Things that go bump in the night - a ghost story - local haunts

Needing comfort and a bowl of soup, I stopped by the restaurant at Longview, Washington's Rutherglen Mansion. Apparently recognizing me as a humor columnist, explorer and man of mystery, my server promptly began telling a story. It was a ghost story . . .

"I was working alone, late one night, clearing tables in the main dining room," she told me. "Then I saw an elderly man out of the corner of my eye. He was standing, all hunched over," she recalled, "Then he was gone."

"I told myself, 'Don't do this to yourself, there's nothing there.' And I forced myself back to work. But then I saw him again. He moved past me. Just six feet away."

"I screamed, and ran out of the building." Her voice was ragged and her gestures urgent. "I didn't come back that night," she said, finishing her story.

The server was looking at me, wide-eyed, as if to ask, "Well, what do you think?"

"I think I'll have the soup," I said.

It all began when Southwest Washington Paranormal Research (SWPR), a ghost hunting organization with members up and down the lower Columbia River, invited me to witness their investigations of the Klondike Restaurant (and Columbia Hotel) in St. Helens, Oregon, and the Rutherglen Mansion in Longview, Washington.

Doug York, a producer and playwright from Mt. Shasta, California came along for the ride. It was near midnight when we arrived in St. Helens. The Klondike was shrouded in fog. It was dark, foreboding and appeared to be deserted. What a fitting scene for paranormal research. Stephen King and Tananarive Due would have loved it.

I made my way through the fog, eventually gaining access to the restaurant. It made me edgy. Once inside, creaking floors, drafty corridors and many shades of darkness took their toll. Luckily York was with me . . . Doug? . . .

The rooms on the upper floors—what had been the old hotel—were stripped bare for renovation. They looked like crypts picked clean by over-eager grave robbers. Shadows were moving around us. Some of these shadows were carrying flashlights. Others had cameras, HS26 temperature gages, electromagnetic field sensors, Raytek Minitemp thermal scanners, walkie talkies with ear buds in place for emergency communication, and other exotic equipment. The shadows were, I hoped, the members of SWPR, moving silently from room to room, taking care of business.

One of the shadows was named Jennifer Fuller. York and I found her in the last room on the second floor, meditating. Fuller was hoping for contact with ethereal world beyond ours. It turns out she is a channeler who serves as a path for communication with the spirit world, although not necessarily in a verbal sense.

Fuller's brushes with the ether often take the form of impressions, sometimes visions of past persons or events, sometimes emotions or physical sensations.

"If something painful happens, I'll pick that up . . ." Fuller told me.

At times Fuller takes on "characteristics" of the spirits she channels. "Some folks handle this better than others. Some people don't like to be around me when I channel," Fuller said in a pinched but happy soto little girl's voice.

Always an empath, Fuller had her first experience with channeling at age eighteen.

I wondered aloud if channeling didn't frighten Fuller, just a little.

"What scares me more," she said, "are the people that are alive, not the ones that have already gone."

"How did you get into channeling," I asked.

"I didn't," she said. "It more or less got into me."

In the next room we found Kimberlie Travis, co-chairperson of SWPR. She gave us a brief tour of the site, and then told us the story that had brought SWPR to the Klondike in the first place.

A local police officer on a late-night patrol saw a man on the front steps of the Klondike. The officer stopped and the man asked him, "Is it wet enough for you? . . ." then disappeared.

"Lots of things scare me," Travis said, admitting to be a serious paranormal investigator who is "basically afraid of the dark." But her most frightening experience was a few years earlier at Rutherglen. Doing investigation in one of the guest rooms, Travis announced, "If there's anything here, come on we're getting bored. Just come out and show yourself." At that moment a small unframed painting flew across the room knocking over a large, very heavy potted plant. Travis did what her training couldn't prevent. She screamed. Then she and another researcher tried to reconstruct the event.

There was just no way that small picture could knock over that plant without some external force behind it.

York and I headed down the dark, empty second floor hall of the old Columbia Hotel. In another room we met Dezi Coss who was operating a high-end Fostex audio recorder, "sensitive enough to record conversations on other floors," she said.

Coss played an earlier recording for us. It sounded like random noise until she played it backwards. Then it revealed a ghostly human-like voice.

I tried to record this "Electronic Voice Phenomena," as Coss called it, using a digital pocket recorder that I'd used on two continents and in six foreign countries. It had never failed me before, but this time my recorder only captures crackling sounds, like the rattle of distant gunfire. There was no such sound in the room. What had my machine actually recorded?

The paranormal researchers of SWPR are direct and serious. Many have day-jobs in scientific and other professions. Amanda Jones is a Paralegal from St. Helens, Oregon. Jennifer Fuller works as a Veterinary Technician in Orchards, Washington. Kimberlie Travis is a Patient Access Representative for a Cardiovascular Care unit in Longview, Washington. They bring these skills to their paranormal research.

As York later observed, "These are scientists actually looking for evidence. They have it well organized. They use high-end equipment. This is very sophisticated stuff."

But they have a sense of humor too.

Travis was describing her work in cardiac care, "People with serious chest pains come to see me."

As she finished, another researcher added, "If they don't make it, we go to see them."

A few weeks later York and I headed to Rutherglen, to see SWPR in action a second time. Film maker Gregg Campbell and retired restaurateur Roland Richards, both members of the SandBagger Institute for Advanced Human Research and Bowling team, joined the renewed adventure.

Richards devoted his research to Rutherglen's "library" on the main floor. After some serious study he concluded: "At my age, most women don't think I'm lively enough to be interesting . . . I thought I might have a chance with these ghost hunters, who are mostly lovely young women. But it turns out they are looking for guys who are a lot less lively than me."

We had to leave Rutherglen, but SWPR members stayed the night continuing their research.

SWPR has recently contributed articles to The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places, published by New Page Books, and participated in the first-ever Rose City Paranormal Conference, during the fall of 2005, in Portland, Oregon. They maintain a website at: http://www.swpr.org.

-- Horace J. Digby --

Winner of the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor