With a chill in the air and Halloween around the corner, there is no denying that the scariest time of the year is here for Oregon. While some will be celebrating the season by shopping for costumes, decorating their homes and stocking up on candy, others will be trying to experience the scares firsthand.
Broadly, so-called dark tourism is a $32 billion industry and includes many ghost tour companies across the country. Portland is no stranger to ghost tours, with a history going back decades.
Tanya March is the owner and tour guide of Slabtown Tours. Marina Martinez-Bateman is the owner of Hawthorne Ghost Tours. They both join us to share more about some of Portland’s haunted sites. We’ll also be taking your calls to hear your spooky stories and unexplained happenings. Our number is (888) 665-5865.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. With a chill in the air and Halloween around the corner, it is officially spooky season. With that in mind, we are taking a break today from the daily drip of news and politics to hear some of your ghost stories.
We’re joined this hour by the owners of two Portland-based tour companies that take visitors through the city’s haunted sites. Tanya March, who has a Ph.D. in urban studies, is the owner and tour guide at Slabtown Tours. Marina Martinez-Bateman is the owner of Hawthorne Ghost Tours. Marina and Tanya, welcome to both of you.
Tanya March: Thanks.
Marina Martinez-Bateman: Yeah, thanks.
Miller: Over the weekend, we asked folks to leave us voicemails with their ghost stories. We got some great ones. I thought we could start right in with one of them. This is Bob from Portland.
Bob [caller voicemail]: I was conducting a property condition assessment, a PCA, on a large property in Washington County. There were two houses on the property. One was a bizarrely remodeled house that happened to be the scene of a murder of a young woman by the property owner. Two of us did that site survey because it was quite creepy.
The second house was the murderer’s mother’s. Two-story, 1940s, totally empty and clean. I did this by myself. I’m on the first floor and I hear the distinct sound of someone walking the length of the second floor in high heels, and it was, “Click, click. Click, click. Click, click. Click, click.” I shouted, “Is anybody here? I’m just inspecting the property. Everything’s OK.” No answer.
I have inspected horrible places. I was convinced of what I heard. I actually called my office, talked to my boss to tell him what happened, and then I’m going to go upstairs. I go upstairs, the windows are shut, closets are empty. No one was there. I mean, the sound was so distinct, it was like a Foley artist had done it. I still don’t know what went on that afternoon.
Miller: Bob, thank you for that call.
Tanya, as I mentioned, you have a Ph.D. in urban studies. When did you start doing ghost tours?
March: Mike Ryerson and I started doing tours of Nob Hill and Slabtown, as part of the Slabtown Festival, to bring back the name Slabtown. I said, “Why don’t we just do some ghost tours around Halloween?” And he’s like, “You do that if you want.” I talked to Lisa over at Peculiarium, and they used to offer it only two weeks a year. About three or four years ago, I read some Reddit posts, and I realized that I just assumed people would call me if they wanted [it] more often. So a year ago, I even started offering them in daytime. Who wants to take a night with ghosts during the day? But apparently a lot of people don’t like to drive in the dark who like ghosts. I never knew that. So my 5 o’clock tour started really bumping with a different demographic.
Martinez-Bateman: Nice.
March: I was just thinking about that call-in just now. I was like, good thing we don’t have a seller’s disclosure clause on ghosts, right? But if there was a murder, then you’d have to disclose that.
Martinez-Bateman: You have to disclose a murder.
March: You don’t have to disclose ghosts.
Martinez-Bateman: No. I mean, then every single building and like most of Portland would be seller’s disclosure ghosts, right? We’re a very haunted city.
Miller: What makes you say that, Marina?
Martinez-Bateman: I think part of it is just the ambience and how rainy we are, how much we have … I mean, it’s not rainy today. But in general, we’re sort of rainy, gloomy. We have a lot of big trees, a lot of foliage. I feel like ground cover and that sort of natural world encroaching on the city makes us way more permeable in a lot of ways, not just to the natural world but also to the supernatural world. And also, just walking around Portland, people know I have a ghost tour. They tell me their ghost stories all of the time. Just about everyone has a ghost.
Miller: It’s like if somebody writes about dreams, then people tell that person their dreams. You become a magnet for ghost stories.
Martinez-Bateman: Oh yeah, people are so excited to tell me about their ghost stories, because a lot of times, a ghost story is not something that someone else wants to hear. Some people are genuinely put off by it. They won’t, like me, lean in, ask follow up questions, speculate about what’s going on. I get really into it. So it’s really exciting to share ghost stories with me because I’m so engaged.
Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail in the meantime. This came from somebody who did not leave their name.
Anonymous [caller voicemail]: In the ‘70s, my mom believed in ghosts. She had us convinced that there was a ghost living in our house. She actually had a medium-type lady come into our house and tell us that it was a poltergeist, a loud and friendly ghost. So all kinds of just unexplained things would happen in the house: cupboards opening and closing, loud noises, this and that.
We were pretty freaked out by it all, so we moved to a different house. The movie “Poltergeist” came out, and my mom said, “No matter what you kids do, when you go to the theater, just don’t go and see the ‘Poltergeist.’” Well, of course, my brother and I went and snuck in and saw the “Poltergeist,” and we were so terrified. I had to have been about 7 or 8. My brother was a hormonal teenage boy who was so scared by the “Poltergeist,” he slept in the same bed as his mom and little sister for three months [laughs]. I think my brother was in seventh or eighth grade. Different spooky things that have happened, but that story, I think, is just the absolute funniest.
Miller: Tanya, one of the things that stands out there is, as I hear it, the desire to be scared. I mean, there’s also this forbidden fruit here. The mom says, “Don’t see this movie. It’ll scare you.” And then the kids immediately go to it, and then they are freaked out; maybe more so because they had felt like they experienced some version in their own earlier house. How much do you–
March: So they’re believers to start with.
Miller: Yeah. How important do you think that is?
March: That’s good because you’ve been indoctrinated in that culture, in that belief system. They go and see a movie about developers building on a Native American graveyard. I think I scare people a lot when I talk about Central Catholic High School because someone was shot in Slabtown. And their ghost is seen walking all the way to what used to be St. Mary’s Cemetery, which is now Central Catholic. That’s why the kids at Central Catholic called the football field “The Boneyard.” We wanted that cemetery across the river … What is left is the pioneer Lone Fir, the Catholic graves were removed and put up in Calvary. I started talking to that, and if you’ve got someone from Central Catholic, they’ll start telling you all the stories about the ghosts at Central Catholic High School.
Miller: How would you describe your research approach, Tanya, when it comes to ghost stories, as somebody who is deeply interested in research, archives and documentary evidence?
March: I’ve spent more time researching Ernest Harps than I spent on my thesis at Columbia University in historic preservation.
Miller: Who is Ernest Harps?
March: Ernest is on Marina’s shirt.
Martinez-Bateman: There he is. Loud and proud.
Miller: He looks like a sweet boy there.
March: Yeah, in 1909, there were hundreds of witnesses to a paranormal phenomena on Marshall Street, between 16th and 17th. The police had to come and actually empty out the house. I’m researching, and I’ve read a lot of Stephen King books, so I didn’t realize at first that we were dealing with a poltergeist. I thought I was dealing with like a Carrie or a Firestarter, someone who had abilities. I didn’t realize that children at a certain age can be more susceptible to “demon possession.”
Martinez-Bateman: Big air quotes around that, if you can’t see.
March: He gets moved to the hotel where his mom works because that’s where she was living. He’d been living with his grandparents. And mom did what moms always do when they want to have control over the kids. They said, “No dessert. You can’t have dessert tonight.” And his little poltergeist playmate serves a piece of lemon pie over 26 people eating at the hotel.
And then the mother has a nervous breakdown. We have Dr. Gilbert. I’ve read all of the files on Dr. Gilbert. He wrote medical journals on Ouija boards and many other things, and they’re at the Oregon Historical Society. He has letters from Carl Jung, Arthur Conan Doyle. I mean, this is a repository of boxes because he worked at OHSU. He was a medical doctor with a Ph.D. He goes before the medical board and asks to do a vivisection on the little boy. That’s the only time my Latin that I took in school ever worked, besides my SAT scores.
Miller: That’s looking into somebody’s insides while they’re still alive?
March: Yes, that’s what he asked the medical board for permission to do. So, I just start using ancestry, newspapers, archival records... COVID allowed me to do a lot more than what I would need to do for a tour, and I’ve started going to ghost conferences. So I can have that longer amount of time to tell these narratives.
Miller: Let’s listen to a part of your tour. I should say that our producers went on both of your tours recently. I want to play a short excerpt from the Ernest Harp part of that recent tour. Let’s have a listen to part of what you said.
