POLARIS: We chose to start our local investigations with the Deschutes Historical Museum, which occupies the impressive three-story structure often heralded as the town’s first “modern building.” Our reasons for choosing the museum were two-fold. First, where better to find information about the town than the local historical society? Second, the museum itself is said to be haunted. Both claims seem quite legitimate.

The story of the buildings construction is as follows:

At the time the building was constructed in 1914, Bend still had the appearance of a pioneer town with muddy dirt roads and rows of wooden clapboard buildings. The residents passed a bond to raise money to modernize the local school which lay the foundation – so to speak – for the building’s construction. (May I tip my hat (if I wore one) to these early pioneers who were forward-thinking enough to put their money in their children’s education before anything else!) The town hired George and Ed Brosterhous, local brothers, to oversee the construction. The new school would be three-stories high and boast an all-stone facade, running water and electric lights powered by a nearby generator. The school opened the following year and operated for decades. Eventually, more modern facilities were constructed and the old building was transformed into the current historical society museum. The museum has retained one room as it appeared in 1915, shortly after the school’s opening, complete with blackboards, uncomfortable wooden desks and a wood-burning stove.

It is during the construction of the building that the haunting legend – or at least the reason behind it – begins.

As the story goes, George Brosterhous was inspecting the progress on the construction when he slipped and fell down the main stairwell. His body plummeted three stories until it landed on the ground floor, killing him instantly.

Naturally, the first thing the team needed to establish was that George Brosterhous was a real person (that was easy as his contributions to the area are numerous and well-documented) and that he died in the manner and place described (a little more challenging). Numerous reliable sources (including the Des Chutes Historical Society) list George and his brother Ed as the general contractors in charge of the school’s construction, which would put both of them at the site probably on a daily basis.

(There is still a Brosterhous Construction Company is existence today located in Klamath Falls, about two hours to the south of Bend. The man was owns the company is named George Brosterhous, although we presume not the same one that haunts the old Reid School building.)

We were also able to establish Brosterhous’s date of death from the Crook’s County corner reports as June 2, 1914 (although cemetery records listed it as June 1). He is buried in the Pilot Butte Cemetery in a plot that he shares with his wife, Anna. According to the Bend Bulletin newspaper, the school officially opened the following September, so Brosterhous’s death certainly occurred during the school’s construction phase. But did he die on the school grounds by falling down the stairwell? This part of the story was harder to confirm, as the contemporary newspaper articles we found on the old Reid School dealt more with the town’s obvious excitement about having a stone building with electricity, rather than the death of one of the contractors. After spending two days searching for documentation on the nature of George’s demise with no success, we resorted to actually asking someone. Now, I don’t write that to be flippant. Frankly, the team prefers “hard documentation” on what we are investigating – newspaper reports, public records, photographs, historical documents, etc. – as opposed to interviews with individuals who were not directly involved in the events. One of our pet peeves, which is something common to books and articles on haunting phenomenon, is the heavy reliance on witness accounts alone. A haunting doesn’t exist just because Joe Bob felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up when he entered the creepy old house. Without a historical context, that sort of witness account is purely subjective and not necessarily paranormal.

So, we had our webmaster contact the Deschutes County Historical Society and ask them two simple questions:

1. Did Brosterhous die on the property by falling down a stairwell?
   
2. Was the Society aware of the haunting and have any knowledge about when and how it began?

These questions were posed so the respondent didn’t have to provide a personal opinion, such a factual reply. It has been our experience that in historical venues (such as the Whaley House and Star of India ship in San Diego), that staff and volunteers can give very conflicting responses based on their personal beliefs. While we were visiting the Star of India, for example, Ash asked a staff member about the haunting legend and was curtly rebuffed. Another staff member, however, was very friendly about it and provided lots of info... or at least his recollection of the stories he had heard. But stories don’t necessarily constitute “hard” documentation.

In the case of the old Reid School, as of this writing we have yet to receive a reply to our inquiry from the Deschutes Historical Society so the best we’re able to do on this one is make some general statements. We can state definitively that George Brosterhous was the general contractor on the Reid School construction project and that he seems to have died suddenly and at a relatively young age during its construction. If he did fall down the school’s stairwell, or met his end in a similarly quick and tragic way, then that might be the genesis of a haunting. Many haunted sites are associated with sudden and traumatic death. The theory is, of course, that the spirit is often unaware of the body’s demise so it continues to carry out its everyday activities... or that the trauma releases so much psychic energy into the environment that it continues to resonate there years – even centuries – later!

ASH: I haven’t written an update in a long time, so I decided to do this one. We are still looking at rumors and legends of the central area of Oregon. We found [one] that was kind of interesting. It was about a dude named John Holt who robbed a stagecoach with a friend of his named Jack. They had held up stagecoaches before, but this time they got lucky because the coach was filled with gold meant for the military posts in southern Oregon and northern California. The men killed the stagecoach driver and took off with the money. But as they were escaping, some Indians attacked them and killed their horses. They were forced to continue on foot, but the guy Jack was wounded and he died. John Holt realized that he couldn’t carry all the gold himself and [hope] to outrun the Indians, so he buried his dead friend and the gold near a place called Skeleton Rock. I wondered if the rock was named that before or after Jack was buried there?

We went to the place where this was suppose to have happened. It is called the Prineville Reservoir which is east of Bend. It’s kind of a scrubby place with ugly looking cliffs and a river running through the middle of it. The river is crooked, so they called it the Crooked River. We had no idea where Skeleton Rock was and we still don’t. We were never able to find it. It’s not on any map we could find and it was only described as a bunch of lava rocks. Well, that’s pretty much the whole place.

Anyway, John Holt was arrested by the Army and sent to prison for a long time. When he got out, it was 1925 and he immediately hired a young guide to help him and went back to find his gold. By that time however, he couldn’t remember where he stashed it and wasn’t able to find it. His guide told the whole story to a fifteen-year old boy named Elton Carey who lived in Prineville. Carey immediately took a friend of his and claimed that he found the buried skeleton of Jack, the guy who had been killed by the Indians. But they said that they only found the top half of Jack’s body and were never able to locate the rest from the waist down. Perhaps he had been partially eaten by scavengers or something?

I totally think that this story is a bunch of bullshit. Meridian did some research for me on this and we weren’t able to find any reports about the robbery of military gold, a man named John Holt or the discovery of Jack’s skeleton. We also weren’t able to find any records about a guy named Elton Carey who lived in Prineville, but it was hard to find records so maybe that why. But even if Elton Carey was a real person, how could someone my age (15) find a skeleton that [had lain] buried for half a century on his first try when the guy who buried Jack and the gold couldn’t [find either]? I don’t think so. Elton Carey never found the gold, though, and neither has anyone else. Probably because there never was any. This story seems to be a real word-of-mouth thing. My guess is that it is all made up but everyone loves to believe that they can find the gold so the legend stays alive.

RUNE: Information about possible haunted sites in the Bend area has been remarkably sparse. We have heard tales about strange orbs being photographed in the Pilot Butte Cemetery (orbs – the great red herring of paranormal investigations!), about a floor that creaks in an old hospital where someone was supposed to have died (old buildings = creaky floors), and that the local teenager population whispers ominously about the three smokestacks that are the town’s major landmark and now a part of the downtown shopping district (Kids! Sheesh!) But other than the Brosterhous haunting, the ghostly pickings here have been slim.

Undaunted (we don’t even understand the meaning of the word “daunt!”), the team decided to look into less-vaporous mysteries. One that I found stems from a rather unusual source: a roadside sign we stumbled upon while cruising down I-20 to the southeast of Bend. It was entitled “Early Day Legends & Lore.” Cool. I read on and one of the stories I found particularly interesting:

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE A LOST CRYSTAL CAVE MAY AWAIT EXPLORERS

Ranch hands first stumbled onto it in 1904 – a cavern that sparkled in their torchlight like diamonds. The men broke off a few samples, then showed them around town on their return to Bend. But no one expressed much interest. The finds weren’t diamonds after all, but most likely calcite crystals, and presumably of little commercial value. Bend hardware merchant Nicholas P. Smith recognized this to be an unusual geologic feature, however - especially in volcanic terrain. So he set out to see for himself. Remarkably, he managed to find the mens’ trail, and then the cave. But his explorations were cut short by an early snowstorm. And when he returned the following spring the landscape seemed puzzlingly changed. Smith could never find the place again. Some believe that mysterious cave is out there, somewhere, still waiting to be found –again.

