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    Haunted Salem, Oregon
    Haunted Salem, Oregon
    Haunted Salem, Oregon
    Ebook166 pages1 hour

    Haunted Salem, Oregon

    By Tim King

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    About this ebook

    “Offers a glimpse into Salem’s complex, haunted history—murders, hangings, corruption—and provides a handful of ghostly tales.” —Statesman Journal
     
    Salem’s haunted tales date back to the 1830s, when indigenous tribes, trappers and homesteaders shared the lush Willamette Valley. Murders, hangings and dark underground passageways defined the city’s early days as the Willamette River moved old stern-wheelers up to the city’s docks. Today, the sounds of those phantom vessels can be heard plying along the river late at night. Oregon’s capital city has long been the site of mental hospitals, prisons and other notorious institutions, famously depicted in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The residual effects of decades of torture and depravity cling to the old facilities in both sight and sound. Author Tim King examines many of these chilling encounters along with eyewitness accounts of spirits that refuse to be quiet.
     
    “Tim King’s new book takes readers to the far west, investigating the hauntings and other supernatural and inexplicable occurrences still going on in Salem, Oregon, putting that city in the same category as old Salem, Mass. . . . A good read for Halloween or, for that matter, any other time of year when one is tempted to learn more about those strange occurrences that defy the laws of science and nature, and challenge our inner complacency.” —Salem-News.com
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 5, 2018
    ISBN9781439665220
    Haunted Salem, Oregon
    Author

    Tim King

    Tim King has been working with computers since the early 1980s, when he programmed games on his Commodore 64 computer and founded a computer club in his high school. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology in 1991. While there, he taught Unix and vi classes and was the leader of a rag-tag group of vi devotees called the "VI Zombies." Presently, Tim is a software consultant in San Francisco, CA, specializing in database and web technologies. His favorite activity is snowboarding, but he also enjoys photography and reading. You can reach him at kingt@verio.com

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      Book preview

      Haunted Salem, Oregon - Tim King

      PREFACE

      Ghosts were real to me as a child. I never doubted the possibility that somehow, some way, certain spirits become earthbound. Overwhelming at times, the subject captured my imagination and never let go.

      I like to describe my late parents as politically conservative people who were completely open minded to the idea of ghosts and the supernatural.

      Charles and Nellie King were fascinating people. They were married in 1941 and spent every day of their lives together, until the day they passed away together. Each had their own amazing stories. My brothers and I were raised with these tales; they were presented as true, and every single one was captivating and scary. My two older brothers, Ken King and Rick King, have always maintained an interest in the supernatural.

      My mom was born in Kansas, and that is where she spent her first twelve years before moving to Los Angeles in 1934. In Kansas, at the age of seven, when her parents divorced, my mom was sent to a Catholic boarding school. The stories from this period are riveting.

      She talked about a little girl who was very mysterious, a child who rarely spoke and had no friends. My mom was very shy and easily intimidated, so it is not surprising that my mom failed to reach out to the little girl. One night, my mom discovered something about that little girl. It was a mystery that she would never solve or adequately process.

      Late at night, getting up to go to the bathroom, my mom heard a ball bouncing in the school gymnasium. She may have been shy, but my mom was very curious, so she quietly walked downstairs and opened the gym door. She assumed, quite logically, that one or more of the kids were breaking the rules and having fun with a ball. But what she observed after opening the door defies all explanation.

      The little mystery girl was sitting in the middle of the gym floor with her legs folded, looking as if she was in a trance, my mom recalled. The little girl was repeating the words, Bounce ball bounce and a large ball was bouncing consistently about five feet in front of the child. As if that wasn’t enough to completely overwhelm my poor mom, the girl looked her straight in the eyes, and my mom said she just melted and ran back to her bed.

      Another night, in the same place, my mom got up very late to use the restroom when everyone was asleep. She was confronted by the ghost of a woman wearing all white. She said she screamed and ran back to the dormitory as fast as she could. It was later determined that the lady my mom saw was probably one of the nuns in a white nightgown, but she never got over it. Those moments were burned into my mom’s memory.

      While my dad was growing up, he had the unique fortune of spending a great deal of time on my family ranch in the Chino Valley of California. As a child, I had the same opportunity, though to a much lesser extent.

      My dad, who was born in 1917, was raised during the final years of the property being an active cattle ranch. I was raised with heaping amounts of family history and lore. Even today, my family ranch in Chino is still an active component of California history; it is a preserved state museum called the Yorba-Slaughter Adobe.