March [recording from tour]: So I’ve got some witness statements of what this little boy did:
“I went over to Saunders’ home today. I was working near there when the neighbors heard the commotion and investigated. I went right in the house. The family did not seem frightened. Mr. and Mr. Saunders and their grandson were in the rear rooms. I myself saw the chairs turn upside down, and a boiler of water sitting on the stove began to rise slowly and turn over onto the floor, spilling the water. I saw the dishes sweep off the sink in great piles and break into small pieces, and great heavy articles of furniture moving about.”
“I can’t explain it. All I know is the devil is in the boy! He’s a medium and so full of electricity, or whatever you may call it, that his presence sets things amoving. I noticed that today. I saw two chairs clapped together as quick as a flash when he passed them, and the telephone dropped as he walked by through the hall. But the funny thing about it is he did not have to be close as things fell and crashed, and ran around upstairs when the boy was downstairs.”
OK. What’s going on at first is an absolute freak out about electricity.
Miller: So that’s your read of this, that this started as a freak out about new technology?
March: Yes. Portland is the first city to receive long distance transmission of electricity in the United States. It was a direct current from Oregon City, from the Willamette Falls. When the Harps-Saunders-Perry family arrives in 1906, that’s the beginning of a huge population boom where we tripled the population. After the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exhibition and Oriental Fair of the Pacific Northwest – I am not using the not historically accurate word for that event – [was] a 137-day event [that] causes this huge population. Most people who arrived in Portland have never seen electricity. We don’t have New York City walk-up buildings. We’re not a gaslight city. We had power really early, and people thought that electricity was evil. There’s articles about it, the way we talk about AI now.
Martinez-Bateman: 5G.
March: Yeah.
Miller: Right. Or wireless signals, 10 years ago.
March: At first, the child is presented as an innocent victim who had been exposed to electricity. Preachers on Sunday service were preaching that we can’t have our kids around electricity because it’s going to make it so they can move things without the impact of gravity anymore.
Miller: Let’s take some calls. Stephanie has called in from Portland. Stephanie, go ahead.
Bethany [caller]: I’m Bethany.
Miller: Bethany, sorry.
Bethany [caller]: Yeah, that’s fine. I just want, first off, to start by saying I’m not afraid of ghosts and spirits. I think that they’re mostly very nice, and I’ve felt them at other times in my life. But I did the Shanghai Tunnels Tour at the insistence of my brother and sister-in-law when I was pregnant. I didn’t feel really anything while we’re on the tour, but that night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I was completely paralyzed. I couldn’t move, and I felt the presence of evil in my room. I really felt this malevolent, terrifying presence. I had to mentally just shout at it and say, “No, you’re not welcome here! Leave now.” And then I felt fine after that.
I’ve never had that experience before, and I hope to never have it again. But I do think most spirits are here to be friends with us.
Miller: When you say you feel like most spirits are here to be friends with us, what makes you say that?
Bethany [caller]: I just, in general, believe more in good than evil. I don’t normally feel bad, scary things. But that was an experience that I’d never had before where I felt just something really frightening to me.
Miller: Bethany, thanks very much for that call.
Let’s take another call from Cam, and let’s see if this phone line works. Cam, are you there?
Cam [caller]: From Southeast Oregon.
Miller: Great, go ahead. You’re calling from Southeast Oregon.
Cam [caller]: Yeah, this is Cam calling. I was a caretaker at the Dosch Estate. Henry Dosch – very important in Portland history, very involved with the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Northwest Portland. And this was their summer home. I was invited to be a caretaker there for about a year. I was told that there’s activity in this house because it was filled with all their original furnishings, two Steinway grand pianos from the ‘20s. It was amazing. Copper wrapped up everything.
So my first night: It’s early June, and I’m sleeping on hair mattresses on their German-carved headboard bed. It’s the only time in my life this has happened to me. It was first light, and I’m in a deep sleep, and I see the color red as I come to consciousness. I hear the sound, distinctive sound … We’re on 11 acres there. It’s very quiet. I hear the sound of leather-soled boots moving very methodically across this large bedroom, past the bed and through the door, and then taking a hard left and walking down the stairs to the landing. I took it as a welcome call.
But I had numerous experiences there in the year that I lived there that confirmed and dispelled my rationalist background with a scientific father, and said, ‘so this is what it’s like.’ I also saw ripples, colored ripples through the air, sitting in the living room, not under the influence of anything. I heard piano notes. The last person to live in that house was married to the last Dosch. He actually played duets with my grandmother who was a concert pianist. Anyway, I heard piano notes. I’d just gotten back from Eugene playing a concert in Eugene. It was late night, and floating piano notes over the French door out to the balcony.