Okay, it’s not the Headless Horseman but I was intrigued enough to look into it. What did I find? Actually, much more than I expected.

Author Melany Tupper provided a detailed and well-documented investigation in her book High Desert Roses, Volume One: Significant Stories from Central Oregon. One of her first points was to refute the version of the story which I read on the I-20 roadside sign. According to Tupper, this is the most widely told version of the story, thanks in part to its appearance in the Oregonian newspaper in 1946. Unfortunately, Tupper’s investigation revealed that a lot of the details in the newspaper version were either wrong or utter fabrications.

Nicholas P(aul) Smith was a real person – an early businessman and a member of the Deschutes Geology Club. He had a amazing impact on the early development of Bend. In fact, the Smith Pioneer Hardware store is considered a local landmark due to its age and all wood construction and is on the National Registry of Historical Sites. Smith probably had some minor role in the search for the Crystal Cave, but the story of his having to flee the site due to a snowstorm and then never being able to find it again are fictional.

The men who actually discovered the cave – referred to innocuously as “ranch hands” on the roadside sign – were actually a local cowboy named Newt Cobb (I swear, that’s his name!) and his cohorts. Of all the tellings and retellings of the Crystal Cave story, only Newt’s version is told from an eyewitness perspective. Even Nicholas Smith was not a “discoverer” of the cave, but rather retraced the steps of Newt and his men and got lucky. And Smith never seems to have claimed that he ever found the Crystal Cave. Tupper found that detail very important and I certainly agree. Tupper believed that the first part of the tale was correct. Newt and his men stumbled upon the cave and found it loaded with amazing crystal formations. They broke off a few as samples which may have been shown to Nicholas Smith later. But any greater involvement by Smith in the cave’s discovery were concocted over time by various versions of the tale, most published long after his death.

So does the Crystal Cave actually exist? Well, after a hundred years no one has been able to find it but the area is highly vulcanized and probably filled with subterranean caverns that have yet to be found. If the Crystal Cave is as wondrous as the story claims, maybe it’s okay that no one is disturbing it.

MIST: Another day-trip from our temporary base of operations found us in the tiny community of Silver Lake, approximately 80 miles due south of Bend. At the end of the Nineteenth century, Silver Lake was the site of a terrible fire whose aftermath still echoes to this day.

The incident had all the elements of a near-perfect disaster: It took a place during a Christmas Eve celebration in a cramped wooden hall with no fire escapes, packed with local families including dozens of children. For these same reasons, it may have had all the elements for a haunting so we set off for Silver Lake to investigate.

As it was over a hundred years ago, Silver Lake is a tiny, unincorporated community with few buildings aside from a few restaurants, two motels, the post office, a gas station and a school. Like much of central Oregon, the scenery varies between high desert scrublands and farmlands. The area in and around Silver Lake is relatively flat and grassy, with a large number of dilapidated buildings overgrown with weeds or hidden beneath thick stands of trees.

But first some background, as reported by the December 29, 1894, edition of the Fresno Bee newspaper:

Although not named in the newspaper article, the person who climbed “onto a bench” and struck his head on the oil lamp was 21-year old George L. Payne. Survivors all seemed to indicate that Payne’s actions were probably motivated only by a desire to get a better view of the stage. Certainly, he didn’t mean to cause the inferno, and sadly he was also one of the fire’s victims, dying three days after the tragedy from his burns.

The tragedy in such a small town made national news and many who had no direct connection to Silver Lake rallied to help the survivors. Perhaps the most notable of these was Dr. Bernard Daly, who lived in Lakeview almost a hundred miles to the south. Although Dr. Daly was a notable and highly respected individual for many reasons, his attempt to help the people of Silver Lake was certainly a highlight of his career:

On Christmas day of 1894, Daily was relaxing at his home in Lakeview when a haggard rider pounded at this door to gasp out a message that a fire at the Silver Lake dance the night before had killed dozens of persons and severely burned many more. Daly aroused a friend, Willard Duncan, and at 4 P.M. the two left by buckboard for Silver Lake. At Paisley they took to horseback, pushing on to Silver Lake through snow so high it often reached the bellies of their horses. Arriving at 6 A.M., after fourteen hours of gruelling [sic] travel, Daly promptly went to the assistance of Silver Lake’s only physician, Dr. Thompson, who had been southward bound when another rider had overhauled him at Summer Lake. The two medics worked until the last of the injured had been cared for. Then, near exhaustion, Daly rested a few hours before starting the long drive back to Lakeview and his patients there. [Excerpt from The Other Side of Oregon by Ralph Friedman, page 285]

Being such a small town, the team felt certain that we’d be able to locate the site where the Chrisman Brother’s hall (sometimes [alternately] known as the Clayton Hall, named after a former business partner) stood. Our intent was to find the site and focus Ash’s considerable psychic abilities on the spot to see if he could pull any information. Unfortunately, we were not successful in finding the actual location of the hall. None of the contemporary newspaper reports we [found] actually note the hall’s location in the town. That may be because, at the time, a street address would have been irrelevant. Certainly anyone passing through Silver Lake at the end of the nineteenth century would have had no trouble locating the town’s one and only mercantile, and probably one of the tiny community’s largest buildings. It would have been obvious. Today, however, the town had grown and although it is filled with the crumbling remains of “historic” buildings, we had no indication of where the hall originally stood. When we spoke to the locals, they invariably had different ideas and recollections about where the hall was located. Some seemed to be making stuff up to mess with us.

According to Melany Tupper’s book, the building was completely destroyed and the fire burned so hot that the only human remains that the survivors were able to recover from the ruins were ash and charred bones. With identification of the victims impossible, the town interred all the collected bones in a mass grave on the outskirts of town. The cemetery still stands where it did a century ago, on the east end of town at the intersection of Fremont Highway and Picture Lane. There is an elaborate stone monument over the grave with all the victims listed. The monument was hauled into town by horse and wagon four years after the tragedy.

I was surprised to find that no one seems to think any part of the town is haunted – not the site of the old hall or the graveyard where the victims are buried. Or at least there’s no other published reports of hauntings that I could find. It would be interesting to find the actually site of the fire, and if there’s a new building standing on the spot, see if there’s any strange phenomenon reported there. Very often with hauntings associated with infernos, witnesses will hear cries for help, smell smoke, experience breathing difficulties, or have a panicked sense of being trapped. But, with our investigation unsuccessful, we reluctantly returned to Bend, saddened by this old tragedy, but not particularly enlightened by it.

MERIDIAN: Yoncalla is a tiny but picturesque farming community located in Oregon’s Umpqua Valley. The scenery here is quintessential southern Oregon: green rolling hills interspersed with wide valleys filled with orchards, vineyards or fields bursting with lush crops. The sky is huge. Sometimes sunny, sometimes with billowing clouds that cast long, dramatic shadows across the landscape. Despite the beauty of the place, Yoncalla is a place that you could probably drive right through without noticing it. For us, however, there is a hidden gem here called the Applegate farm.

The Applegate farm, and more particularly the farm house, is a regular fixture in many published guides on haunted places. It also seems to be a more legitimate haunted location due to its well-documented history and the veracity of the witnesses who have gone on record about the strange events within its walls. Many of these witnesses are Applegate family members, the descendants Oregon pioneer Charles Applegate who established the farm in 1852.

The family member who best publicized the haunting phenomenon in the farm house was Shannon Applegate, who wrote a history of her famous family called Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore. Her family is certainly worthy of a book. Maybe of several. All through the area you will encounter places with the Applegate name: a mountain, a river, an elementary school, a town, etc., etc. Shannon Applegate, who wrote about the hauntings in Skookum, has gone on to write several other books about the history of the Oregon frontier, distinguishing herself as a notable historian who does not shy away from research. (According to Amazon.com, it took her seventeen years to research Skookum!)

Charles, the patriarch of the Applegate clan, moved his family to the Umpqua Valley in the mid-1800s to avoid the “overcrowding” he found in the Willamette Valley to the north. With his brothers, he built an impressive two-story farmhouse. The house was divided into two halves: one for the women folk and one for the men. This was fairly typical of the era, as even married couples often had separate bedrooms in the same house and particular rooms reserved for one gender or the other. Of course, at the time, men and women often lead very different and separate lives. In the Applegate farm house, apparently the only thing that mingled freely was the smoke from the large fireplace that warmed both sides of the domicile.

