Ghost story

I WAS IN A GIDDY MOOD as I traveled on a dark and foreboding day from Seattle to Port Townsend. It was the cusp of a full moon, the day before Friday the 13th. I was on assignment to spend the night in Washington state's best-known real-life haunted house.

"Haaaa, haaa, haaa, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh," I screeched to my sister long distance. "Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

The ferry plowed the cold dark underwater of Puget Sound from Edmonds to Kingston. I read Ghost Stories of Washington to put me in the mood, cackling wildly at unsuspecting children who veered too close.

I'm not averse to ghosts. I see dead people. Dozens, every day. They aren't the bloody-gauze-gouged-eyes sort. They are clean-cut and wear floral dresses and white T-shirts—at least in Ballard. They hang out by fire hydrants and on the front concrete steps of middle-class houses. I have learned over the years to give them a passing nod, to not stir them up.

Sometimes, I get full of myself and forget.

A classically trained journalist is not supposed to see spirits—metaphysics and reporting mix like a creative thought impinging upon an inverted pyramid. I'm not a typical journalist. I read tarot professionally (and usually secretly, although now the black cat is certainly out of the bag).

A journalism colleague recently came by accident to the back room of a Fremont bookstore where I see tarot clients. He jumped when he saw the tarot cards. "That stuff scares the shit out of me," he said and headed toward the front of the bookstore. I followed, cackling like a witch and tapping my fingernails on his back, having a bit of fun with his shadow, until he ran out the door. Thank God, I thought as I pressed my face against the glass and watched him rush down the street, they don't burn people like me anymore.

MANRESA CASTLE IN PORT TOWNSEND is a turn of the century manor complete with an impressive turret. Built in 1892 as a private residence, used in the mid-1920s by Jesuit priests, it became a 40-room hotel in 1968. It has European antiques, rich carpets, an ornately carved oak staircase Linda Blair would backflip over, and daily visits from the other side.

Seven years ago, the television show Sightings ran a program on the moving wall hangings, the flashing lights, the breaking glasses, and the unknown footsteps skittering nightly within the castle walls. The History Channel is running a piece this winter on Manresa for a special called Haunted Northwest.

"As people sleep, they feel a small cat or dog jump onto the bed," says hotel manager Roger O'Connor, who explains that the hauntings have surprisingly helped, not hindered, business. "They turn on the lights and nothing is there. There are strange lights under the doors. Music is heard. Sometimes it's a piano. Sometimes it's a violin, sometimes a full orchestra."

As I dropped my bags in Suite 216—a high-ceilinged room with straight-backed antiques—a quiet thought crept in: What was I doing here by myself? I felt like a lone hiker who'd come arrogantly to camp in grizzly country, my occult connection a slab of rump roast tied to my belt. I pushed the thought away and flipped through the cable channels until I found Tales from the Crypt. Sitting at the five-foot-high windows next to a gauzy curtain, I hoped passersby would think I was a ghost. My sister called at nine and pulled the string on a skeleton she'd bought for Halloween. "Come in," the raspy voice said. "COME IN, if you dare!" We howled.

No ghosts have ever been sighted at the hotel; all anyone has recorded are moving objects, flitting shadows seen from the corner of their eyes, and the eerie sense of other presences. Several years ago a bartender, tired of hotel guests' questions about ghosts, invented two—a Jesuit priest who hung himself from the rafters and a woman named Kate who flung herself from an upstairs window. "Kate" had heard her fianc頷as lost at sea. He wasn't, and came home to find the dead body of his love.

People flock to Manresa Castle with Ouija boards and mediums for regular chats with Kate in room 306, from whose window she was supposed to have flung herself. (On the floor above me, in fact, four women pace in 306, waiting for the full moon, waiting for Kate.) Of course, no such suicides can be found. The bartender took Kate from the first name of the original owner's second wife, who certainly did not commit suicide. He had to change the dates after the Sightings crew noted that Kate could not have flung herself from the window in 1921, since the castle was empty and abandoned that year. He changed the date to 1927. There is no record of a Jesuit priest killing himself.

But a lack of tragic historical figures does not mean a lack of paranormal activity. As I was soon to find out.

After two glasses of wine in the downstairs bar—where I met the father of a bride who was getting married on the castle grounds at the stroke of midnight on Friday the 13th, the night of the full moon—I went back to my suite and climbed into the short brass bed, surrounded by floral wallpaper and a view of the night lights of Port Townsend Bay.