Allen’s was one of many new businesses springing up in Old Town, which was part of city’s renewal plan to spruce up the area and hopefully capture business from the wealthy folks that worked in the high rises in the city’s core area. We had cruised by the place a few times and had intended to stop by and introduce ourselves, but until now we hadn’t had the opportunity. The small storefront, located at one corner of the building, had been empty for as long as I could remember, its windows too dirty to see in, and its inset doorway urine splashed and strewn with litter.
“That must be the complainant,” Bill said, as I pulled us to the curb in front of Allen’s. The 30-something man was standing in the entryway, his arms crossed, hands cupping his elbows, and his weight shifting from one leg to the other. “Seems wrapped a little tight.”
I greeted him as we got out of our unit, but the man didn’t acknowledge it and continued with the elbow cupping and swaying, his eyes large and … frightened? Bill looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.
Only a few people were out and about on the sidewalks. Half way down the block a sandwich board near the curb read “Tours: Portland Shanghai Tunnels, Daily At 2 P.M.”
“You call?” Bill asked. The man made a short nod. “About a burglary?” The man nodded again.
Someone had done a nice job cleaning up the exterior of Allen’s with fresh jade-green paint, new windows, and red lettering that read Allen’s Café. Good Coffee. Fresh Pastry. Big Sandwiches. Conversation.
The large south and west side corner windows were covered with heavy steel security bars. The new-looking door was edged with multiple locks, and a steel security door was open and positioned against the side of the inset. I looked back at the man. If this was Allen, he wasn’t terribly conversational.
“You okay, sir?” I asked. It wasn’t uncommon to find burglary victims shaken from having an intruder invade their space. Psychological rape, one victim called it.
His eyes came into focus and blinked as he looked from me to Bill and back to me again. “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry. I had a bit of a …” He turned about and led us inside the place. “Come in, please. I’ll show you.” Bill asked his name. “I’m Allen St John. I own the café.”
It was a tiny place: four tables and a long bar-type table by the window, hanging plants, and an order station. It wasn’t more than 20 feet by 20 feet.
“There,” the man said, still hugging himself as he pointed with his chin toward a pile of white coffee mugs on the floor. No, not a pile, but rather a careful arrangement of about two dozen mugs centered on the floor between the four tables. They had been arranged into a small pyramid, four cups on each side, then three, then two, and one at the top.
I looked at the man. “Why are they—?”
“I didn’t put those there,” he breathed. He pointed at other cups lined up on shelving behind the register. “I keep them there. After they’re cleaned, I put them there so I can easily retrieve them when customers come in.”
“The front door forced?” Bill asked rhetorically. I saw him look at the door facing the same as I did when we entered. I didn’t see where it had been tampered with. The man shook his head. “How about the back door?”
“There isn’t one.”
“So the cups were like this when you came in,” I said. “When did you come in?”
“About thirty minutes ago. I left last night about seven. I cleaned up, swept, did dishes, and locked the front door and the security door when I left. You can see how strong the doors are. And the windows are barred and they don’t open anyway.”
“No other way to get in?” Bill asked.
“No officer,” Allen said impatiently. “This room is it. There’s no way anyone could hide in here when I was closing up. I don’t even have a restroom. Besides they’d have to unlock both doors to get out and I have the only keys. And they were locked tight this morning just as I left them last night.”
He glanced over at his coffee machine where a full pot of coffee and another of clear water steamed. He looked back at me and swallowed. “I didn’t do that.”
“Didn’t do what?” Bill asked. “Make the coffee?”
Allen pulled his arms in tighter against his chest and looked at my partner with impossibly large eyes. He shook his head. “I … I open at nine thirty. I don’t make coffee until just before then.” Without turning his head he looked over at the pots, then back at Bill as if too afraid to look there longer. “It was … steaming when I came in at seven thirty.”
My read on Allen, and Bill concurred later, was that he wasn’t mental, but he definitely was a very frightened man.
“Anything taken?” Bill asked, pulling out his little notebook.
He shook his head. “No. Just things … disturbed. Those cups piled like that and … the coffee.”
We got Allen’s information and headed for the car. Bill wrote the report noting that it was a burglary with property moved about but nothing taken. With so many burglaries called in each day, the detectives mostly paid attention to those with property stolen and suspect information. Allen’s report no doubt worked its way to the bottom of the pile and was eventually turned into nothing more than a computer entry in the system.
Allen’s Café didn’t last and a few months later the corner space was again empty.
Tunnel tours, their tales of vice, crimes, death, and hauntings therein continue to this day.
Note: I recently caught the tail end of the TV program Ghost Adventures. It was a rerun of the 2012 opening season of the program and they were investigating Portland’s tunnels. They experienced doors rattling, a ghostly heat signature on one of their instruments (probably a infrared motion detector), and an EVP near a prostitute’s cove in the tunnel, saying, “Let’s get naked.”