Over the past one hundred and fifty years, there’s been plenty of time for the rambling farm house to gather spooks. Needless to say, most of the phantoms are said to be Applegate family members. Footsteps or fiddle music are often heard in empty rooms; or the cries of disembodied babies echo through the hallways. Some published sources say the house is haunted by two ghosts, others cite as many as fifteen. Since the house is still the private property of the Applegate family, we weren’t able to gain access to the structure itself so, sadly, we don’t have any of our own impressions to share. However, Shannon Applegate was interviewed extensively about the alleged hauntings in the 1970s by newspaper reporter Dean Baker and had the following to say about them:

“...One night in my bedroom when the voices were particularly loud and I felt like I was about at the end of my rope, I decided to take the direct approach,” Shannon told Baker. She spoke into the darkness, telling the listening ghosts that she was trying to write an accurate history of the family. She reminded them that she had as much right to live in this home as did the dead, and asked for their cooperation in her project. At the time she had been reading by kerosene lamp in an effort to capture the feeling of the house in its pioneer days. “The kerosene lamp dimmed. It was like a shadow passing over it, and sitting upright in bed, I fell into one of the deepest sleeps I have ever had.”

Eventually Shannon learned to live with her family spirits. Once she saw an empty chair rocking and smelled pipe smoke and whiskey. “In that case I really did feel that it was great-great-grandfather Charles... I believe that unequivocally. I even said ‘Hello.’” (Excerpt from Ghost Stories from the Pacific Northwest by Margaret Read MacDonald, page 57.)

You can still see the farm today, although with the growth of Yoncalla it appears to be “in town” rather than a rural structure like it was when it was first built. It’s private property however, so I wouldn’t suggest going any closer to it than the edge of the road. The Applegates, both living and dead, may not appreciate trespassers.

ASH: Everyone wanted me to write this blog because it was about a teenager named Robert Turnbull Grankey. Robert was a sophomore at the South Eugene High School which was constructed in 1953 and originally called Eugene High School. When North Eugene High was built in 1957, the school changed its name to South Eugene High school. Robert was a thespian student who was working on a play, adjusting the lights from a catwalk suspended in front of the stage and above where the audience was seated. Somehow he slipped and fell, crashing down on the auditorium chairs below where he was immediately killed. Apparently some of the chairs he fell on were dented, damage that you could still see until the auditorium was remodeled in the early 1990s. After his death, there were repeated stories from students and teachers about a strange presence in the theater. Some students would claim to see a figure on the light platform when no one was there. Others would hear footsteps on an empty stage or hear a voice like somehow was reciting lines from a play. Others just had a creepy feeling about being watched or not being alone when no one else was in sight.

The haunting legend at South Eugene High School is repeated in many books and websites. But as we have found on our travels, that doesn’t mean it actually is a true. It’s kind of weird because some people don’t believe that we ever landed on the moon, despite the overwhelming evidence that we did. But then other people will completely believe a ghost story without any proof whatsoever. We all knew that in order to show the possibility of a haunting at South Eugene High School we would have to prove several things:

First, we would have to show that Robert Turnbull Grankey was a real person who attended the school. Second, we would have to show that he died in the same way that the legend describes. Third, we would have to show that the classic elements needed for a haunting were there.

There is no doubt that Grankey was a real person and that he attended South Eugene High School. We found various independent sources that reference him, including newspaper announcements of his death like this one from the March 12, 1958, edition of the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper:

GRANKEY – Robert T. Grankey of 3610 Bailey Hill Road, passed away on March 11, 1958. He was born in Los Angeles, California April 11, 1941. He was a sophomore student at South Eugene High. He is survived by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Grankey; a sister, Judith at home; a half-sister, Mrs. John W. Jones of Anson, Texas. The funeral will be held in the Poole-Larson Chapel Saturday, March 15, 1958 at 10:30 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations in his memory may be made to the Children’s Hospital School.

We also found references and memorials to Robert from the school itself, so clearly he was a student who died suddenly on March 11, 1958. What we weren’t able to independently confirm was how he died. Strangely, other than the funeral announcements, we weren’t able to find any article in the Eugene Register-Guard in the days following the tragedy. I think that a sixteen-year old falling to his death in the high school theater in a small town would have been a front page article, but we weren’t able to find anything on it. However, we were able to find an article written by Kristen Sheley in the October 28, 1997, edition of the Oregon Daily Emerald. Kristen references that such an article did exists when she wrote:

As Grankey, a sophomore, was crossing approximately six feet from one catwalk to another on two-by-six-inch beams, he lost his footing, crashed through the plaster ceiling of the auditorium and fell 55 feet, according to a Register-Guard article.

Thirty students were present in the auditorium and witnessed the fatal slip. Grankey was killed almost instantly from a broken neck and severe head injuries. So great was the impact from the fall that they two chairs on which Grankey landed – Row G, Seats 10 and 11 – remained dented from the accident until they were removed during remodeling in 1994.

So clearly there was an article on the accident in the local paper even though we were not able to find it. So that proved our first two points: Grankey was a real person who died at the school as the legend describes. So what about the haunting itself?

When our team visited the school, it was closed for summer break. It is a large campus with many nondescript buildings painted white and blue-purple. There were lots of large, grassy yards and fields all around. Lots of people were on the property, but most of them were walking their dogs or playing with their little kids in the grass. We weren’t really sure where the theater was located, or if the accident happened in the gymnasium or a multi-purpose room. Some sources say Grankey died in the “theater,” but others say it was an “auditorium.” None of us were clear if the theater had its own auditorium and which building it would be. Since the school was closed, there were no staff around to ask but there were small groups of teenagers hanging out skateboarding. Rune has no problem just going up and talking to anybody about anything, so she marched right over and asked this group of boys about the haunting. One of the boys said he had heard of us, but I think he was probably confusing us with TAPS on TV. (We’re not famous.) In any case, once they heard that we were investigating a ghost, they were really talkative. Mostly they had questions, but not much useful information. A couple of them had heard that a student had died at the school “back in the day,” but he didn’t know any details. What you can learn is that the haunting legend is still alive today, although a lot of the details may be lost. But does the Grankey accident have all the elements for a possible haunting?

The short answer is yes.

My dad is better at explaining how this works, but usually if the death is tragic and unexpected, and the person has unresolved business, then there could be a haunting. Really, Robert T. Grankey didn’t go to school that morning expecting to fall through the roof and die. His slip [was] accidental and truly tragic. The fact that a bunch of other students saw him die probably contributed to the “psychic signature” that was left behind on the school. When someone dies unexpectedly, their ghost is often seen performing the same activities it did in life or just prior to death. This also seems to be the case here. Kristen Sheley’s 1997 article offers additional evidence of this:

...Reports dating back to the early 1970s tell of lights mysteriously switching on and off, funny noises like footsteps on the catwalk and sightings of someone hanging around the theater after it had been locked up for the night... mysterious noises, such as strange creaking and footsteps, have also been reported, usually emanating from the catwalk where Grankey took his last steps. Once, a custodian heard a piano playing in the locked theater after hours. Some claim to have heard their names called by an eerie voice in the empty auditorium. A variety of students and faculty over the years have reported seeing someone sitting in the old balcony or standing at the back of the locked auditorium...

Many of the activities described by Sheley would have been those performed by Grankey in life, probably on a daily basis. As a result, we would suggest that South Eugene High School may be the location of a true haunting [See Apparitions for additional information on this phenomenon], or the replaying of an old memory imprinted on the environment by the person’s death. This is different from an apparition, where the ghost performs independent tasks which change from encounter to encounter and seems to interact intelligently with the living. Of course, they only way you could know for sure it to actually do a long-term investigation in the school. Maybe that would be a good project for some of the students there?

RUNE: Over the past week we have been exploring the charming little town of Corvallis, one of my favorite places in all of Oregon. Home of Oregon State University; bisected by the rolling Willamette River; peppered with all-vegan restaurants, alternative bookshops and the occasional hippie drum-circle; Corvallis’s very existence is enough to make the butt-holes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh pucker and unpucker in anxious dread. To the casual observer, the town would appear to be a slice of mid-twentieth century Americana. Restrictions on new development have kept its streets, its buildings and its “feel” both nostalgic and all-American. That is, unless you’re one of those people who consider it un-American to appreciate art, culture, the environment and higher education. Sean Hannity, right? But enough of my left-wing rant!

