Hell, maybe it moved there all by itself.
Editor’s note: I saw the video and it’s disturbingly creepy.
WHITE EAGLE
By Loren W. Christensen
Back in the late 1970s, there was an old tavern in my beat in Portland with a rich history of sordidness and violence. The tavern was a stone’s throw from the railroad, which was another stone’s throw from the mighty Willamette River. In the late 1800s through the first few decades of the 1900s, ship workers, railroad men, drifters, prostitutes, and criminals of every ilk kept things rootin’ and tootin’ and bleeding in the place. The basement and second floor were used for prostitution and opium smoking. Asian and black female prostitutes were kept in the basement; some purportedly were never allowed to leave.
The 13 rooms on the second floor gave customers and prostitutes more privacy. A woman named Rose was murdered by a jealous brothel manager up there, and people have reported smelling odors of wafting perfume, hearing a woman cry and other strange noises, and seeing a face at the upstairs window when no one was on the second floor.
My partner Bill knew the manager and we’d swing by once in a while to have coffee with him before he opened up. The first time I met him he was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the pub, a deep worry frown creasing his forehead.
“What’s happenin’, Dan?” Bill asked, after pulling us to the curb. The two of them exchanged friendly digs for a minute before Dan asked us to come in for coffee.
The two-story structure was long and rectangular with empty lots on each side of it. There were other buildings next to it at one time, possibly attached, but the lots were empty then and they still are today.
There were only the three of us in the place that morning as we sat around a table next to a long bar. Chairs had been set upside down on all the other tables so that Dan, still looking as if something was bothering him, could clean the floor. We chatted for a while and when I asked something about the place, he frowned again and began fiddling mindlessly with a saltshaker.
“Sometimes in the morning,” he said, his eyes still on the shaker, “the chairs aren’t where I left them the night before.”
We looked at him.
He looked a little uncomfortable, as if he wished he could withdraw his words. He stood and reached for his broom where he left it propped against another table.
“Uh, you can’t leave it at that, Dan,” Bill said.
“No one works at night,” he said, moving his broom around, though he had already swept the floor. “No cleaning crew. No anyone.”
“Any sign of forced entry?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It’s happened before too. Sometimes the chairs have been removed from the tops of the tables and sometimes they’re all pushed into that far corner over there. One time they were scattered all about the floor.”
McMenamins is a popular chain of over 65 pubs and hotels throughout Oregon and Washington. They buy old and unique buildings, schools, and hotels, add multiple themed pubs within a single sprawling complex, along with theaters and gift shops, and fill all available spaces with antique art. Several of their pubs and hotels have been declared haunted by paranormal investigators and written about in articles, books, and blogs. White Eagle is a relatively small pub they bought in 1993. Still, it’s mentioned in nearly every story about haunted locations in Oregon.
In recent years, psychics have reported feeling a powerful sense of violence and death in the basement area, and witnesses say they have seen floating brooms and mops. One employee felt hands push her down the stairs.
I perceived a weird vibe in the place those many years ago, a mild sense of something out of the norm. Dan’s story about moving furniture seemed fitting to what I was feeling.
I have been to the White Eagle a few times in the last few years and while I had read about recent paranormal activity in the place, I didn’t get that same vibe I did three decades ago. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.
Or maybe, as has happened in other haunted places, it is laying low for a while and will return on its own schedule.
At night. In the dark.
THE MAN IN THE WINDOW
By Jess Burlingham
“A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises.” ~ J. M. Barrie
It was mid October, half way to All Hallows Eve and nearing midnight when dispatch sent Officer Nelson and me on a theft call to Greystone Lane in Richmond, Virginia. The old three-story house rested on a dead end road, surrounded by a six-foot high chain-link fence. The street was lit well enough but the grounds around the house were in near darkness, no doubt making the thieves’ job easier.
The owner met us outside and told us he was renovating the 100-year-old structure; at least he was before thieves ran off with his tools, metals, and an assortment of scrap materials from the grounds. He didn’t know if anything had been taken from inside, although he had checked the doors and windows and didn’t find any sign of entry.
Detective Roberts, a property crime detective, arrived and we began our investigation. We first checked the grounds on all four sides of the house, our flashlight beams penetrating every dark nook and cranny. We found nothing unusual. That is, until I saw the figure in the upstairs window.
Actually, I felt it first, felt—him.
How? I’m not sure, other than I have always had a strong sixth sense about things. I know how that sounds but it’s true. This time I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end an instant before I was drawn to the window.
The room behind the glass was dark but I could see well enough to know that whoever was looking out was male. Was he looking at me? At all of us? I couldn’t tell, but it somehow felt to me that he knew I was connecting with him. I looked away to ask the owner if there was anyone living in the house or if there were guests inside. He assured me there was no one.
When I looked back up, the figure was gone.