THE STABBER
By Kasey Keckeisen
Like most cops I am skeptical by nature. I’ve always been interested in the supernatural and I love horror movies, but I’ve never seen a ghost nor do I wish to. I never saw one the night I’m going to tell you about, but my partner did, and I trust what he told me just as I’ve trusted him with my life many times. No, I wasn’t there for the ghost sighting.
But I was there the night the ghost was made.
It happened about 12 years ago, and I clearly remember the incident because it was one of my first as a SWAT operator on a major metropolitan police department in Minnesota. It started out as a typical domestic disturbance call. But when the first patrol officers arrived, one of the male participants threatened them with a knife. A moment later, he stabbed himself, and then quickly barricaded himself inside his home. In a matter of seconds, the call accelerated from a family fight to an armed barricaded subject with hostages. That’s when I was called to the scene along with the rest of the SWAT team.
We quickly replaced the patrol officers, and took position behind a large oak tree on the corner of the lot that allowed us to watch the front of the house and one of its sides. We held this position as an incident command (IC) post was setup, and the hostage negotiator began to communicate with the volatile man inside. In time, all the hostages were released and only the armed man remained in the house.
Over the course of the standoff, we learned the family had been trying to do a sort of intervention on the man who was off his meds, violent, and suicidal. The attempt had deteriorated and that is when the police were called.
At one point, I saw a face matching the description of the man peer out from between the curtains covering the living room window. I radioed IC, and told them I had had a visual on the guy but he had disappeared. A few minutes later, a light in a small upstairs window came on and I radioed that in. This went on for hours: A face would appear in the window and I’d radio it in; a light in the upstairs bathroom window would come on and then go off, and I’d radio it in; and the face would appear again in the window and I’d radio it in.
Then the light stayed on in the upstairs bathroom. We waited. But there was no further movement in the ho
use, no more glimpses of the man’s face in the window, and no more conversation between him and our negotiation team. But still we waited.
Finally, the order came for SWAT to make entry.
We stacked up, streamed in, and swept one room at a time. We found the man upstairs.
He was lying in the bathroom, and every square inch of its white-tiled walls and floor was dripping blood.
The man had cut his neck, not by drawing the knife across the front, as is the norm, but by plunging the blade into his throat over and over. He rammed it in, pulled it out, rammed it in again, and did so until he had lost so much blood he could no longer continue. With all the connective tissue cut away, his head had flopped back like a depressed Pez dispenser.
I’m sure even the veteran SWAT operators were stunned by what had to have been some kind of internal demons that drove the mentally disturbed man to do this to himself. A mere slice across the arteries would have killed him within seconds, but he had stabbed himself repeatedly until he finally succumbed to the loss of blood.
We cleared the rest of the house and went back outside. IC had debriefed the family about the death and we had no sooner exited the house than they began screaming at us.
“It’s your fault,” they shouted. “Why did you let him die? You made him do it with your shiny guns.”
They were Native American people and they commenced to chant and burn sage, an ancient ritual done to cleanse negative energy and ward off evil spirits. Why, I wondered, did they have sage with them?
10 years later
My friend, also a SWAT officer at the time of the suicide call, was now working as a K9 officer. One day we were both in training and he said, “You’re never going to believe this but beat officers and I have taken numerous break-in calls at that house where the guy nearly decapitated himself.”
He had been repeatedly dispatched with the other officers because if the intruder were to flee, he and his K9 partner would be on site to search for a trail. But every time the officers responded, there was never any indication anyone had left the house or, for that matter, had even been inside. One night my friend had grown impatient with it all.
“We’ve been here four times in the last three weeks about someone breaking in,” he said to the complainant. “There is never anyone here or any sign someone entered. Why do you keep calling us?
The complainant looked embarrassed and told the officers they wouldn’t believe his story. He was urged to tell them anyway.
“Ok,” the man said, taking a deep breath. “I’ll be alone down here in the living room watching TV. The light will go on in the upstairs bathroom. When I go to check it out there is no one there. So I turn it off and go back downstairs. Then the bathroom door will slam shut.”
The man took another deep breath. “I try to put it out of my head and tell myself I’m just imagining things. But then out of the corner of my eye I’ll see a guy come out of the bathroom, come down the stairs, and go behind the curtain over there by the front window.
This is the same window I saw the man looking out of 10 years earlier. The upstairs bathroom is where we found him.
“I freak out,” the complainant said, “and run out of the room. But as I do, I hear the door to the upstairs bathroom slam shut again. I figure there is someone in my house messing with me, right? So I call the cops. But when you guys show up you never find him.”
My friend asked the man what he knew about the history of the house
“It’s been in my family for a while. I bought it from my cousin.”