Despite its crunchy granola culture, Corvallis and the surrounding area still has its share of peculiar legends and ghost stories. We decided to start our search with the focal point of the community: the OSU campus.

The sprawling campus, which seems to occupy at least 50% of Corvallis’s overall real estate, is gorgeous. Stately buildings with classical pediments are surrounded by grassy quads, immense trees and neatly-manicured courtyards. Summer break was still ongoing, so the grounds were devoid of bouncy girls wearing tiny shorts with OSU emblazoned across their ass cheeks; and unshaven boys decorated with wool caps and way too many hemp-and-homemade-bead necklaces. God, how I miss them! Our goal for the last few days was to find and investigate a building called Sackett Hall.

Sackett Hall is the oldest residence dormitory on the OSU campus, originally constructed in 1948. The OSU website provides the following information:

“...While historic, Sackett has been upgraded to meet the needs of today’s college student, housing approximately 300 residents. Sackett is divided into four quadrants with two wings per quadrant. Sackett Hall offers double rooms, single gender floors, and rooms with separate sleeping porch and walk-in closets...”

Aside from the high-speed internet and cable television, the dorm also offers something called “Sackett furniture.” Don’t get excited. There’s nothing sexy about “Sackett furniture.” It appears to be your standard ugly dorm furnishings whose durable construction can stand up to years of “crashing,” “lounging,” “kickin’ back,” and those frantic but quiet “bbbjs” so you won’t wake up your roommate. (Consult the Urban Dictionary for more, kids.)

So why Sackett Hall? Would you believe that there’s a legend stemming from the 1950s about a coed who killed herself over poor grades and now haunts the halls, appearing as a floating lady in white? I know, it sounds familiar right? It should, because so many American universities have these “coed suicide” stories connected to them. So was this one just another urban legend?

We decided to use Mist’s legendary powers of persuasion to gain access to the inside of the hall. She concocted an entire story about how she was searching for accommodations for her freshman daughter, but in the end it wasn’t really necessary. We were able to walk right in. Needless to say, there were no gossamer apparitions strolling around and the building seemed relatively unremarkable, other than it kind of smelled like a wet dog. Mist seemed a little bummed that she hadn’t been able to lie to anyone to gain entry, so after we looked around she stood outside and told people that we were researching an article on the haunting. (It wasn’t a lie, we really were researching an article. This one, actually.) The few students we encountered really didn’t know what she was talking about. One “dude” told her he had seen things in the hallways, but it was usually when he was “baked.” Ah, college men.

But, not being ones to presume that there was no truth to the legend, we did do our research. To our surprise and delight, we did find some additional information on the death behind this haunting legend. According to an article that appeared in the Halloween 2008 edition of the Corvallis Gazette-Times, there may be two women haunting Sackett Hall. The first is the aforementioned girl, whom the article refers to as “Brandy” but gives a slightly different version of her death. The second is an unnamed woman who was allegedly slaughtered in the basement by America’s most infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy. No name is given for this poor girl, but the reference to Bundy gave us a good place to start our search. The question became: Was Bundy ever in Corvallis or was a young girl ever murdered here during the years he was actively “working” the Pacific northwest?

The Gazette-Times article does not name Bundy’s alleged victim, but it would have been easy enough to do so. A simple Google search revealed Bundy’s one and only known Corvallis victim to be 20-year old Kathy Parks, an OSU student who left her room in Sackett Hall on the night of May 6, 1974, and was never seen again. Okay, this was new information for us. It’s very exciting to actually be in the midst of an investigation and find new information rather than dead ends. Absolutely no one on the OCE team knew much about Ted Bundy, but we were now compelled to become experts fast. Because the information was voluminous, we actually created a new enewsletter to address it called “The Search for the Sackett Hall Spooks."

We also found that Sackett Hall wasn't the only haunted venue on campus. The Gazette-Times named two other ghosts we hadn’t heard of: Ida Kidder, the university’s first librarian; and a World War I hero named Edward C. Allworth who managed the Memorial Union for almost four decades. There were others, but we decided to concentrate on these two since the legends provided exact names, dates and circumstances.

Kidder is alleged to haunt Waldo Hall, the former women’s dormitory where she lived from her arrival in Corvallis in 1908 until her death in 1920. In many ways, Kidder defied the stereotype of early school librarians as severe spinsters isolated from the rest of humanity. She started her career as an elementary school teacher but upon marrying gave it up in order to be a full-time housewife. By the early twentieth century, it seems that Kidder had been widowed and was forced to reinvent herself and her life. She enrolled at the University of Illinois, and despite the challenges of being considerably older than her classmates, obtained her Bachelors of Library Science Degree. She worked various governmental posts as an archivist throughout the west and Pacific northwest until she was finally offered the newly-created position of staff librarian at the Corvallis campus. At the time, OSU was considered a “cow college” – catering mostly to agriculture students. Kidder went immediately to work organizing and modernizing the library. She successfully championed a variety of causes – including a required course for all incoming freshmen on how to use libraries and the creation of a new campus library constructed in 1918 . Because she lived alongside the students in Waldo Hall, they also became her friends. Her popularity and reputation as a warm, affable character led to her being widely known as “Mother Kidder.” The student body’s affection for her was obvious when, in November 1919 she suffered a heart attack and afterwards had great difficulty moving around campus. Some engineering students came to her rescue by building her an electric wicker cart. The “wickermobile” became a common sight at OSU during Kidder’s last few months. When Kidder died in February of the following year, the students requested that she lay in state in the library for several days. Hundreds of people from the area filed past to pay their last respects.

It is said that Kidder now haunts the fourth floor of Waldo Hall, where she lived for the duration of her years at OSU. The fourth floor is closed off and empty today, but students still claim to see a matronly figure standing at some of the windows and gazing down at the campus she loved so much. OSU still seems to embrace the memory of Ida Kidder, and is even very open-minded about the possibility of her ghost on the campus. We found this small blog entry on the OSU website:

Elizabeth Thomas works in Waldo Hall, and people have told her they’ve seen a woman “disappear” in a second story hallway of the Oregon State University building.

The primary suspect in the vanishing act is Ida Kidder, the school’s first librarian.

She’s been dead since 1920.

“People weren’t creeped out or anything. They thought she was a friendly presence,” Thomas said.

We weren’t able to gain access to the fourth floor, but the consistent tales of Kidder’s ghost and her deep connection to the university do have the hallmarks of a legitimate haunting. From the nature of the reports, it sounds like Waldo Hall may contain the residual psychic energy of Kidder, which are randomly replayed and experienced by various students and staff. We were not able to find any reports of witnesses who actually interacted with Kidder, which would indicate that these are not an apparitional events (events where the ghost appears to be self-aware and able to interact with the living and its surroundings.) Regardless, it seems to if you have to have a ghost in your dorm, having a “motherly” one would be the best possible choice. Sleep well, kids.

The second haunting event we investigated was that of Edward C. Allworth, a man whose personal achievement and contributions to OSU certainly rival those of Kidder. In fact, the Corvallis campus library maintains his scrapbooks and correspondences created during the last ten years of his employment there. Allworth was a certified war hero, having received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1919 for swimming across a French river with members of his platoon and overcoming superior German forces on the other side. His official citation reads:

While his company was crossing the Meuse River and canal at a bridgehead opposite Clery-le-Petit, the bridge over the canal was destroyed by shell fire and Capt. Allworth's command became separated, part of it being on the east bank of the canal and the remainder on the west bank. Seeing his advance units making slow headway up the steep slope ahead, this officer mounted the canal bank and called for his men to follow. Plunging in he swam across the canal under fire from the enemy, followed by his men. Inspiring his men by his example of gallantry, he led them up the slope, joining his hard-pressed platoons in front. By his personal leadership he forced the enemy back for more than a kilometer, overcoming machine-gun nests and capturing 100 prisoners, whose number exceeded that of the men in his command. The exceptional courage and leadership displayed by Capt. Allworth made possible the re-establishment of a bridgehead over the canal and the successful advance of other troops.

Allworth retired from the military in 1927 and took a temporary position in Corvallis to raise month for the OSU Memorial Union. The position was made permanent and Allworth stayed until his retirement in 1963. He died three years later and was buried at the Crystal Lake Masonic Cemetery in Corvallis. But did he ever leave the Memorial Union?

Curiously, he may have had an invitation to stay on, even after death. Upon Allworth’s retirement, then-OSU President James Jensen wrote him a letter that read: “We expect your presence on the campus and will be disappointed if we do not see you often.” Allworth may have obliged him as his ghost is one of the most-reported on campus, usually seen in the Memorial Union itself. Reports suggest that this ghost, like Kidder’s, is benign and often unobtrusive. Students and faculty will report seeing an older man sitting in the spacious Memorial Hall lounge, only to watch him evaporate before their very eyes. Or smelling an invisible cigar (we couldn’t confirm that Allworth smoked, but these reports are attributed to his spirit nonetheless). Or encounter the kindly man in one of the hallways. Again, like Kidder, these experiences would appear to be residual “memories” of activities Allworth enjoyed and performed during life.

We were able to tour the Memorial Hall and spent considerable time roaming through its cavernous sitting rooms, balconies and basement. We sent our psychic powerhouse, Ash, to work in north corridor, an area Allworth’s specter is said to frequent. The nice thing about being there prior to the Fall semester beginning as these areas were relatively empty and Ash was able to get a good “feel” for the building as a whole. As is always our practice, he was given only basic information about haunting. He sat for a long time in the beautiful lounge before finding the rest of the team and reporting his impressions of an “old man in a dark suit who liked to roam around and talk to people.” He was not able to give a very detailed description of the man, other than he was “completely bald.” Ash stated that he felt that the man was a person of some importance, possibly a professor. He also noted that the ghost was not malicious or even frightening, but rather “friendly.” Cool, I thought, two friendly ghosts on the OSU campus. One a motherly figure, the other a fatherly one. All those young people, many of them away from their families and homes for the first time, would appear to be in good hands... at least paranormally-speaking.

POLARIS: After spending several weeks earlier this year on various Bigfoot investigations in California, we were a little reluctant to tackle another one but curiosity got the best of us. This particular large hairy monster story comes from the Millersburg area of Oregon, just to the north of Corvallis. According to a variety of sources (all unsubstantiated), the monster made its first appearance in the area during the “late 1950s or early 1960s.” Now, you will recall that we have regularly warned our website visitors to be suspicious when some kind of amazing phenomenon does not come with an exact date. After all, do history books record the attack on Pearl Harbor as being “sometime in the early 1940s?” If it was an important or unusual event, why wouldn’t anyone remember the date? The inexact date is often an indication that you may be dealing with an urban legend.

Although we were undeterred by the nebulous dating of this story, actually finding the location – Conser Lake – proved to be daunting. It does not appear on Google Earth or any of the GPS mapping systems we were using. However, the road on which the Millersburg town hall and general store sit is called Conser Road, so it’s reasonable to assume that one of the lakes nearby had the same name. There also appears to be some evidence that Conser was the historical name for Millersburg. If this is true, than any of the nine lakes in the area could have been the “Conser Lake,” or more appropriately – “a lake near the town of Conser.” There currently is no body of water in the area called Conser Lake. And just to be on the safe side, we actually made the effort to find maps of Linn County, Oregon, dating back to the late nineteenth century but still we could not find Conser Lake.

In desperation, we drove into nearby Albany and had lunch at a local pub where we asked some of the locals about the lake. Only one, a grizzled old man with a large black beard and very dirty hands, told us that he “had heard of it but had never been there.” He gave us some convoluted instructions on how to find the lake, which seemed to lead us back to Conser Road but dead-ended there.

If you follow Conser Road far enough west you will find yourself on the banks of the Willamette River. We followed the river north for several miles, encountering plenty of farms and orchards but no Conser Lake. There is a small Wilson Lake to the north of Conser Road, so Rune surmised that perhaps this feature had been called Conser Lake in decades past. We were not able to confirm this.

So... if there’s no town called Conser and no Conser Lake, could there have been a Conser Lake monster? The story, as we found, only got weirder and less credible as we continued to search for answers.

As was not uncommon for the “late 1950s or early 1960s,” the Conser Lake monster had an extraterrestrial connection. Apparently reports of the creature were preceded by a bright object falling from the sky and crashing into the woods. The monster – or E.T. if you prefer – then began showing up on local farms. The description of the creature changes according to whose account you read, but the consistent features include softly-glowing white fur, cat-like ears, unusual height, webbed fingers and feet that made a “squishing noise” as the creature walked. He was allegedly spotted within a thirty-mile radius around Millersburg and so frightened the locals that they were barricading themselves in their homes and pleading with the sheriff to take action.

Curiously – or maybe not, depending on how you look at it – our team couldn’t find any contemporary newspaper reports about this incident. Nor were we able to verify the existence of any of the alleged witnesses named in other sources. Those details, like the exact dates of the monster’s rampage, remain frustratingly amorphous.

MIST: There are two notable things about this blog entry. A. It is the first one in which Echo, who tends to be shy about making contributions to the website, helped me. B. There was probably more debate over whether or not we should cover this topic than anything else in OCE history. Why, you might ask? It boils down to what the individual team members consider appropriate source material for the site. This blog entry, you see, [is] about a UFO and UFO’s are not paranormal. Some members argued that including the Trent Farm “disk” on the site made us appear like other internet websites, where everything is paranormal. Perhaps you know the sites I’m referring to? Absolutely everything in the universe ever is the work of spirits, angels, aliens, Atlanteans or Bigfoot? As a general rule of thumb, OCE has tried to keep the paranormal separate from issues such as extraterrestrial life.

On the other hand, we do cover things that are not paranormal on a regular basis. For example, real-life mysteries like the disappearance of Amelia Earhart or what happened during the Mira Loma “chickencoop murders.” These items are still mysterious and therefore we include them. In the end, we decided to include the Trent Farm disk because its classification as a UFO does not mean it is extraterrestrial. It is just “unknown,” and unknown mean “mysterious.”

The Trent Farm flying disk photos are probably some of the most well-published UFO images in history. This is partly because the man who snapped them – Oregon farmer Paul Trent – did not claim any ownership to them or solicit money for them. As a result, they are considered public domain images. Moreover, they have never been adequately explained or debunked, making them one of the more legitimate UFO sightings of the twentieth century.

The story of the two images is uncomplicated. On May 11, 1950, Evelyn Trent had walked outside her home just before sunset to feed her rabbits. When she looked up, she saw a metallic disk-shaped object with what appeared to have a mast sticking out of the middle of it hovering some distance away. She shouted to her husband, Paul Trent, who arrived with his camera in hand and snapped two photos of the object. The sighting did not receive any publicity for almost a month because Paul had not used up all the film in his camera and apparently was in no rush to develop the images. Once he did have the photographs produced, he showed them to his friend, Frank Wortman. It was Wortman who contacted the media about the sighting. The story subsequently appeared in newspapers all over the country. It was also featured in the June 1950 edition of Life magazine. There were no abductions, cattle mutilations or “grays” in silver jumpsuits involved. Just a hovering disk.

As with most cases like this, the photos and the veracity of the witnesses has been analyzed ad nauseam. We won’t bother to repeat those scientific studies in detail as they are extremely precise and much of the data is, honestly, completely above us. Suffice to say that no one, even after six decades of trying, has been able to expose a hoax.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist and well-known UFO investigator, did probably the most extensive analysis on the photos. In a paper he presented at a Center for UFO Studies symposium, he wrote in part:

...I have concluded, from communications with many people who have talked to the Trents, that no one who has met them personally would believe that they would think of creating any hoax or perpetrating a hoax as successful and long lasting as their flying saucer report... Instead, the available verbal and photographic evidence indicates that the sighting was not a hoax... [The McMinnville Photos by Bruce Maccabee (Referred to as CUFOS Paper #2)]

Paul and Evelyn Trent died in 1997 and 1998 respectively. Both insisted up until their deaths that the object they saw was real and the photographs they took legitimate. But what was the object? No one has ever been able to explain that either, although Paul did tentatively suggest who might know in some newspaper articles that appeared at the time.

“[The] army knows what they are,” he was quoted as saying.