      One night, around 1931 or so, my dad and his good friend Tom Core were taking a midnight walk on the road that led to the adobe. Walking past the foundation of an earlier ancestor’s homesite, they saw a light in the sky illuminating a field.

      When my dad and his friend got closer, they saw that there was an undefinable object in the sky creating a circle of light about forty, possibly fifty feet in diameter. He said that if you stepped into the light, everything was like daylight. They heard no sound coming from whatever was generating the light, but they estimated the object to be about fifty feet in the air.

      There was never an explanation for what it was that they saw that night. An earlier look at family history reveals that in the 1870s, a cigar-shaped object that reportedly had people inside, waving to those they passed, flew through the Chino Valley and was witnessed by hundreds of people. While balloons certainly were flying for quite some time by the 1870s, longer airships, zeppelins and dirigibles would not debut for many years.

      My dad talked about an even stranger night that involved both he and his friend Tom. They were both around fourteen, taking another one of their midnight walks, when they looked over to the milk house and saw one of the ranch hands inside. They didn’t think too much about it.

      The next morning, at breakfast, my father and his friend described seeing the ranch hand, whose name was Tom, in the milk house. My dad’s uncle Hode angrily demanded to know what they were talking about. You know damned well milk houses don’t have windows. As it turned out, my dad and his friend could not possibly have seen a window or light, because the milk house was simply a concrete building, no way to see out or in. Yet they did. What forces or powers were at work that night?

      Another story that my mom always shared was about an extremely strange event one night in Northern California. She believed always that a Bigfoot or Sasquatch approached them when they were sleeping in their camper in an extremely remote location known for sightings of the creature.

      My mom and my oldest brother were awakened by a foul smell. They both recall that there had been cows near them when they went to sleep, and the cowbells were audible and even a relaxing and comforting sound. Then, just as the smell became prominent, the cows began to run away, their bells falling silent very quickly. The smell seeping into their camper from outside became worse.

      My mom said she tried to wake my dad and have him get one of his rifles, but he was fast asleep, and he jokingly told her to go back to sleep. Then, to my mom’s horror, whatever it was outside brushed up against the camper. My mom thought she could hear its breath. The next morning, my mom was unhappy with my dad. They never told me whether or not they looked for footprints. Those are the kind of stories I was raised with.

      Another night, long before my time, my parents were camping in the desert. To break the boredom, they would do this strange thing with a card table. Everyone placed their hands on top of it and said, Rise, table, rise. One night, both of my parents explained, the table simply lifted into the air and then floated away from them, moving several feet into the desert. None of their hands were on or even near the table.

      I believe that the stories my parents shared absolutely ignited a flame inside my heart and have largely been responsible for my continued interest in things that are supernatural and impossible to explain. These stories set the stage for a lifetime of interest and research into the paranormal world.

      In my career, I have written and produced a number of articles and reports about paranormal research and ghost stories. The first time I merged my supernatural interest with broadcasting was when I served as news director for KLYC, 1260 AM in McMinnville, Oregon. As the news director, I was the first to arrive each morning and begin the station’s broadcast day at 6:00 a.m. Adjacent to the DJ booth was an area we called the rack room, where the broadcast equipment and controls were located. My first act of the day was to warm up the plates, which sat for roughly fifteen minutes, prior to the moment I activated the transmitter.

      Each morning when I was in the rack room, I would see a person or an object moving in my periphery, in my right eye, but whenever I would look up to see it, nothing was there. I admit that I didn’t enjoy opening that station each morning, though the vibe throughout the day was very normal and pleasant. This station allowed me to explore the paranormal subject in detail, and I learned a great deal from a clairvoyant I worked with. She taught me a number of things about the relationship between news media and paranormal studies.

      One of the first things reporters learn about the supernatural is that it is of strong interest to mainstream media during exactly two weeks of the year, those of course being the final two weeks in October.

      KNIGHT HALL GHOST

      I fell into the game of paying attention to the supernatural during those weeks initially while working for KLYC, and it happened to be October 1991, so I chose to follow a story from the Oregonian newspaper about a haunted building at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, called Knight Hall.

      I tracked down an extremely talented Portland psychic named Erin Laselle, who had been quoted by the Oregonian about the ghost of a girl who had been talked about for decades at Knight Hall, affectionately known as Vera. ¹

      I asked her to come to the radio station to do an hour-long live talk show about the supernatural. After the show, I gave her a tour of the radio station. She said that because our

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