There were just many of these experiences. I never saw anything beyond the ripples through the air. I heard plenty. We’re talking about a house that was loaded with all the original possessions. Eventually, they had to sell off a lot of the land because the zoning changed. It’s now on the National Register, and it was a cultural center actually for Portland in the very early days.
So that’s my story. I have no question about another dimension of reality any longer.
Miller: Cam, thank you very much for that call. That was Cam calling from Southeast Oregon.
Andrew, let’s try this again. Andrew has called in from Milwaukie. Andrew, go ahead.
Andrew [caller]: All right, yeah, thanks so much. So I, personally, have never really experienced anything with ghosts before. But growing up, my best friend was my next door neighbor, and her dad had always said that he was very kind of attuned to ghosts, the supernatural and things like that. So one time, her parents and my parents went out to dinner together. We grew up in Gresham, and they decided to go to McMenamins Kennedy School in Northeast Portland. So they went there and they walked in to have dinner. Her dad was immediately like, “I can’t stay here. I can feel ghosts everywhere.” It just made him really uncomfortable, and they just had to turn around, walk out and find somewhere else to eat.
Miller: Is that something that he would regularly say or there was something specific about the Kennedy School in his telling?
Andrew [caller]: This is just always the memory that stuck out to me with regards to that. But I know that there had been other instances, I just can’t think of any that come to mind. But I think it was really about the abundance of spirits that he felt in that situation. So maybe it wasn’t just one, but it was many, and that’s always what kind of stuck out to me.
Miller: Andrew, thanks very much.
Michael has called in from Portland. Michael, go ahead.
Michael [caller]: Oh, hi. Yeah, I work at the Rimsky-Korsakoffee House in Southeast Portland. I’ve been working here for decades. When I first started working, it wasn’t as busy as it [is] now. We used to have the Church of Craft set up here on Sundays. In the holiday season, they would have a craft bazaar. So one of my coworkers asked if I could come in and watch the bazaar. It was in one of the rooms upstairs, across from the bathroom.
I said sure. I came in. It was like a really stormy night in December. I just grabbed a Willamette Week, and I went upstairs and had some coffee. I just sat up there for, I don’t know, like an hour. No one had come upstairs to even use the bathroom. So I was kind of getting bored. I got really into this article, and then I got a whiff of gardenia perfume. I was like, ooh, somebody classy is coming in. My grandmother used to wear that [laughter]. I heard footsteps, like high heel shoes, on the wood floor. I was enmeshed in my article, and I just said, “Hi, if you have any questions, let me know.” And I hear the chair to my left scoot across the floor, and then I hear, at the same time, the table to my right jerk.
I put the paper down and looked around. And no one is there. I look, and there was a display stand of jewelry and it was swinging back and forth, like somebody had taken their hand across it. I just looked at that, and I go, “let me get a price check,” and I threw the paper down. It was all “sweets don’t fail me now,” and I ran [laughter]. I flew down the stairs. I kicked open the door to the kitchen, and I was white. I looked at my coworkers, and I just said, “Ghost!” And they didn’t even bat an eyelash. They were like, “Oh, that’s probably just Eva.” And I was like, “Who?”
We’re the second owner of this house that was built in 1902. The owner, Goody Cable, she bought it after Eva Graves had passed away in her 90s. They had an estate sale here. And she’d had a dream about this place. She’s been looking for years for a cafe or a house to start a cafe, and she’d kind of given up. Then she had a dream that this woman was showing her around this beautiful house, and they’re like, this would be perfect. Look at all this space. You can have the piano. Two weeks later, she was driving down the street. She looked over and she had deja vu. Deja Vu, [singing] could this be a dream that I–
Miller: [Laughs] Michael, we’re running up against a break, but let me just ask you a quick question before we have to say goodbye and take a quick break: Which is, have you gone back up there? You freaked out. You ran downstairs. Your coworkers said, ‘oh yeah, sure, we know that ghost.’ But have you been back up?
Michael [caller]: Oh yeah. It initially freaked me out, like there was someone there but there wasn’t. But it wasn’t menacing at all. It was very benevolent. It just startled me. There’ve been other incidents where staff have seen or heard things. A month later, I was in the kitchen and one of my coworkers couldn’t come, so I asked a friend to come in and help me. We were talking, and then she was looking past me, and I said, “Hello, what are you doing?” And she’s like, “Sorry, I just saw two little girls standing behind you at the door of the basement.” I was like, “My bike’s down there!” [Laughter]
That’s when I found out about the sisters, Eva and Norma, who grew up here, and they lived their whole lives and then they passed away.
