Today you can still find arrowheads scattered along the Columbia River beaches. Early morning joggers and late-evening walkers also report almost identical encounters with a naked Multnomah youth. The adolescent boy walks along the waterline and doesn't seem aware of anything except the river and the sand.
More recently, so many cremated nudists have been spread on "clothing optional" Collins Beach that most level areas above the tide line are layered in the telltale crunchy white grit of crushed bone.
9. Heathman Hotel's Haunted Photograph
At first glance the photograph looks ordinary. It shows the wood-paneled Tea Court of the Heathman Hotel at 1001 SW Broadway. There are paintings by Andy Warhol. A crystal chandelier from the American embassy in Czechoslovakia. A big, blazing fireplace. Flowers, plants, chairs, and sofas. There's the grand piano where Sting and Wyn-ton Marsalis and Arlo Guthrie sit and play for hours when they stay here.
In the photograph it's September 21, 2001, and the hotel's previous owners are officially passing the keys to the new owners. Near the fireplace, just outside the circle of people, a soft, glowing figure stands beside a chair. It's nothing you'd notice at first, but it's there.
"A guy took this picture," says Jeff Jobe, the hotel's general manager, "and the ghost was there. We've tried to reason it away, but we can't. Those lamps in the photo only have thirty-watt bulbs in them."
Charles Barkley stays here, signing his name "Billy Crystal." Billy Crystal stays here, signing as "Charles Barkley." For satirist David Sedaris, the Heathman is a second home, the only place he'd want to live in the United States outside of New York City. Jeff says, "At some point in the history of the hotel, this became the place for authors to stay. It's just the buzz." In fact so many famous writers stay here, the hotel's library has collected some three thousand signed first editions.
It's easy to see why guests keep coming back—and why some guests have never left.
Larry Adams, the hotel's director of operations, can tell you the maids are a little squeamish about cleaning Rooms 803 and 703. If a guest is going to complain, chances are they're booked in 803 or one of the rooms directly below it. People return to 803 or 703 to find the bottles of water half drunk. Desks are moved. Beds are mussed. Towels used. Cups and glasses are turned over. The television is turned on or a chair is moved. Of course, they complain.
But when Larry or Jeff check the key card system, it shows no one has entered the room since the last time the guest left. "There's no way to fudge the system," Jeff says. "You just can't get in."
In September 1999, the psychic Char, author of Questions from Earth, Answers from Heaven, stayed in Room 703. Another psychic, Echo Bodiene, stayed in the room for a week to dialogue with the spirit. The two women agree it's the spirit of a man who jumped from Room 803, committing suicide and now haunting each room he looked into on his way down.
Larry says the man was scarred or deformed in some way. "People made fun of the way he looked, and he was tired of it," he says, adding the suicide took place not long after the hotel opened in 1927.
In 1975 a blind guest named Harris killed himself in Room 303. His body was found by housekeeper Fidel Semper, now retired from the hotel. Employees and guests also report cold spots in the hallways, phantoms breezing past them, and the sound of footsteps on the grand staircase when it's empty.
Now when a guest complains, Jeff shows them the key card records, saying, "Look. Here's the readout. Nothing was stolen. He only moves furniture." Assuring them, "He doesn't make noise. He only drinks the water."
10. Lydia
A ghost named Lydia is supposed to haunt the Pied Cow Coffeehouse, a Victorian mansion at 3244 SE Belmont Street. The restaurant that occupied the space previously,
Butter Toes, is supposed to have also been host to Lydia's presence.
11. The Haunted Bathrooms
In the bathrooms the trash lids start to swing by themselves. Water will start running in the bathroom sinks. You'll hear the sounds of someone doing their business in empty toilet stalls. Some mornings, the staff will arrive early to find the water running in sinks. Some nights, they'll hear the noise of parties in the private upstairs dining rooms that are empty.
At the Rose and Raindrop Restaurant, server Jenna Hill says, "A lot of people will go into the bathroom late at night and come out looking kind of pale."
Built by Edward Holman in 1880, the building at 532 SE Grand Avenue was for years the Barber and Hill Undertakers and Embalmers. In the dozen apartments above the restaurant, it's a given that clocks will reset themselves all the time. Mark Roe, an artist who sells his work at Portland's Saturday Market, remembers, "I had a girlfriend who lived in an apartment above the restaurant, and I'd stay overnight. You could still smell the formaldehyde coming up through the floors."
The building once housed the Nickelodeon Theater, one of Portland's first vaudeville and silent movie houses, as well as Ralph's Good Used Furniture store, owned by Ralph Jacobson, the man who taught the Hippo Hardware team their trade.
It was designed by Justus F. Krumbein, who also designed the original state capitol building. For several years it housed a restaurant called Digger O'Dells, named for the gravedigger character from the Life of Riley radio show in the 1940s.
The two private dining rooms—where you can hear mysterious parties at night—are named the Duffy and Baker rooms, after two traveling vaudeville troupes. Both rooms are directly over the haunted bathrooms. These, Jenna Hill says, are above the crematory ovens in the basement. Those ovens are walled over, she says, but still there.
12. Unmarked Graves
Nobody wanted to work late nights at Michaels (the arts and crafts store) when it was located at NE 122nd and Sandy Boulevard. Lights and a loud compressor would turn themselves off and on at night. It seems that road widening has crowded the adjacent pioneer cemetery, and scores of graves have been misplaced. The rumor among Michaels employees is that their old parking lot is paving over a good share of those plots. As a result several lawsuits against the county are pending.
Several employees at the neighboring Kmart confirm these stories, mostly the lights and noise at night, but asked not to be identified. This outlet of Michaels has since moved a few blocks, to more peaceful ground along Airport Way.
13. Maryhill Museum
"The first thing you need to learn is the difference between Maryhill myths and Maryhill reality," say Lee Musgrave, the media spokesman for Maryhill Museum.
Every year, people come visit this fine arts museum in the desert above the Columbia River, and they insist on the wildest things.
They insist that the builder, railroad magnate Sam Hill, kidnapped Queen Marie of Romania and kept her prisoner in a basement cell. And they insist the museum used to keep the world's largest sturgeon in a basement swimming pool. And the queen's gold gown on display in the main hall is covered with real diamonds that the museum staff replace with rhinestones whenever they need money to cover operating expenses. And Queen Marie was the lesbian lover of dancer Loie Fuller. And the place is haunted. Really haunted. A Druid funeral barge, acquired but never displayed, is still stored in pieces somewhere in the museum. And, and, and...