Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

III

CIVIC-MINDED SPIRITS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE WIND THROUGH CATHEDRAL PARK

Portland, OR

In the video there is first the image of kids, their flashlights to their chins, then giggling in the darkness. One is named Isaiah, another Vinnie, the third Jamison—beyond that there’s not much more information about them. They could be in their early twenties, but they continue to giggle like schoolchildren. The camera drops, there’s fumbling. They could be drunk, high. They’re clearly enjoying themselves, barely keeping it together.

They are beneath the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon. Portland’s bridges are so spectacular that one of the city’s many nicknames is “Bridge City,” but St. Johns is perhaps its most beautiful. A dual suspension bridge patinaed in copper green, it rises above the Willamette River like a smaller, more refined Golden Gate Bridge. On the west side it crosses over NW St. Helens Road before meeting NW Bridge Avenue; on the east side of the river the bridge towers above a gentle slope, descending gracefully into Portland’s St. Johns district.

The land under the bridge on the east side is now called Cathedral Park, named for the sweeping gothic arches that form the supports for the bridge above it. It captures a great deal of the city’s scenic beauty: the gently flowing river, the hints of industrialization dwarfed by the mountains and the evergreens all around. It is, though, surprisingly noisy: the cars rushing by a hundred feet above your head and the wind coursing through the gothic arches all around you combine to create a sense of voices and howlings that accompany you throughout the park. On the bridge’s supports signs blare out warnings: DANGER: FALLING OBJECTS, PARK AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The kids who have made this YouTube video are there for the ghost of Thelma Taylor. In 1949 Taylor, then fifteen years old, was abducted from under the bridge. At the time there was no park, just dirt, junk, and bushes spilling out in all directions. Taylor was hitching a ride to a summer job when she was picked up by Morris Leland, a twenty-two-year-old drifter.

A week after Taylor’s disappearance, police pulled Leland over for stealing a car and took him down to the police station, where, without prompting, he asked to talk to a homicide detective. He proceeded to make a full confession, describing in detail how he’d murdered Taylor, covered her body in driftwood, and wiped his prints off her lunch pail before leaving the scene. He offered to take the police to the place where he’d left her remains. Until that moment he was just a petty criminal who’d stolen a few cars. The murder of Thelma Taylor was something else entirely, and it was weighing on him when he blurted out his confession to the detective. He was tried in 1951, quickly found guilty, and sentenced to death. After several unsuccessful appeals, Leland went to Oregon’s gas chamber in 1953.

The stories told about Taylor are predictably gruesome: she was raped and tortured for seven days, they say, before she was finally killed. “Oh yeah,” one diner owner told the local news in a 2013 special about the murdered girl, “I’ve been down there at night and heard her scream, ‘Help me, help me—somebody help me!’” This is why people come to find Taylor: they want the chills that go with a brush with death, the intoxication that comes with being close to mortality. Writer Andy Weeks, in his guide Haunted Oregon, advises that you “visit the area and see if you can hear the unearthly screams of now-deceased Thelma. They won’t be pretty sounds if you hear them, but ones that will make your skin crawl.” What better way to spend a chilly evening than trying to scare yourself into feeling alive?

The screams you may hear at Cathedral Park, screams that twine themselves with the wind as it whips up from the water and through the arches of the St Johns Bridge, come, so they say, from the bridge itself, from the massive stone pylons anchoring the span looming above you. When Thelma Taylor was murdered, the theory goes, the bridge itself “recorded” the event and now plays back the horror it once witnessed.

As the guidebook Ghosthunting Oregon claims, paranormal researchers say Cathedral Park is an area “primed for a haunting”: the water from the river and the limestone blocks used to build St. Johns Bridge are associated with a phenomenon called residual haunting. Also sometimes called the stone tape theory, the belief is that certain inanimate objects are primed to record imprints of certain action that they then play back later. As Ghosthunting Oregon puts it, “Inanimate materials, such as stone, can absorb energy from the living, much as a tape recorder absorbs the voice of the living, especially during episodes of high tension, anxiety, and fear. Once this energy is stored, it can also be released, resulting in the display, or replay, of the recorded events.”