Miller: Michael, I bet we could talk for the whole hour, but I want to leave room for other folks. Thank you very much for calling in.
Linda has called in from Tualatin. Linda, go ahead.
Linda [caller]: Hi. It’s about 40 years ago. I was living in an old duplex in Southeast Portland, a 1900s building, and one night awoke to seeing a ghostly, almost sort of a caricature of a ghostly figure looking out the window next to my bed. It was sort of cloudy, like that classic ghost appearance. But it was definitely a man in profile with a hat and overcoat, sort of like the 1940s, looking out the window. That was sort of scary, but just happening. I can’t remember now, because it’s been so long, if it was that moment or the next night I woke, and he turned and swooped down so that his face was right in front of mine, as if you were trying to figure out a–
Miller: Linda, not sure what happened to the swoop. Linda, are you still there?
Linda [caller]: I’m still here. I’m sorry, I started to hear myself back. So, yeah, he swooped down and looked right close in my face. I was feeling like, maybe he was trying to figure out if I was the person he meant to haunt. That was very scary, but then he just disappeared.
I didn’t see him again, but over the next couple of weeks, I felt a presence several times when I came into my house. I sort of called out to him and asked him to please not come back, because it was very disturbing.
Miller: After it happened, after you said ‘please don’t come back, I didn’t enjoy that,’ did you experience more events like that?
Linda [caller]: You know, I can’t recall exactly. I mean, it did stop, but whether it stopped right after I asked, I don’t know. After I saw him, I checked in with my family who’s far away to see if anything bad had happened to anyone in the family. I thought maybe that’s why a spirit was coming to see me, but no, nothing was going on. I asked other people living in the duplex, the people upstairs, if they knew of any of the history of the building, but I couldn’t find anything out. So I don’t know what it was or why it happened.
Miller: Linda, thanks very much for that call. I appreciate it. Your call reminded me of a voicemail that we got from Rachel from Portland. Let’s have a listen to this.
Rachel [caller voicemail]: I bought a house several years ago. When I bought the house, down in the basement were partially-built walls with weird black lace curtains hanging down from them. In a couple of places, there were actually hooks in the ceilings. They weren’t like meat hooks or anything that thick because I don’t think I would have bought the house. But anyway, it was weird.
I finished the basement. I remodeled the basement as an apartment. There was a time when I had a young woman staying with me. She came up and said that the lights were flickering on and off just randomly. She would turn them off – she knew it – and she would find them on at another time. So I thought, well, that’s weird, and honestly, I didn’t believe her initially. She was actually really scared. She was spooked out.
She was going away for the weekend, and I asked her if I could do a little test. So sure enough, when she was gone, I turned the lights all off, and then I went down there each day to see if they were on. And the first day, they weren’t on or anything. But at one point during that period when she was gone they were on. I turned them off, then checked another couple of days, and they were turned on again.
So, when I was down there turning them off, I said, “If there’s anybody listening, please, you’re frightening the young lady that’s staying here. Please don’t turn the lights on and off because it’s scaring her. You’re welcome in my house as long as you don’t scare the people that I care about.” [I] kind of chuckled to myself and then went about my business. They never went on and off again after that [laughs].
Miller: Marina, I’m curious what stands out to you so far in the calls that we’ve heard?
Martinez-Bateman: I mean, I think it’s similar to what I was talking about earlier, about how we’re a very ghosty city. We’re also just very ghosty people, the people who live here in Portland.
Miller: You mean, we’re open to ghosts?
Martinez-Bateman: Yes. We’re a lot more likely to, say, talk to a ghost in our house, even if we think of ourselves as very rational.
March: Ghost negotiations going on on these calls.
Martinez-Bateman: Yeah, we’re going to be like, “Hey, so ghost. It’s really cool that you’re here and all, and we love that, but you’re scaring my tenant. Could you just like cool it?”
Miller: It does seem very Portland.
Martinez-Bateman: It feels very Portland to be like, “We’re so happy you’re here and also, like, don’t freak people out, man. Be cool.”
Miller: Let’s take another call. John has called in from Northeast Portland. John, go ahead.
