-grandfather was a “runner” who helped to supply the brothers with booze to sell in their “blind pig,” and did some time in the Whatcom County Jail….

In this week’s episode, we discuss a 1922 court case involving Bellingham’s “baddest” lady barber, Lorena Upper, accused of violating the “red light statute.”

If you didn’t already know - the Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History! In this week’s episode we feature stories of the less-often-arrested sex. We tell stories about women who ran afoul of the law, as well as the women charged with policing them!

THIS EPISODE’S STORY is about a murder that occurred on Forest Street, near the Majestic Hall in Bellingham, Washington. It is a rather sordid tale that involves a whole cast of seriously damaged folks. It’s about a man who shot his wife and his son-in-law,--- who was also his wife’s lover---. It’s about fancy-talking lawyers with pink toupees --and-- a particularly savage and patriarchal biblical law (even for the 1890's) filed under the Laws of Moses. And lastly, it’s about the flaws in our justice system then and NOW.

As autumn brings spider webs and spooky things, here is a seasonal tale from the Good Time Girls’ “Gore and Lore” crypt… That summer things really started “heating up” around Fairhaven as the town was swept by a series of fires, believed to be of “incendiary origin.”