If that’s true, the army’s still not saying.

In a curious side note to this story, several years ago some “fringe UFOlogists” produced what they called the “lost third Trent photograph.” From day one, there have only been two known photos of the disks that Paul and Evelyn saw in 1950. Suddenly, a third materialized, showing a similar single-masted craft floating at an extreme angle over the ground. Those who claimed to have uncovered the missing photo also claimed that it proved a hoax, as no aerodynamic craft could have flown at such a strange orientation. Other UFO enthusiasts immediately countered that argument. After all, they contested, UFOs do not use a propulsion system that we understand and are well-known for aerial maneuvers that would seem impossible. The debate was useless, however, since the “third photo” that proved the hoax was, in fact, a hoax. The “third photo” was actually produced in 1977 by a German man named Walter Schilling who later admitted that the image is actually a model he built. Years later, someone took Schilling’s bogus color photo, reproduced it in black and white, and attempted to pass it off as a photo taken by Paul Trent. Since the Schilling photo had already been widely published and previously debunked, however, the gig was up quickly.

Aren’t these sloppy techniques still being used today in relation to Presidential birth certificates? Folks, if you’re going to hoax something, at least do your homework!

The team wasn’t able to find the location of the old Trent farm in McMinnville, although it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if we had. Whatever Paul Trent photographed there in 1950 is long since gone. Only the mystery lingers.

POLARIS: If you take the narrow, serpentine road at the north end of the Yaquina Bay bridge and follow it down the rocky cliffs, you will come to a large parking lot which overlooks the beautiful Newport beach. And sitting on a heavily wooded bluff far above, is the red and white facade of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse.

The poor Yaquina Bay lighthouse. The place just can’t catch a break. Built in 1871 and in operation for only three years, the structure itself was a testament to poor planning. It seems that its location, on the outer edge of the bay did not provide sufficient visibility for seagoing vessels. In fact, its light could barely be seen at sea so it was shut down and the Yaquina Head Lighthouse was built to replace it. The structure stood vacant for most of the early twentieth century until the city finally decided to demolish it in 1946. It was only due to the activism of the people of Newport that the old structure was saved, refurbished and opened as a state park. That’s when the haunting legends begin, but even these stories are of dubious quality.

Over the years, two main haunting legends have formed. The first involves a Captain-Bligh-type character named Evan MacClure who found himself the victim of a shipboard mutiny and was set adrift in a rowboat by his angry crew. According to the legend, the rowboat was found washed up on the beach beneath the lighthouse, empty. It was assumed that Captain McClure perished at sea and his vengeful ghost took up residence in the abandoned lighthouse. There are two major problems with this story.

First, it defies our conventional understanding of how hauntings work. Ghosts tend to inhabit places that were important to them in life – a home, a school, their place of death. I have not heard of “vagabond ghosts” as described in Captain MacClure’s case. We would have to assume that a ghost – a spectral memory of a living creature – needs some kind of abode to haunt and will pick and choose one at will. This is behavior that may be more akin to stories about demons or other supernatural entities [see our story on the Rakshasa Hunt for an example of this] but not necessarily of an apparition.

Secondly, there appears to be no historical evidence of Captain MacClure. As stated above, the first of the MacClure ghost stories began after the lighthouse was refurbished in the late 1940s and early 1950s, or some seventy-five years after MacClure was said to have perished at sea. Did the ghost lie dormant during all those years in between? The abandoned lighthouse surely must’ve been a local curiosity and one that inspired rumors, but the sources we found indicate that there aren’t any stories about MacClure predating 1946. So exactly how did the MacClure story originate? Since the team was not able to find any documentation on MacClure himself, we decided to look for his ship instead. Our research did reveal a whaling vessel called Moncton – kind of – but none of the details of its history fit the haunting legend. The Moncton we found was a corvette-class warship attached to the Royal Canadian Navy during the World War II years. When it was decommissioned from active duty with the military, it was sold to the Norwegians who refitted her as a whaling vessel under the new name Willem Vinke. She was scrapped in 1966. Obviously, this vessel could not have been the one allegedly commanded by Captain MacClure in January 1874.

Failing to find either Captain MacClure or his ship, the team began to consider other nineteenth century stories that may have influenced the MacClure legend.

Our first thought was that the tale may have been influenced by the 1824 mutiny led by Samuel Comstock onboard the Globe. This exceptionally gruesome mutiny and hijacking is still considered the worst in the history of the whaling industry. [See Enewsletter: The Bloody King of Mili Atoll or more information on this incident.] Or could the tale of the Moncton and Captain MacClure have been inspired by the real-life mutiny aboard the American vessel, Jefferson Borden, which occurred in 1875? The timeframe for this incident is more satisfying, as it occurred only one year after the fictional Moncton mutiny. However, the mutiny on board the Jefferson Borden was unsuccessful as her captain was able to barricade himself in his quarters and eventually convinced the rebels to surrender, but only after they murdered the first and second mates. The story was reported widely in Oregon newspapers, as it was in the press all over the world.

But these examples are purely speculation on our part, as the team was not able to find any direct or documentable link between the MacClure legend and these real incidents. Since the mutiny onboard the Jefferson Borden was covered in Oregon newspapers and it occurred half a world away, we found it unlikely that a skipper would be set adrift to die near Newport but this would not be reported at all. Our conclusion is that there was no such vessel as the Moncton, and thus, no such haunting of the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse by its captain. Sorry, folks.

The lighthouse’s second haunting legend doesn’t fare any better, but this time we do have a very clear understanding of its genesis. It starts with a piece of fiction written in 1899 by a woman named Lischen M. Miller. “The Haunted Lighthouse” was a short story that appeared in the Pacific Monthly magazine and was inspired by Miller’s own fascination with the then-abandoned Yaquina Bay lighthouse. Miller was an Oregon resident who frequently wrote tales of intrigue and mystery about her home state. Her lighthouse tale was just one of these, but for many (including the authors of many guides to haunted places), her words were taken very literally. Her story begins with this description:

“Situated at Yaquina, on the coast of Oregon, is an old, deserted lighthouse.  It stands upon a promontory that juts out dividing the bay from the ocean, and is exposed to every wind that blows.  Its weather-beaten walls are wrapped in mystery.  Of an afternoon when the fog comes drifting in from the sea and completely envelopes the lighthouse, and then stops in its course as if its object had been attained, it is the loneliest place in the world.  At such times those who chance to be in the vicinity hear a moaning sound like the cry of one in pain, and sometimes a frenzied call for help pierces the death-like stillness of the waning day.  Far out at sea, ships passing in the night are often guided in their course by a light that gleams from the lantern tower where no lamp is ever trimmed...”

The story, which is written in a very sober style, reads more like a historical account than a piece of fiction, and clearly this is how it was construed by many of the people who read it. The story recounts a tale about a maiden named Muriel Trevenard who visits the old lighthouse with a group of acquaintances and finds a mysterious hidden chamber behind an inside wall. The visitors all assume that it was a passage used in years past by smugglers and pay it little mind. But when Muriel goes missing, and only her blood-soaked handkerchief is recovered, the trespassers came to realize that there was more to the lighthouse than they originally thought.

“...As time went by, the story was forgotten by all but those who joined in that weary search for the missing girl. But to this day it is said the blood-stains are dark upon the floor in the upper chamber...” Miller wrote in conclusion.

Despite it’s title, there is no ghost in Miller’s story. But the people of Newport and ghosthunters for generations to come were happy to create one. Often relaying the story as a factual account, Muriel Trevenard became a real person haunting a real place. But it’s just not so. That doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy the tale, however. I would suggest, if you have the opportunity, that you take a copy of Miller’s story with you Newport and read it with friends as you tour the lighthouse. Try to do it when it’s raining and the wind’s blowing and the clouds are swirling all around. It will be awesome. I promise.

RELATED VIDEO: View our 10-minute mini-documentary entitled Pacific Coasts Ghosts for more on this topic.

MERIDIAN: The Yaquina Head Lighthouse has the distinction of being the tallest such structure in Oregon. Completed in 1873, it sits on a barren, wind-swept spit of land, looking from a distance like a giant bowling ball pin. Near its base is a small whitewashed house, all that remains of a complex of buildings that once stood here while the structure was in active use. On the day that we visited, the coast was overcast and the surf unforgiving. I stood at the west end of the head looking down into the crashing waves below and got a real sense of what it must have been like to live here a hundred years ago, when your main purpose was to keep that light burning so no ships smashed against these cliffs.