John [caller]: Yes, hello, I’m a 61-year-old fella. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve been to a lot of places, a lot of danky Brooklyn basements, Spanish castles. I’ve always thought I’m gonna see a ghost somewhere there. But I’m currently living in a big house that’s being renovated, and I’m kind of the caretaker living here alone while the worker bees are gone after the daytime work. The first six months I was here, nothing really happened. But then one night, at 4 in the morning, [I’m] fast asleep, and I feel like someone [is] putting a quilt on top of my bed that I’m in. I’m like, ‘that’s funny, I’ve got all my quilts on the bed.’ And as I’m thinking that, I feel this warm amber glow kind of right behind my shoulder, because I sleep on my side. It felt like someone was in bed with me spooning me.
As soon as I woke up, I was like, what’s going on here? It just disappeared. But it happened like 10 times and it was very benevolent. I did end up starting, when I wake up, I’d pull up my mouth guard. I’d say, “Hey, who are you? What are you doing? Are you in the house? Are you a friend?” I did once see an apparition right by the bed. It was a figure and it was kind of like magenta with melting mercury, and that’s the only kind of visual I saw of the spirit.
Miller: The spooning spirit.
Background Voice: That sounds beautiful.
John [caller]: The spooning spirit. [Laughter]
Miller: John, thank you very much for that call.
James has called in also from Northeast Portland. James, go ahead.
James [caller]: Hi, yeah, this is James. I was out at this coastal house that my wife and I enjoy to go to. I took my dog there, just me and the dog one day. It was a couple of weeks after the husband of the house had passed away. I didn’t think much of that, but I was sitting in a chair right by the stairs and reading a book at night. And my dog just planted herself at the bottom of the stairs, and was just staring up at the stairs, looking back at me and staring up at the stairs. And eventually, she got so freaked out, she ran over and jumped in my lap. She’s a 75-pound pit bull who never was a lapdog, and just wouldn’t leave my lap. She was so scared.
I went up there, and I turned on the lights, and I felt kind of eerie. I didn’t see anything, but the rest of the evening, I just sat in the chair with my dog who was just kind of trembling and very, very shaken. So I think he must have been up there.
Miller: James, thank you for that call.
Let’s listen to another voicemail. This is Candace from Portland.
Candace [caller voicemail]: My younger daughter went through chemotherapy for a brain tumor from the age of 1 to the age of 5. There’s some sort of like veil thinness or something that is with kids who are on chemotherapy. It’s so interesting, but it almost appears like a halo around them. They just seem to have this clarity and this connection to really heavy stuff: In life, and spirit, and even God, or whatever belief system that they are in. My daughter was completely nonverbal, and when her best friend passed, her little chemo boyfriend passed, he was 3 1/2 [years old]. One of the last things he told me was that he would always look after my daughter and he was worried about his parents. Those were his final thoughts at 3 1/2 [years old].
My daughter, for the next couple of weeks, would randomly throughout the day, start playing with something that we couldn’t see – laughing, dancing, giggling like she was being tickled. Playing, really seeing something. She would say his name. She was completely nonverbal, and she would say his name.
Then about two months after that, I had an uncle that passed from cancer. The same thing happened for about two weeks after my Uncle Joey died. My daughter would play with something that was there. She would be dancing, singing, laughing, absolutely engaging, and saying his name, which was Joey. Those are the only times she said a word, which is very interesting. She is an OSU graduate, by the way. And is 35 years old this year.
Background Voice: Wow, congratulations.
Miller: I’m curious – and I’d love to hear [from] both of you on this – Tanya, what do you think the ghost stories that we experience, that we remember or tell each other… What can teach us?
March: Well, one thing I was noticing that people are talking about is when a house is in transition.
Miller: So many. Moving into a new house or fixing it up.
March: “Beetlejuice” plays on that, right? You’re going to be sharing and cohabitating with the history that was in the house before you arrived.
Miller: And you’re more aware of it maybe when you first arrive before your own layer of living there has taken over. Even if you’re not even thinking about spirits.
March: Correct.
Martinez-Bateman: Yeah, you know that this hasn’t always been your house. And you’re starting a relationship with the house. When you start a relationship with anyone, you’re also starting a relationship with all the people they’ve been in a relationship with before.
Miller: What about the idea of ghosts as giving warnings to us? Does that come into the stories on the tours that you lead?
Martinez-Bateman: No, actually.
March: I’ve had people share with me stories of ghosts waking them up in the middle of the night, to only find out that the house is about to burn down – deep sleepers, when seconds matter. And [they] hire me to find out who woke them up. I get hired to do research on ghosts that have done a good deed, because they want to honor the person that saved their life or did something.
Martinez-Bateman: That’s so cool.
March: So it’s the same historic research I do for National Register of Nomination, but I’m doing it for a client who just wants to know their name and honor that spirit for helping them.