“Listen, sir,” my friend said, “No one is breaking into your house and you’re not crazy. But you really need to talk to your cousin about its history.
As I said in the beginning, I’m a skeptic by nature but I still I wonder about what was happening in that house.
Did an evil spirit take hold of the man all those years ago?
Could a possession have shown itself as a mental illness?
Did a possession make him capable of such grievous harm to himself?
Did the family know about it and that’s why they had the sage ready to burn at the intervention?
Or if there wasn’t a possession, could it be that his suicide was so violent his spirit can’t move on.
Or was the moment so emotionally charged that the negative energy created by his violent death, somehow burned an image track of it into the rooms of that house?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. All I know for sure is that unthinkable emotional and physical violence occurred in that place and there has been something going on in it ever since that cannot be explained.
THE FACELESS MANNEQUIN
By Kevin Faulk
Being out and about at 3 a.m. is always a little unsettling, regardless of what you’re doing. Writer Bram Stoker wrote: “No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.” What makes this worse is working at an Oregon college that dates back to the 1800’s. Some of the buildings are old and creaky, with a history of being built over a pioneer cemetery.
It was part of my job description as a public safety officer to check the buildings to ensure there was no errant student or a non-student inside causing mischief.
On the night in question, I was making my rounds through all the structures when I came to a particular building that always pushed my needle deep into the red on the spine-tingling scale. It was the theater building, purchased by the university during World War II.
I’m convinced there is something fundamentally not normal about all theater buildings. Google lists lots of links to haunted theaters throughout the world. Hollywood, California, of course, boasts many haunted ones, to include the tourist-popular Mann’s Chinese Theater. That one tops every theater list.
There were lots of things inside the old campus theater that toyed with one’s imagination: its single nightlight, which cast a “ghostly light” across its well-trodden stage; dressing room mirrors that never failed to scare the crap out of me when my own reflection suddenly loomed in my flashlight beam; the basement with its metal operating table and a chair with binding straps on its arms (which all the officers jokingly assumed were props; and a certain area in one of the hallways that would give me chills every single time I passed through it.
Creepy, yes, but mostly explainable. But there were other things the officers, and many students and faculty could not explain. In fact, previous experiences I had had within the building encouraged my baser instincts to avoid the place altogether. One night, I didn’t listen to them—though I should have.
I was making my way through the theater building when I passed by a door I had never opened. There was no reason to, especially since the sign next to it indicated the room was used for storage.
But this time I was curious.
I unlocked the padlock, turned the ancient knob, and pushed open the door to darkness. I clicked on my flashlight and the beam fell on a black, faceless mannequin smack in the center of the room.
I forced a nervous laugh, took a few deep breaths to regain control of my heartbeat, and marveled at how one’s mind can play games with—
The mannequin began rotating on its metal base.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I blurted into the bizarre room, while scooting back out into the hall.
I stood motionless for a few moments staring at several old framed pictures adorning the hallway, though not really seeing them. Then on a whim because, well, because sometimes I just do dumb things, I retrieved my iPhone and pushed the video button. I aimed it at the aforementioned pictures for a second and then I slowly crept back into the darkness of the strange room.
I swept my flashlight to all four corners to ensure no one was in there and then settled the beam on the mannequin. If at this point I had fully believed it had actually moved, rather than it being a trick of the light beam or my imagination, which was admittedly heightened because of the theater’s built in creep f
actor, I would have exited the place with extreme haste.
I held my light on the featureless head for a moment, as it stood mute and motionless in the seldom used and always locked room. I smiled to myself and wondered how I could have thought a faceless, heartless, inanimate object that just happened to be shaped like a human could ever move. I’m not one to take fights of fancy. I’m a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, a martial artist, and a father. It was ridiculous to think—
The mannequin moved again … turning ever so slowly toward me.
I might have made an audible noise of some kind as my legs turned to mush. Somehow I kept my phone’s camera on the thing for a few more seconds. Then I wanted, no, I had to get out of there right that instant. I fast-walked—really, really fast-walked—to the nearest exit.
Looking back now, I sometimes wish I hadn’t recorded it because then I could tell myself that my sleep-deprived eyes were deceiving me. But I know they weren’t.
The mannequin moved, but how? Was it on a moving platform of some kind? If so, why wasn’t it continuously rotating? And how would it have been powered? And if it were—and I know in my gut it wasn’t—why would it be powered at all since it was locked inside of a storeroom for I don’t know how long?
Might a student have played a prank on a poor campus cop? What an elaborate mission that would be. They would have to somehow gain entry to the locked room and then wait, and wait some more, never knowing if this would be the one time—the only time—I would look into the room or, for that matter, if I would even be checking the theater that night.
It was a very long time before I went into the room again and by then the mannequin had been moved to some other location.
Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers Page 8