The residual haunting theory was first popularized by an anthropologist named T. C. Lethbridge, whose career began to decline as he became more and more obsessed with ghosts and spirits. His 1961 book Ghost and Ghoul offered no room for skeptics (“The question is not whether people see ghosts or not. There is ample evidence that they do so”) and turned instead to a mechanism that could explain spirits, a mechanism that relied less on the afterlife and more on the psychic abilities of the living. Rather than see spirits as distinct entities, capable of agency and will after death, he argued that we the living act as spiritual television projectors, capable of sending ideas mentally that are then picked up by others and interpreted as ghosts. The majority of ghosts, Lethbridge concluded, “are no more than mental pictures produced by living people,” and in the burgeoning technology of television he found a perfect metaphor. Ghosts, he concluded, “appear to be no more and no less than television pictures. The television picture is a man-made ghost.”

Lethbridge wasn’t the first to propose such an idea. Sir Oliver Lodge, in his 1908 book Man and the Universe, speaks of how a haunted house has “photographed” a past tragedy. But Lethbridge’s ideas caught fire in England, perhaps because of the strong association with television, and in 1972 BBC Two broadcast a made-for-TV film, The Stone Tape, inspired by Lethbridge’s idea of television ghosts. A team of scientists who’ve relocated to new headquarters in a Victorian mansion with a reputation of being haunted discover that the ghosts they’re seeing are a sort of playback loop of an earlier tragedy. The stone tape’s playback abilities depend greatly on the individual acting as the receiver—haunting here, in its simplest form, is a psychic interplay between place and person, between a past tragedy and a present witness’s ability to attune herself to that tragedy.

In this version of haunting, ghosts are not able to harm or otherwise disturb the living, even though the images called forth may be traumatic or terrifying. With many of the ghost hunters I’ve talked to, from California to Louisiana, residual haunting is put forth as the most popular explanation for hauntings, even if its mechanism is as implausible as the Spiritualist version of ghosts. It holds out the promise that no matter how creepy the environment, the ghost hunter won’t be harmed, and yet still manages to give people the thrill they want to feel that much more alive.

The kind of ghost that haunts Cathedral Park, local ghost researcher Jefferson Davis told me, is an important question. “Is it a remnant spirit, is it a self-aware spirit, or is it something else?” Davis was born in the Pacific Northwest, and he has been fascinated with ghosts from an early age. He describes himself as a “comfortable skeptic”: “I believe in the possibility,” he said, but he hasn’t seen or heard anything that he believes beyond a shadow of a doubt to be confirmation of the paranormal. “I’m just waiting for something to happen.”

Davis’s background is in anthropology, so he’s trained to see ghost stories as expressions of larger cultural trends and indicative of communal beliefs. If the traditional ghost story formula involves a restless ghost, a task left undone, an injustice not yet addressed, the residual haunting formula doesn’t require this—Thelma Taylor’s killer, after all, was brought to justice, and so her spirit need not call out to the living to aid her.

The Cathedral Park ghost instead seems to exist as a cautionary tale. Local historian Jim Speirs, who grew up in North Portland, didn’t remember much about the murder when he first began writing about Thelma Taylor for the St. Johns Review in 2009. “What I do recall is a vague, scary story that circulated around Roosevelt when I attended school there in the 60’s,” he later wrote. “That tale was of a ghost that haunted the bowels of the St. Johns Bridge … and that the place was to be avoided.” This, of course, was easy enough to do, since at the time there was no park; “the area,” Speirs remembered, “was acres of tangled wild blackberries, stunted trees, abandoned cars, piles of garbage, menacing underbrush, and passing hobo derelicts.”

Taylor’s story is important for someone like Davis precisely because it’s a true story that nonetheless has all the hallmarks of a fictitious urban legend. “A lot of hauntings are not symbolic, a lot of hauntings really happened, and that’s what makes it interesting,” Davis told me, speaking specifically to how a story like this blurs drama and melodrama, making the archetypal aspects of Thelma’s story so closely intertwined with facts that it becomes hard to separate the two.