Miller: So you’re looking through genealogical stuff, newspapers or whatever. The client, in this case, wants to find out the name of a dead person so they can honor their ghost–
March: And say thank you appropriately.
Miller: But from your perspective, the work is still the plain old, same old history work.
March: Yeah, it’s the same work I would do when I put Darcelle’s house on the National Register. Or when I worked on the Peacock Lane project. It’s the same sort of work. It is challenging, because oftentimes when I get hired by clients for National Register, they’re talking about affluent buildings owned by people with money. When it comes to ghosts, oftentimes I’m trying to find renters. It’s more complex because the record is less fixed.
I did the Wilcox Mansion, which was a mansion, but they’d been a radio station. Can you imagine if you tried to figure out which of the people you’d interviewed was the ghost?
Miller: No, there have been thousands of people in your seat.
March: Right. So that’s a challenge. The Wilcox Mansion had been a radio station for years.
Miller: I mean, in general, I interview live people, but I take your point. [Laughter]
Stacey has called in from Rhododendron. Stacy, go ahead.
Stacey [caller]: Yeah, thank you. I have a story. I lived and grew up in Oregon City. One night – this is probably about 15 years ago – me and my boyfriend were completely asleep. It was 3 a.m. in the morning. We had two dogs with us. We were in my mom’s house. She was gone in Chicago. There was nobody else in the house. Nobody had access to the house except us. And we were woken up to the loudest running down the stairs, which was right next to my bedroom door. The dogs jumped up and were barking, and we panicked. We thought somebody had broken into the house, so I grabbed my phone and I was about to call 911.
We had a German shepherd, so my boyfriend just opened up the door and let him go out. We were expecting to hear some kind of violent interaction. He just slowly– [clicking noises]
Oh, can you still hear me?
Miller: Yes. Sorry, go on.
Stacey [caller]: OK. So he slowly went down and started drinking water, and we were both like, what? We were so confused because somebody was clearly violently running down the stairs, and it was a lot of stairs. So we started slowly going through the house, and we couldn’t find anything. We checked every door, every window. We were assuming somebody was hiding because it was so real and it had happened. We tried to go back to sleep, didn’t, but the next morning I called my mom and told her what had happened. And she was like, there’s been so much activity in this house. My mom was considering putting the house on the market.
We actually reached out to the paranormal group in Oregon City. They came out and they did an investigation in the house. We were there and they set up cameras. They did everything like the EVP and all the stuff you see on TV. Me and my mom stayed in there. It was 2 o’clock in the morning. I was sitting next to the stairs and we started asking questions. And all of a sudden, we heard footsteps again. It was very playful. And we started getting voices coming through the EVP.
Miller: For those of us who are less up on this, what is the EVP?
Stacey [caller]: I don’t honestly know that well, but it’s kind of like this radio frequency that’s moving very, very, very quickly through a radio signal, I guess, and it’s pulling words out. So all of a sudden, it started saying, “Mommy.” And it was calling out. “Mommy. Mommy, hungry. Mommy, food. Mommy lost.” And it kept going back to “Mommy.” It was like, oh my gosh, that was exactly the sound of like a little … Well, not little. It sounded large in the moment, but playful running down the stairs and then kind of this jump.
They did some research in the area and found there was some pretty horrible stuff that had happened in that housing development. On that land, it was pretty horrible stuff that had gone on. There was a lot of women and children. So anyway, all of the research kind of came together and they found that. Also, the paranormal group had found that there were a lot of little kid interactions and stuff happening during their research at our house.
Throughout the years that my mom had that house, we would have lights turn on and off, and then she also had these really creepy little dolls that I don’t know why she kept them. But they would move, and we would find them in little spots. So she ended up selling the house. But we had so many experiences there. It all kind of came down to like little kid stuff that was going on, but it was pretty scary and it freaked me out. I’ve never forgotten that experience. It stuck with me.
Miller: Stacey, thank you very much. And maybe it’s just as well that the house is no longer in the family. That was Stacey calling from Rhododendron.
Marina, Stacey didn’t give us the details of what happened, but the implication was some scary, grisly things–
Martinez-Bateman: Some very terrible things happened to some very innocent children.
Miller: How do you navigate real life happenings like that in the context of the tours that you give?
Martinez-Bateman: On our tour, because we’re very family friendly and we’re less invested in historical … I don’t do research. My research is ethnographic. It’s talking to everybody on the street, talking to people who’ve lived in the neighborhood, over and over and over. The stories we tell on the tour are the ones we’ve heard a bunch or that are already established in mythology. They’re in books, they’re on podcasts, stuff like that.