I informed Detective Roberts of what I had seen and he told the owner that we needed to clear the inside for everyone’s safety. (I think Detective Roberts thought I was a little crazy but in a few minutes he would be quite fearful.) The owner had no problem with this and remained outside as we slipped through the door. It took a while to search the place because there were three levels and lots of square footage but in the end it was all clear. We asked the owner to come in and look around to see if anything was missing.
We followed him as he surveyed the place and all was fine. But when we began to ascend the stairs to the upper level—that’s when we heard them.
Footsteps.
Coming from the top floor and in the direction of the window where I had the seen the man.
We all froze in place, except for the homeowner who acted as if he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. When we told him what we had heard, he didn’t seem surprised. I asked, half joking and half serious, if the house might be haunted.
“Yes it is,” he said, his voice unaffected, though goose bumps were popping out all over me. “I don’t know who the man—the ghost—is but I do know he’s older and he stays on the upper level.”
He said it so nonchalantly it was as if he were referring to a kind old gentleman tenant. Maybe he was.
Not just a little unnerved, I managed to tell him what I had seen in the window from outside.
“Oh yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m not surprised. Others have seen the exact same thing up there.”
STRANGE PLACE
By Loren W. Christensen
In Section Four, “UFOs,” I wrote a chapter called “Close Encounters of the Second Kind,” which was about my experiences with UFOs on the edge of the Florida Everglades when I served there as a military policeman on an Army missile battery in the late 1960s. I encourage you to read that story first as it will make this one clearer.
As described in the “Close Encounters” piece, our headquarters’ compound�
��offices, sleeping quarters, chow hall, and rec room—were a mile down the road from what we called “down range”—a larger area that contained three huge missile barns, the dog kennels, an assortment of trailers and smaller buildings, and a ranch-style house where men could eat, sleep, and watch TV. For some unknown reason, my perceptions of the strangeness of the place never occurred in the headquarters’ area but only down range. There my acuities were rich indeed.
As an MP dog handler I worked at night. There were eight of us and we generally worked four man/dog teams per shift and patrolled the outer perimeter of the grounds in pairs, though at times we went out alone. The 10-acres had been carved out of the jungle, a terrible place densely populated with uncountable insects, slithering critters, little hairy animals, and ‘gators with wide, yawning jaws. Not a place for a city boy like me.
There were three other missile batteries in the Everglades and we would occasionally hear about one of them experiencing what paranormal investigators call a “full apparition.” As the name implies, this is a sighting of a complete or partial body of a ghost or spirit, which typically fades away as soon as someone sees it. The MPs at the other missile batteries reported seeing only the top half of an apparition, a woman. They said as soon as they shined their lights on it or turned on their vehicle headlights, the image dissolved. I never witnessed it, but it was a constant story batted around the entire year I was stationed in Florida.
The experiences at my battery were more about what we sensed and, on one occasion, how my dog acted, or rather, reacted.
To something unseen.
When we weren’t out patrolling, we hung out in a small brick blockhouse that was used during the day to sign people in before they were allowed into the missile area. But at night, we often took cover in it from the hoards of mosquitos and would shoot the breeze until it was our turn to take a lap around the perimeter. We would then walk about 100 yards to the kennels, retrieve our dogs, and head out. But sometimes that short walk through the thick darkness was fear provoking, especially strange because there was no tangible reason for it.
The feeling—and to reiterate it didn’t happen every time to me—was a combination of feeling watched, anxiety, hypervigilance, goose pimpled flesh, dread, and of intense anticipation. But why?
Because I was a big tough soldier who worked with attack dogs, I didn’t share my feelings with any of the guys because the ridicule would have been of biblical proportions. Or so I thought.
One night three other MPs and I were in the brick blockhouse talking about whatever young soldiers talked about when I made an observation about the spooky walk to the kennels. The room suddenly became quiet and all eyes were on me. Then, like a bursting dam, they all began talking at once.
“I knoooow.”
“I hate that walk.”
“Walk? I run.”
“I always keep my hand on my gun.”
No one had an explanation but all felt the strange atmosphere and admitted it frightened them.
Fritz, my 70-pound German shepherd, was trained to alert on people and discouraged to alert on animals. That was the idea, anyway. But eons of hunting for food are hard to drill out of a dog in eight weeks of training. When Fritz would alert on a human in the dark, he would lift his head high. If it were very dark out, I would bend down and look between his ears to detect the person he had spotted silhouetted against the sky. When he would forget his training and alert on an animal or snake, he would duck his head nearly to the ground.
The long stretch of unlit double-fenced area often gave me the creeps even when I was with Fritz, who was tough enough to shred the face off a bronze statue. One night the feeling was particularly intense as we patrolled alone on the backside of the compound. The darkness was dense with visibility no more than a few feet in any direction.
Fritz stopped. He didn’t lift his head or lower it, growl or bark, or give me any other kind of warning as he had done a hundred times before.