Erik Meharry isn’t sure exactly when he became interested in Thelma Taylor. He’d grown up just outside Portland, and like most kids in the area, he knew the story as just something to scare kids from hitchhiking, nothing specific. Now he works as an investigator for the public defender’s office, but at the time he began delving into the life of Thelma Taylor, he was working at a mortuary. (“I got in the funeral business by accident,” he told me; “they needed someone to pick up the bodies.”) On-call for twenty-four hours at a time, he was living in the funeral home, and at some point—though he says it was unrelated to his job—he became deeply interested in Taylor’s life. He doesn’t remember exactly what it was that caught his attention. “Mostly,” he said, “I just felt bad for her.”

He started researching—collecting news clippings and trial records, stuff that went beyond the urban legends and ghost stories. For all the belief that Taylor haunts Cathedral Park, Meharry learned that she was killed eight blocks away from the bridge. She wasn’t raped, and though it was a week before Leland was caught and confessed, the murder itself happened the morning after the kidnapping; there was no prolonged imprisonment.

In 2012 Meharry put up a Facebook page about Taylor, mainly to keep her memory alive but also to sort out the truth from the lore. On September 25, 2012, about eight months after he’d launched the page, he received a message from a woman named Paulette Jarrett. It was brief and to the point: “Thelma Taylor is my sister—who are you?”

In an oft-quoted passage from his book Lies Across America, James W. Loewen writes of a distinction between the dead made by Kiswahili speakers in east and central Africa:

According to John Mbiti, Kiswahili speakers divide the deceased into two categories: sasha and zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered… . But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

Loewen uses this distinction to critique the historical problems in many of the monuments and markers that dot the country. While history is most accurately documented while it is in living memory—the sasha—civic monuments are often products of zamani, and they are, for Loewen, ideologically loaded: “Not primarily motivated by loss or grief, zamani monuments and markers usually go up to serve the political exigencies of the time of their erection.”Memorials honoring Confederate war heroes, or the victims of 9/11—hashed out and argued over, long delayed and deployed by politicians for any number of personal ends—typify the kind of zamani monument that has little connection to the actual dead or loss that a sasha monument, like a temporary roadside memorial or a simple gravestone, might honor.

While Loewen is primarily concerned with public monuments, his distinction gives us another lens for understanding ghost stories and how those stories evolve over time. As I’ve gathered ghost stories over the past decade, I’ve seen historical specificity reduced to the same clichés and melodrama over and over again. Ghost stories become, in this light, a kind of fetishization of the past, detached from the actual history—a kind of frozen moment in which all of the past mirrors itself. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote, “It is not the passion (whether of objects or subjects) for substances that speaks in fetishism, it is the passion for the code,” and in the melodramatic ghosts we find a passion not for individual stories or histories so much as for a certain set of clichés repeated over and over again. This is the effect of zamani memory: without first-person accounts, without personal memories, the stories become monuments that must serve larger purposes.

Case in point: Cathedral Park itself. One obviously false aspect of the story of Thelma Taylor is where she died: not in the park but some eight blocks away. And yet, despite being easily disproven, the incorrect location has become an integral part of the legend. Why in particular does this fallacy persevere?

The bridge was opened in 1931. But despite such fanfare, the park itself was not built until the 1970s and not dedicated until May 1980. The decision to turn this land into a park was an attempt to capitalize on the dead space under the bridge’s long span and to eradicate the kind of forces that might otherwise gather in such dead spaces.

Parks like Cathedral Park are part of a general movement in urban planning under the rubric of what’s called adaptive reuse: otherwise-dead zones in the city that have been repurposed. Perhaps the most famous and successful example is the High Line in New York City, an elevated railway trestle that’s been converted into a linear park. The idea here is to convert eyesores into habitable spaces.

Adaptive reuse projects have of course also included former Kirkbride asylums, and as with those asylums, it should come as little surprise that many projects bear haunted legacies. A local tour company offers a haunted tour of the High Line, with stories of ghosts like a mysterious figure who lived below the tracks, a “West Side Cowboy” who fell to his death, and various children who died and now haunt the park. Another adaptive reuse project in New York, lower Manhattan’s Battery Park, is also haunted, this one by vice president Aaron Burr and his daughter, Theodosia. These buildings and parks attract ghosts because they are ghosts: once abandoned, they’ve been reconstituted, given a new life after death. It shouldn’t be surprising that stories of the past cling to them, manifesting themselves in ghost stories and unexplained occurrences.