We have some terrible stuff that have happened to young people on the street. And how we deal with that is sometimes we don’t talk about that, because it is supposed to be a fun tour. But when we do talk about it or when people bring it up, one of the things we talk about is that, because of ghost stories, we can add endings to people’s real life stories. We have children who’ve been through something really terrible. And yet, because of this ghostly presence in this house, they can still run up and down the stairs. They can still jump off the last four stairs, even though their mom probably told them not to a million times. They can hang out with the dog, they can play with the dolls in the house. They can have these living childhood moments after their earthly life is over. They can still develop and grow, and be a presence here, even if they’ve been sort of taken from us too early.
Miller: William has called in from Oregon City. William, go ahead.
William [caller]: Thank you. My first ghost experience was when I was about 8 years old, and it was in Oregon City around the elevator. For people who don’t know, Oregon City has a vertical street.
Miller: The famous municipal elevator.
William [caller]: Yes. I was seeing this little boy that was about a year older than I was. He was 9, I was 8. A group of friends in that neighborhood asked who this little boy was and if he could play with us. And one of my friends said, “Oh no, that’s Carl Green. He’s dead. He died of typhoid.”
I found out 50 years later, when I was on a tour with Rocky Smith’s Northwest Ghost Tours, that it was actually a very famous little boy. He died from typhoid playing in the streams, because Oregon City’s water that flowed was deadly in those days. People had been seeing him for decades.
I wound up giving some ghost tours with Rocky’s tour company, and I actually had somebody on a tour see the little boy before I mentioned him. So, he was still peeking out. I’ve had lots of other experiences, but we don’t have time.
Miller: William, thank you very much for that one. Best to start maybe with the first one, the indelible one from when you were 8 years old. Thanks very much for that call.
I want to play one more voicemail. This is Maura from Vancouver.
Maura [caller voicemail]: My ghost story, or spirit story, is I was sitting in my living room by myself, watching TV with the lights out. And I had my glasses on. In the reflection of my glasses with the TV glare, there was a shadow figure of a man with a hat. I wasn’t scared, so I’m hoping it was a deceased relative. But my animals sitting on the couch with me also looked up behind me at the figure.
Miller: I’m curious, Tanya and Marina. Maybe Tanya first, just to put it simply, do you believe in ghosts?
March: [Laughs] Every time I’ve seen a ghost, I did not believe that it was a ghost when I saw it. It’s other people who’ve told me.
Miller: Every time you’ve … That’s an interesting way to put it. Every time you’ve seen a ghost, you didn’t believe it was a ghost, and other people who were also there or who you then told the story to said that was a ghost.
March: Like when I give a praise and blessing at church, I’m thankful that this good Samaritan helped me to only find out that person was dead when they helped me. I mean, it’s weird. I want to see ghosts so badly. And it’s like, what? Other people are like, ‘you’ve been there.’
Martinez-Bateman: It feels normal … I also have that experience. I’ve seen a ghost, and I’ll think I was dreaming. I used to play with my dead great grandmother when I was a child all the time. And I just thought, well, it was me trying to process the death of my great grandmother.
Miller: That’s you saying that now as an adult, or even at the time, you wouldn’t have said, ‘no, I’m playing with a ghost.’
Martinez-Bateman: I think, at the time, as a child, if someone had said, “but you’re just playing pretend, right,” I would be like, “yeah, sure.” Because what, to a child, is playing pretend versus playing with your friend, pretend? It’s not distinguishable.
Miller: It’s more porous, our experience of the world at that age.
Martinez-Bateman: That’s why we have so many children who see ghosts, or who tell us stories that later seem like ghostly stories. Or when people who have a lot of ghost experiences, the first time they see a ghost, they are like 8 – like with the guy in Oregon City. When you’re younger, the veil is thinner. A lot of grown up logic isn’t applicable to the way you see the world. I think it’s easier to look at the world with these really open, understanding eyes. So you see a little boy and you want to play with him, and it doesn’t really matter if he’s alive or dead.
Miller: Marina and Tanya, that is a great place to leave it: Not mattering if they’re alive or dead. Thank you so much. Marina Martinez-Bateman, owner and tour guide at Hawthorne Ghost Tours. Tanya March, owner and tour guide of Slabtown Tours. Thank you both.
March: Thank you.
Martinez-Bateman: Thank you.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
