What’s on my mind? This being the haunting season, I’ll spit it right out: I believe in the paranormal. Weird as this may sound, I’ve seen a lot of places and done a lot of things, but will probably never forget these two ghostly experiences - each of which was also experienced by a second person with me.
Some time in the 1980s, my late spouse and I spent a night in the Oregon Caves Chateau. We jerked awake to the sound of a woman pacing above us. Back and forth, back and forth she went. Which was strange, because we were on the top floor, with nothing above but the roof. Too nervous to leave the bed, we spent the night hiding under the covers and eventually fell back to sleep.
When we commented about this at breakfast, our server called the manager, who pressed us for every detail. In the 1930s, he said, a bride named Elizabeth hanged herself on her wedding night when her new husband took up with a chambermaid. Elizabeth is said to haunt the chateau - especially room 310, the one in which we were sleeping.
The server also said staff who set the breakfast tables have learned to duck when knives, forks, and spoons sometimes fly from the cutlery drawers.
“Want to see something extra spooky?” the manager asked.
I said yes. Having seen my “morning face” without makeup, I figured I could take anything. The manager took me to a light-filled room without furniture the chateau never rented. The moment he opened the door, I stood at the entrance, frozen with terror. I couldn’t even go into the room.
“That’s everyone response,” he said.
Thanks to the modern-day magic of Google, I’ve found a version of what we experienced on a National Parks website:
The second haunting? In 2003, my adult daughter and I stayed at the Empress of Little Rock in Arkansas. We weren’t aware the hotel had a reputation for being haunted. As it was, we were the hotel’s only occupants, and had our pick of its many sumptious rooms.
After we’d settled into sleep, I awoke to hear loud snoring pour from the walls and from the other side of the bed. The inhalation and exhalation immediately beside me were so loud and so prolonged, it would have been impossible for any person to have done this.
I heard the snoring in the middle of the night; my daughter heard it in the very early morning, while it was still dark. With no one else in the hotel, she assumed I was asleep in the next room, but the room I’d chosen was several rooms away.
Checking the pillow, the mattress, and the walls, I found no sign of any device, so did what any mature, intelligent women would do, which was to hide under the blankets.
We heard at breakfast that three or four apparitions sometimes climb a non-existent ladder, passing through the ceiling into the attic. When a staff member dashed into the through its proper entrance, he found the ghostly apparitions as a table playing cards.
True? False? Who knows? The story certainly sounded interesting over bacon and eggs, and what each of us had experienced was couldn’t be explained.
© Nicole Parton, 2019
