Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Archive for the ‘Ghosts and Hauntings’ Category

A YouTube clip of Oregon’s haunted coastal places.

One of my favorite places to walk around here is the Masonic cemetery. It’s an old cemetery with a lot of local history, and a group of volunteers that work very hard to preserve the integrity of the cemetery (plant life, trails, history, signs, grave markers, etc.) and keep it available to the public. There is a mausoleum as well, which is open to the public once a month. We went up there today to walk around.

I took a lot of photographs and even brought my recorder along in case I was lucky enough to get any EVPs (which didn’t happen. I did feel two slight “buzzy” feelings I get when in the presence of spirits, but didn’t feel that when I was inside the mausoleum, though I did get that feeling very strongly during the opening and dedication of the mausoleum a few years ago.) One odd thing happened when we saw this grave; we were both struck by the lovely simplicity of the marker and the grave.

Jim sitting on bench at grave marker

I joined Jim and we were sitting there, talking about how nice a spot it was, how we both liked the marker and the appearance of a natural piece in that setting. I started to take pictures of the marker when this happened:

I said “Look what’s happening to the camera” and the images in the window were going crazy with color and jumping around. It isn’t just that the images turned out this way, while I was just holding the camera the images in the window were jumping around and I couldn’t make it stop. I just started taking pics anyway to see what, if anything, would happen.

Here’s the same marker appearing normally

Possibly supernatural experience, who’s to say. But it could also be a camera glitch. It’s a cheap camera, and if you notice in the first photo of Jim, the flowers seem almost psychedelic in color. Camera on its last legs, or spirit communication. Either way nice effect.

This issue has been going on for a long time. Triangle Lake is not far from where I live; it’s only about twenty minutes away or so. For years, the residents in the area have been fighting this, as in other communities in my county as well as Oregon in general. From KVAL:

TRIANGLE LAKE, Ore. – Some residents are calling it an environmental horror story, and on Thursday they got the chance to voice their concerns to the state and federal governments.

Nearly 150 people packed the Grange Hall in Triangle Lake on Thursday night after more than 20 residents say their urine tested positive for dangerous pesticides.

It’s ugly. The meeting was called by “…state and federal agencies…” in order to potentially address the poisoning of an entire community:

In response to years of complaints, state and federal agencies held the meeting to lay out a plan for investigating any possible pesticide exposure. lay out a plan for investigating any possible pesticide exposure.

The article cited here doesn’t mention that residents paid for, out of their own pockets, the testing that proves they’ve been exposed. As one resident said

“One hundred percent of us tested positive for the two most dangerous timber industry pesticides in our urine, and we’re not happy about it,” said Dale Day.

I find it incredible — but not surprising — the agencies are only now just beginning to listen. Maybe, sort of.

Speaking of the Triangle Lake area, it is a very weird area in general. Only speaking for myself, and Jim, we have both felt immediate, oppressive and (for lack of a better word) haunted vibes when driving through there. There’s something about the area that literally feels, on a physical level as well as psychological and emotional, that there is an unseen presences about. I remember one drive out there to look at a house for sale; it sounded like everything we wanted; domed, a few structures, a couple of acres, near water… and the asking price was reasonable. But we couldn’t even get our of the car to look, the further in we drove, the worse this feeling got. We turned around and left. I’ve felt this very time i’ve gone out to the area.

I’m not suggesting this weird feeling has anything to with pesticides. And I realize many people love the area. Only speaking for myself.

Dealing with the feds in this case, I have no idea how this will turn out, but I hope it will turn well for the residents in the area. There’s a bit of hope; field burning was banned and I was convinced that would never happen. It was a long, long fight and an ugly one, but finally, we won on that one.

When we first moved into our house, built in 1927, there were some definite remnant energies. I wouldn’t say the house was haunted, exactly, but we both felt strong imprints of previous owners. Oddly, the strongest feeling was fairly recent, rather than decades ago. Just not a healthy feeling. And for many years, there was always a negative feeling emanating from the backyard at night. I often felt silly, because it was just a backyard, medium sized, and fenced; nothing out of the ordinary about it. Why in the world would I feel such a strong creepy feeling every time I went outside at night? After many years, the feeling seemed to have dissipated, but it’s still there on occasion.

Overall, through the years, things have calmed down — not that they were ever exceptionally vivid, as with other haunted places I’ve been in — and nothing has happened for some time. Until the past couple of weeks. Little things, like knowing damn well I put something someplace, and then, it’s gone. And then, a few moments later, it’s back. Happened again this morning; my glasses were not there on top of my computer, which irritated me, since I knew I had put them there the night before. (It’s where I always put them at night.) Look around, thinking they fell on the floor or whatever, look back to the laptop, and there they are. That kind of thing has been happening a lot recently. I wondered why this, and a few other odd little things would be happening again after many years of calm.

Then I realized: we decided to devote ourselves into redoing our house. Not “remodeling” (too poor and house too funky for that) but lots of work, interior and exterior. Due to finances and health issues, we’ve ignored our house, inside and outside, and finally decided to direct our energies to fixing this place up. Two weeks ago we started with the roof — whole thing completely redone. Lots of yard work, cutting back old brush and taking out shrubs and all kinds of stuff. We’ve been very active in this house recently, as far as fixing it up. So it occurred to me that it’s possible all this activity has stirred things up on the other side.