There are several legends that I would like to address in this blog. The first has to do with why and where this lighthouse was built. In his previous entry, Polaris noted how this lighthouse was supposed to have replaced the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse, which had poor visibility to the ships at sea. This story appears to be true. But another tale indicates that the Yaquina Head Lighthouse was also “misplaced” due to confusion over some geographical features. According to the legend, the structure was supposed to be built further north at Cape Foulweather, but the building supplies were accidentally unloaded at Yaquina Head so that’s where they stayed and where the building was ultimately erected. Not true, say historians... but the story lingers on.

The next legend continues to add to the lighthouse’s mystique. Not only was the lighthouse built at the wrong spot, say the raconteurs, but a workman was killed during its constructions, falling into a hollow space between its mammoth walls where his body could not be recovered. The other men at the job site just walled up the remains and forgot about him until his ghost started to appear on the lighthouse steps. Also not true, say historians... but the story lingers on.

The final legend may be the most credible one. I found it in the book LIGHTHOUSES AND LIFE-SAVING ON THE OREGON COAST by David Pinyeard, and this tale is retold almost verbatim on numerous ghost-hunting websites. Pinyeard wrote:

In the early 1920s, Keeper William Smith went into twon with his family, leaving Assistance Keepers Herbert Higgins and Frank Story in charge. Higgins fell ill, and Story drank a few too many. Seeing that Story had not tended the light, Higgins got out of his sickbed and went into the tower, collapsing near the lantern room. Smith saw from Newport that the light was dark and rushed back to the lighthouse. Upon his arrival, he found Higgins dead and Story drunk. After that, Story filled with guilt, feared Higgins’s ghost and always took his bulldog with him into the tower for protection. [page 50]

Not being one to believe anything I read, however, I set out to find Herbert Higgins. Fortunately, there weren’t too many of them. An 1880 federal census listed a Herbert A. Higgins being born to a family in Upper Astoria the previous year. A 1900 census listed a Herbert E. Higgins in the Portland area. But could either of these men be our ill-fated assistant lighthouse keeper? A review of the Oregon state death certificates proved frustrating. It listed twenty-three people with the last name “Higgins” who died during the 1920s in Oregon, but none of them named Herbert and none of them in the Newport area. Then I checked the listings for anyone by that name buried in the two local cemeteries. Nothing. I checked these same records for either Frank Story or William Smith. I didn’t find the former, but there is a man named William Smith buried in the Eureka cemetery who died in 1950. Could this be the lighthouse keeper who found Higgin’s dead body? This can never be easy, can it?

I was able to confirm a few other elements about this story, however. For example, there were always three keepers stationed at the light until 1939. So, the trio of Higgins, Story and Smith makes sense here. The story about the three men – and the haunting legend that followed Higgins death – also appears in reputable sources so I’m inclined to believe that this incident was real, despite my inability to confirm it personally. I would have loved to know if anyone actually experienced Higgins’ ghost, or if it was just Story’s abiding sense of guilt which caused him to believe that the lighthouse was haunted. But on that count, the record is also unfortunately mute.

RELATED VIDEO: View our 10-minute mini-documentary entitled Pacific Coasts Ghosts for more on this topic.

MIST: One of the more persistent urban legends along the Pacific Coast Highway is attached to the three-mile stretch that borders Cannon Beach. The beach is a popular tourist destination, a wide swath of sand with a dome-shaped rock, known as Haystack Rock, poking out of the roaring surf. The beach owes its unusual name to a US naval vessel called USS Shark which sank off shore in 1847 after trying to escape the Columbia River Bar, the area where the giant river meets the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, various cannons from the wreck have washed up on shore, most recently in March 2008 at Arch Cape, which is a mere five miles south of Cannon Beach. Due to the treacherous conditions, this area has become known to sailors over the years as “The Graveyard of the Pacific.” It is not known precisely how many ships and their sailors have met their watery ends here, but the area is still notorious even in this day of modern technology and navigation. Tourists can see some of the wreckage, most particularly in the rusted metal skeleton of the Peter Iredale, a steel barque that ran ashore in 1906. The wreck is easily accessible from the cliffs above via the Fort Stevens State Park, or simply by walking up the beach from Seaside. [See Enewsletter: Did the Peter Iredale Wreck Twice in the Same Place?]

Like the wayward cannons from the USS Shark and probably lots of other shipwreck debris, the tale of the “Bandage Man” appears to have washed onto these shores from some mysterious point. At first telling, the tale has all the major hallmarks of an urban legend. The specter is horrific to behold – a mangled man wrapped almost entirely in bloody bandages. He is said to prey upon unsuspecting visitors, often leaping onto the hoods of their passing cars. It is rumored that he is responsible for various animal deaths and human murders in the area. And all of these tales, as you probably suspect, have little to no credible documentation behind them.

Although a mummy-like phantom lurking the Oregon coast is unique to the region, the tale itself is not without precedence. A thousand miles to the south, in the great state of California, an old and persistent tale about a burned man, dubbed “Charman” by the locals, is still told to this day. Like the “Bandage Man,” the “Charman” appears to be trapped in the agony of his own demise, forever suffering the last moments of his life. He is described as appearing like a blackened corpse, burned flesh sloughing off a grizzled skeleton. And like the “Bandage Man,” “Charman” takes a perverse pleasure in attacking motorists and hikers who happen down the road he haunts. The original identity of “Charman” is unknown, although various tales claim that he was a firefighter killed in the performance of his duty or a driver who became trapped in a burning car. In her book, GHOST STORIES OF OREGON, author Susan Smitten offers similar sensational explanations for the origin of “Bandage Man:”

...Where the Bandage Man came from is up for debate. One account suggests it is the vengeful spirit of a logger who was cut to pieces in a nearby sawmill. In his book OREGON’S GHOSTS AND MONSTERS, Mike Helm interviews a local who believes the man was killed in a coastal landslide and returned a few days later to exact revenge for his untimely death... [page 24]

For me, neither of these explanations were particularly satisfying. No one on our team believed that the Bandage Man was an actual person, but like all urban legends his genesis had to start somewhere, probably with a real event now lost over the generations. I had to wonder if somehow he was tied to the “Graveyard of the Pacific” and the numerous shipwrecks that occurred here. Perhaps to the USS Shark itself?

In mid-1846, the USS Shark was dispatched from Honolulu, Hawaii, with orders to survey the Columbia River. The assignment was both scientific and political. The US government wanted better navigational information and the chance “to cheer our citizens in that region by the presence of the American flag.” The sight of the impressive warship cruising up and down the Columbia must have achieved precisely that for the local pioneers. On September 10, as the USS Shark was crossing the Columbia River Bar back into the Pacific, it struck an uncharted shoal and sank. But all the crew escaped unharmed, thereby eliminating my initial theory that the “Bandage Man” might have been a casualty from the wreck. I then looked at the wreck of the Peter Iredale for clues, but also came up empty. The crew from that vessel also escaped unharmed. Plus, the Peter Iredale wreck seemed too distant from Cannon Beach, having run aground ten miles to the north, to be the source of any legend there. So was there a third option, perhaps another shipwreck that occurred near Cannon Beach in which the sailors were badly mangled and wrapped in bandages?

Determining this was a daunting task for several reasons. The vast number of shipwrecks along the coast was the first. The fact that new wrecks are being discovered all the time was the second. In just the last year, for example, three new wrecks were unearthed, including that of a 223-foot schooner that ran aground near Cannon Beach in 1944. Confidently, I pressed on, only to become frustrated by my own inquisitiveness. I simply could find any shipwreck that might account for this fanciful specter. Like so many legends of its kind, the “Bandage Man” tale has no identifying dates, names or historical events attached to it. Looking for clues became the veritable search for the needle in the haystack. I even considered shark attack on a swimmer or surfer, but these kinds of attacks are rare along Cannon Beach. I only found a few recorded ones over the last thirty years... and none with fatalities.

After spending two days groping for some indication of where the “Bandage Man” story may have originated, I finally had to concede that nothing particularly bad or newsworthy has occurred at Cannon Beach, Oregon. Or at least nothing that would lead me to believe that some poor sap ended up mangled and wrapped in bloody bandages. In the end, I found myself exactly where I started – assuming that the “Bandage Man” is simply a urban legend.

In light of this, there’s no reason to avoid Cannon Beach out of fear for the phantom. Frankly, it’s too beautiful to avoid and if you find yourself along that strip of the Pacific Coast Highway, I would recommend stopping for a while and running barefoot through the surf!

RELATED VIDEO: View our 10-minute mini-documentary entitled Pacific Coasts Ghosts for more on this topic.

POLARIS: Perhaps one of my favorite investigation sites in Oregon has to be the Fort Stevens State Park, located just north of Seaside. Today, the large former military reservation is a popular recreational site offering extensive camping facilities and miles of hiking and biking trails. The fort is located on a fingertip of land, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean on west and the Columbia River on the north and east. As a result, there are miles of sandy beaches, thick spruce and pine forests, rocky estuaries, freshwater lakes and grassy headlands. Needless to say, the team lingered in this area for days before we actually set out to investigate what had lured us here – the military fort itself.

When you drive into the main battery of the park, where the visitors center and extensive museum is located, you are almost overwhelmed by the size and extent of the concrete bunkers and gun emplacements here. Most of this massive development took place in the years between the Civil War and World War I when the fort was intended to the be main defense for the Columbia River. In fact, some of the earthworks actually date back to the Civil War and everything here is a mute testimonial to a now-distant age, when war was conducted not by smart bombs and automated drones, but by massive guns which required massive platforms and massive defenses. But even the shocking sight of the grey concrete batteries set into grassy, flower-strewn banks does not lead one to fully appreciate Fort Stevens. Other than the bunkers, most of the buildings here were demolished after the fort was abandoned at the end of World War II. To the west of the museum parking lot, for example, is the strangely eerie sight of dozens of red brick chimneys rising out of an otherwise empty field. Seventy years ago, this was a large residential area for many of the fort’s families. The houses are gone, and only the chimneys and foundations remain, most now reclaimed by native plants and wildlife.

As awe-inspiring and formidable as the fort is, its fearsome guns never fired in combat and only shook once under an enemy bombardment... such as it was. Fort Stevens represents an age when Americans began to really realize that the oceans on either side of the country could no longer buffer them against outside threats. The fort was built in anticipation of invasions that never came. It was abandoned at the beginning of the nuclear age, when such mammoth defenses no longer made any difference against the reality of modern weaponry.

The Outcast Earth team came to Fort Stevens to study the stories of phantoms from World War II, the last era in which the battery stood watch over the Columbia River. And, ironically, the only time when the fort came under attack as the following newspaper article recounts:

The attack by the Japanese sub, I-25, was a notable event in American history, the first time that the mainland had been shelled by an enemy vessel since the War of 1812. It was also the only time during the Second World War that this happened. Despite the daring of the I-25 crew, the attack had a more profound psychological effect than a military one. All of the explosive shells fell onto the beaches and in the swampland around the fort but otherwise caused little damage. In fact, the 1906 shipwreck Peter Iredale was more imperiled by the bombardment than Fort Stevens, and even it emerged unscathed. I-25’s target was known as Battery Russell, an extensive concrete bunker on the Pacific Ocean side of the fort, north of the Peter Iredale. Although teeming with weapons, Captain Jack Wood, the commander of Battery Russell, never received permission to return fire. There has been speculation since 1942 as to why this decision was made. The official reason from the military was that the I-25 was on a reconnaissance mission and returning fire would have revealed the position of the hidden American guns. However, many of the soldiers stationed at Fort Stevens later noted that most of the armament at the installation dated back to the First World War and they were dubious as to what effect this would have on modern warships. Some theorists have surmised that the fort commandant didn’t fire due to this insecurity in his own equipment. Regardless, the attack and the fort’s lack of response prompted a debate about the overall effectiveness of coastal batteries and ultimately led to Fort Stevens’ decommissioning in 1947.

Whether it was the Japanese bombardment or just simple coincidence, it is Battery Russell that is most often associated with ghosts. Our team spent hours and hours at Fort Stevens, but all of us were drawn more to Battery Russell than anywhere else in the area. The battery is rather isolated, located at the end of a narrow road and hidden in the thick forest. The main gun platforms were located at the top of a precipitous stairway. As we reached the top landing, we all just stood in quiet awe of the installation. At first glance, it reminded me of a Mayan ruin rising out of the jungle, a series of massive grey blocks piled one on top of the other to create a kind of blunted pyramid. Various staircases and ramps led up to the flat-roofed observation deck at the very top, probably the spot were the battery commander and his men surveyed the darkness in search of the enemy submarine. The labyrinthine chambers within the battery are now all empty, the damp walls heavily discolored or covered in moss. But yet they all seemed to contain echoes from the past which our more sensitive members sensed quickly [read Ash’s blog, My Tour of Battery Russell, for more.]

Since no one was killed during the I-25’s bombardment, we were stuck with a persistent question: if Battery Russell is haunted, by whom? There is a theory among some parapsychologists that certain types of structures are more likely to retain psychic energy than others. This appears to be particularly true of heavy, thick-walled constructions – castles, mansions, catacombs, tunnels, forts, etc. Is it possible, the theorists wonder, that the building itself catches and holds the energy of dramatic events and personalities that can then be perceived by future generations? Walking through the claustrophobic spaces of Battery Russell, this theory made some sense to us. Surely the men who were stationed at the emplacement on June 21, 1942, thought that the war had suddenly come to the American mainland. Perhaps this was the prelude to the long-anticipated Japanese invasion of the United States? The fear and anxiety in the battery must have been palpable. Perhaps then, the ghosts that have been reported here over the years do not represent particular individuals, but rather the collective energy of numerous young soldiers? When phantoms are reported, most seem to be engaged in innocuous behaviors – standing guard, walking patrols, carrying lanterns through the darkness. To my mind, these reports indicate that the battery has the ability to “rebroadcast” past events. If that’s the case, then almost any visitor could have the opportunity to relive the battery’s past in a very intimate way.

RELATED VIDEO: View our 10-minute mini-documentary entitled Pacific Coasts Ghosts for more on this topic.

ASH: Battery Russell at Fort Stevens was a very cool place. On our first visit there, we were completely alone since I don’t think most tourists go there. Instead they go to the main fort [Batteries Pratt, West, Mishler, 245, etc.] which is a lot larger and much easier to find. It was kind of cool being there by ourselves because we had a lot of time to wander around exploring without stupid tourist[s] and their screaming children. We all spread out with our cameras, iPhones (for recording possible EVP), and notebooks. Echo was afraid to be on her own, so she went with me. We started out by climbing to the top of the bunkers, as this is where some people have seen the ghost of soldiers standing guard. It was late afternoon and sun was beginning to go down. It was very quiet there and we noticed that we really didn’t even hear many birds singing. We didn’t get any strong impressions topside, however. When we went underneath, it was a different story. I immediately got the sense of a small group of men being there. It wasn’t a scary feeling, but more like a bunch of guys who were just hanging out, maybe a little bored. The area where I got the biggest feeling was at the far end of the bunker. We found a brick fireplace there, which was a real weird thing to see in this place. As Echo and me walked down the hallway toward [the room with the fireplace], I saw a man dressed all in dark green and wearing a very long overcoat leaning against the outer wall, [opposite from the fireplace]. His left shoulder was touching the wall and his body was at a slant. I could see his lower legs really well because they were kind of sticking out toward me. I could just see his shins though because of the overcoat. He had on muddy boots and some kind of long socks. I couldn’t see his face because his head was down and he had on one of those [wide-brimmed] metal helmets like the soldiers wore on Wake Island. His coat was speckled and I thought it was dirty, but thinking back on it I now think it was probably wet from rain (even though it wasn’t raining at the time, sunny outside.) After seeing him for about 3-5 seconds, he vanished. I mentioned it to Echo but she didn’t see him.

When we entered the fireplace room, I also got the impression of another man being there, sitting on some kind of metal canister near the fireplace. I didn’t see this person, but instead just kind of sensed him. My impression that these men were on break or something from their duties and were trying to stay warm by the fire. I stayed in that room for a while afterward but didn’t see the apparition again. I finally called my dad over and he photographed the areas with me and drew a sketch of what I had seen.