Go home, ghost!

• The tale of a haunted school continues Ñ in a writer’s home

By Paul Duchene

The Portland Tribune, Mar 19, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Some ghosts just don’t get the message that they’re dead.

That includes a deceased student from the Christie School in Marylhurst whom we disturbed by a visit last fall. His story continues, though in a different city.

Back in September, I visited the Christie School with psychic Janet Reiner from Olympia, Wash., and archaeologist-ghost hunter Jeff Davis of Vancouver, Wash.

Davis has written several books about Northwest ghosts. He was most intrigued by the Christie School because part of it has been condemned for almost 40 years, and there are numerous stories about child spirits that sleep there uneasily Ñ if at all. So we arranged a nighttime visit.

It was, literally, a dark experience. Reiner was extremely upset by the atmosphere on the abandoned top floor of the 1910 building, where there is no electrical power. She began to sense the ghosts of children in the darkness.

Reiner’s observations corresponded with stories I’d heard from longtime school staff members about unexplained occurrences Ñ recollections I had not shared with her. She described a child playing where I had heard that an administrator’s dog would not walk, for example, and commented on children crying, a prominent feature in a number of other stories.

She also disturbed Tribune photographer Kyle Green Ñ who went in as an unbeliever Ñ by describing a little blue-eyed girl he could feel hanging onto his leg.

Reiner smudged us with sage and sweetgrass smoke at the end of the evening “so nobody would follow us home.”

I closed my story by remarking that I had heard footsteps in my gravel driveway at 2 a.m. when I alighted from my car. I couldn’t see anybody and attributed it to imagination, or maybe a neighbor walking a dog.

But I slept fitfully that night. I awoke tired, yawning and with gritty eyes. This continued for several days, until I got a call from Reiner, who had read the story.

“Let me guess, you’re only sleeping

21Ú2 or three hours and then you wake up Ñ wide awake, right?” she said. “You took somebody home. I’d better come down.”

She wasn’t able to smudge my house for several weeks. By that time I was feeling rundown and thinking about the fact that tests show sleep deprivation seriously compromises the immune system. I had a flu shot Ñ then got the flu.

Oddly, if I stayed overnight elsewhere, I slept fine.

The other thing I couldn’t explain was that somehow the house seemed darker. The lights weren’t burning as brightly, and replacing bulbs didn’t help.

I concluded that, whether the problem was real or in my head, something needed to be done.

When Reiner arrived, she shooed me away while she concentrated. On my return she had news.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have smudged your car. You’ve got a 10- to 12-year-old boy here who hid in your car while I was smudging you. His name’s Mark or Michael, and he feels an affinity to you. He’s English or Irish. I think I mentioned him to you when we were up on the fourth floor of the school. He’s kind of a ringleader. Not a bad boy, but stubborn.”

“I’m not opposed to him staying here,” I said. “But I have to get some sleep.”

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