It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses, if at all.

From Jason Offut at From the Shadows: Time Slip in Oregon, about one couple’s experience at the beautiful Edgefield resort in Troutdale, Oregon. This is one of several hotels, pubs, and resorts operated by the McMennimen brothers, who also put on the McMinnville UFO Fest every May.

I’ve been attending the UFO Fest for every year for the past five years; and we spent a wonderful weekend at Edgefield’s some time ago. At the time, we didn’t know that the place has a reputation for being haunted, but we surely felt haunty vibes while there, particularly on the floor where the dorms were. Very strong.

Found the following story on the Unsolved Mysteries site. This was posted in October of 2006: True story from Pendleton, Oregon….eerie! Story goes: woman has flat tire while driving highway at night, stops to fix it, strange man looms before her, she awakes  later to find. . .

Yachats, OR 2010 photo by Regan Lee

My new Trickster’s Realm column is up at Binnall of America. Here’s an excerpt, for more, visit BoA!

Some eerie and strange things have been happening on the Oregon coast these past few weeks. While mostly mundane in nature,there’s an aura of weirdness about these events. Climate change, global warming, weather patterns, the aftermath of BP’s disaster in the Gulf, toxins in the ocean, and general earth rage-madness have come together, sending us signals that things are very wrong, and very different from what we’ve known. Things are wilder, more chaotic, sadder, and stranger. Warnings and omens that are wake-up calls to be sure.

Tillamook

A November 6th item in local news: Oregon crabbers in the Tillamook area are facing a dangerous season, more so than the usual: Dangerous crab season puts rescuers on alert Tillamook has a history of wildness; dangerous ocean, haunted waters, the deaths of men fighting the rough ocean while building the Tillamook Lighthouse in 1880. Native American legends of the area tell of spirits in the water and haunted underwater/underground tunnels. The lighthouse is now privately owned, but that hasn’t stopped the tragic and haunted history, for it became a columbarium. But, even that is not entirely true, according to Our Oregon Coast website:

After interring about 30 urns, the columbarium’s license was revoked in 1999 by the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board and was rejected upon reapplication in 2005. The board said the owners have not kept accurate records and, because urns sit on boards and concrete blocks and not in niches, the lighthouse does not even qualify as a columbarium.

As for the crabbers in the Tillamook area, fishermen know of the dangers and that’s not news, but the danger has been escalating:

We’ve lost a lot of boats,” said Mike Saindon, master chief petty officer in Garibaldi. “It is a very dangerous place and it has been for awhile. Conditions are bad and they have been getting worse over the years. No one knows why that’s happening.”The Tillamook Bay bar — the place at the tip of the jetties where the calm bay waters meet the sea — has been growing progressively worse for about 20 years.

“Traditionally when you get a lot of water flowing it clears the channels out,” said Saindon. “That isn’t happening here. The sand builds up on the bar and causes waves to break more frequently and in a larger area. That creates a larger surf zone and not a clear channel.”

Bob Welch is a columnist for the Register-Guard, Eugene-Springfield area’s local newspaper. It’s a mainstream column; Welch likes sports a whole lot, and writes about so-called human interest type stories in the area. He isn’t out there at all, (I remember a column he wrote some years ago where he made insipid fun of Bigfoot witnesses, yuck yuck) so it’s that kind of thing.

He had an little moment of synchronicty the other day which inspired him to ask readers to share their interesting odd moments involving synchronicty.(Mysterious, magical or just weird? ) In his recent column Mysterious, eerie events remembered
he shares some of those responses. My favorites: the story about feral cats in Hawaii, and the coach in Harrisburg who had a ghostly encounter with his mother.

Not to pick on Welch (though I’m not a fan particularly) but in another column, as well as a very different kind of column, he writes about a wild game feast in Potluck’s food is, well, a little wild At no point during the article does he address the ethical issues; it’s simply a golly gee kind of piece about, in a surreal juxtaposition, a local country church’s annual game meat fest:

The setting is beautiful, quintessential Americana, a white church steeple rising into the sky amid trees, fields and rolling hills about five miles northwest of Monroe.

The dress is primarily, well, camouflage.

And the décor is what I’d call country fish & game: guns, pelts, poles, antlers, traps, duck decoys and two giant elk mounts, including emcee Scott Ballard’s world-record “8 by 9” Roosevelt elk — eight points on one side of the rack, nine on the other.

After the prayer, we head through the kitchen to go through the potluck line.

The whole scene is bizarre; prayer, camouflage, dead animals on the walls as well as on plates, and the contrast between the country and the gun toting hunters.

Among the food offered: bear, bison, wild cow soup, Nutria, elk, and lemon pepper cougar. And among the door prizes for the event: waterproof Bibles.

Alien Art Genre: Drawings, paintings, and other artistic renderings of aliens, entities, UFOs, and other strange things experienced — whether literally or by inspiration — by creative witnesses. If you have an image to submit, email Regan Lee at rlee@orangeorb.net with image, medium, title and brief description (direct sighting or encounter, inspired by _____, etc.)