Instead, he sprang off the ground and slammed into my chest with all four feet.
I fell onto my back and because the leash was wrapped around my wrist, Fritz nearly ripped my arm out of my shoulder socket as he tried to yank himself free to bolt in the opposite direction.
I outweighed him by 120 pounds but that didn’t keep him from trying to drag me. I shouted “No!” repeatedly, as I pulled on the cyclone fence to get to my feet. Even after I had gotten up, Fritz continued his struggle to get away. Somehow, I managed to retrieve my flashlight from my belt clip and point a beam into the dark.
There was nothing there. Even the swamp outside the fence was still.
No way was I going to continue in that direction, even if Fritz would have let me, which he wouldn’t have. We half walked and half ran back to the corner, hung a right turn, and hurried along the width of the compound to the kennel shack. Only then did the feeling of being watched and … followed, dissipate.
It took a while before Fritz relaxed and was his usual cheerful attack-dog self. It took me a little longer, plus my chest hurt where he hit me.
Eight years later, I was out of the service and on vacation with a long layover at Miami International Airport. To kill time, I rented a car and drove out to the Keys and up the narrow, winding road to the missile battery. The headquarters was still fenced in but gone was the pristine military look of the place. Windows were broken, the exterior paint was flaking off, and weeds were everywhere. I drove on to where the missiles had been kept and found that area in the same condition. I got out of the car and walked over to the cyclone fence to get a closer look, which immediately drew the attention of two MPs.
I told them I had been stationed there for a year and wanted to check it out. They told me I was just in time because it was going to be torn down the very next day. They also told me I couldn’t come inside the fence. It was strange seeing it again and knowing it would soon be gone. Besides the experiences I’ve told here and in the chapter, “Close Encounters of the Second Kind,” I had normal experiences too that profoundly affected me.
I started to leave but decided, what the heck, I’ll ask them. I told them a little about the UFOs and the general creepiness of the place, and asked if they had experienced anything similar. They both nodded vigorously.
“Ooooh, yeah,” one of them said. “I’ll be glad to get out of this place. It’s weird here.”
“Very weird,” the other man concurred.
I understood them wanting to leave. The UFOs were the final straw for me when I served in the battery. I decided I could deal with the Vietcong, but this strange place was just too much.
I went into the First Sergeant’s office and volunteered to go to the war.
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY
By Steven R. Alva
In 1983, I was a young police officer finishing out my probationary period in Hollywood Division. The violence in Hollywood back then was such that you could go out for breakfast and have a bus boy run up to your table to say he just found dismembered body parts inside a dumpster out back. There was a constant plethora of runaway kids that came from all over the country “to be discovered,” only to become street urchins on Hollywood Boulevard, and then eventually disappear never to be heard from again.
If you drove from east to west on the famous street, you would see groups of female prostitutes standing on every corner and sellers of narcotics offering everything from heroin to hashish to speed. Santa Monica Boulevard wasn’t any better, with male prostitutes strolling the street cruising for customers. Overseeing this circus from high up in the hills were the very rich and very famous.
It was a fast-paced division, and I learned much from the senior officers, many of whom worked those streets all of their careers. This made for some really good cops with highly developed street smarts and intuition. I have always felt lucky I was able to work with them.
As crazy as this atmosphere was, one night we got a radio call we would never forget.
It was around 3:30 a.m. and
my partner and I were working 6Adam15 when dispatch gave us a code-30 audible at Forest Lawn Cemetery. We were told there were listening devices inside the main building and the alarm company could hear talking and banging.
Forest Lawn Cemetery is located on the very edge of Hollywood Division, next to Studio City. Its private street is poorly lit and there have been many bad traffic accidents there.
We turned off our lights as we approached to not give away our arrival, parked a short distance away from the building, and began moving toward it on foot. We proceeded slowly, visually clearing the grounds of anyone hiding or waiting for us, a task made difficult since the cemetery grounds were unlit. But why would they put lights in a cemetery, anyway?
The building in question looked to be an old, two-story American colonial structure. I would learn later that the bottom floor was a chapel, and the second floor contained a display room and a prep area where the deceased were dressed and made up before being laid out in their coffins.
Another two-man unit arrived to cover us. They watched the front door while my partner and I checked the building’s perimeter looking for signs of forced entry. We didn’t find any.
Dispatch: "6Adam15, be advised the alarm company can hear loud talking inside the location right now."
"We’re outside of it,” I replied, “It appears to be locked. Have security meet us here with the keys."
No sooner had I said that than the security officer appeared out of the darkness, his eyes large with … fear? I told him we had received a radio call of a possible burglary with noises heard inside the structure. When I said we would like to go in and clear the place of suspects or see if there was indeed a crime committed, he thrust the keys at me instead of opening the door for us. I must have looked surprised because he said something that I didn’t understand—but I would in a few minutes.
Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers Page 9