Cathedral Park, a place that feels new and refurbished but can’t entirely cover up the scar of what it was before, was always destined to be haunted. It can’t escape the monstrous bridge looming above it, the incongruity of the bustle of traffic and the park environs. It can’t escape the wind that tears through it at all hours, the wail and moan that rushes through it. Even had Thelma Taylor never come here at all, one way or another Cathedral Park would’ve found its ghost.

Kevin Brockmeier’s 2006 The Brief History of the Dead literalizes the difference between sasha and zamani; it takes place in the city of the sasha dead. In the novel it’s the place where those newly deceased go while someone alive still remembers them, a place they leave only once there is no one left alive to keep them in living memory. Thelma Taylor belongs here, in a very different city of the dead than where most ghosts roam. Victorian ladies, Confederate soldiers, silent film starlets—they may have descendants, but they aren’t kept alive in living memory. Thelma Taylor’s story is unlike many I’ve come across, simply because there are still so many who remember her.

After Jim Speirs first wrote about Taylor in the St. Johns Review, he received several e-mails from people who remembered her in life. Having awakened memories decades old, he collected various e-mails he’d received in a blog post; one woman remembered Taylor from grade school and attending her funeral; “even though Morris had been caught,” she wrote, “we were still scared stiff.” The murder changed the landscape, turning the world from a place of wonder to one of deep suspicion. While North Portland high schoolers once went to the bridge for expansive views of the Willamette as it flowed into the city, they stopped going near the bridge altogether after the murder. “My friend Thelma is still down there, and I don’t care how good the music becomes, or how pretty the park is, I will NEVER step on that land again!” George Parrish remembered Taylor as well: “She was skinny and underdeveloped, but that’s just the odd age she was when I knew her. We were classmates … but I don’t remember much about her, and doubt if I’d remember her at all if she hadn’t been killed.”

Another man e-mailed Speirs about the killer himself. “It’s been a long time,” Bill Grubb told Speirs, “but we knew Leland was weird, he didn’t have any friends that I can recall, and he was always doing something stupid… . He always had a knife, and that made us weary [sic] of him … he was always playing with a knife.”

Paulette Jarrett was only three years old when her sister was murdered, but she still has two clear memories: one of Thelma sitting outside with her friends, and another of finding her in the living room chewing gum and asking for a piece. “So she pulls it out of her mouth and hands it to me,” she told me. “Well, I had a screaming fit, I did not want something out of her mouth—I wanted my own piece! And of course Mom comes around the corner, asking what the heck’s going on, and Thelma said, ‘Well, she asked for gum, so I gave it to her and she refused it.’” As a memory on its own, it’s not much, but it’s a snippet of a life, of a person who could be more than just the story of her death. Jarrett still has a cache of photos of her sister—dressed in their father’s uniform, posing for a school portrait, living the life of a perfectly normal teenager. Jarrett, who spent the rest of her childhood sheltered because her mother wouldn’t allow her to go anywhere by herself, told me that mostly she wonders how Thelma would have turned out if she’d lived. “I just wish I’d known her a little better.”

The ghost stories that swarm around Thelma Taylor suggest what happens when an actual life maps too closely on an urban legend. Taylor’s disappearance and murder became a warning about hitchhiking or loitering in desolate places. The details were never terribly important—the important thing was to scare people into listening. It was an easy conversion from a life to a lesson, from sasha to zamani, from the messy world of a human being’s thoughts, desires, and memories to a cautionary tale.

When I asked Davis about whether it was ethical to give tours or tell stories about Taylor’s death, he seemed somewhat conflicted by the genuine moral conundrums involved. “None of us wants to set out to ruin the day—or the month or the year—of someone else’s life, like the family member of someone who’s been killed.” Like many ghost hunters I’ve interviewed, Davis genuinely believes that his work is not exploitive, that he does his best to get out the true story, to report terrible events without sensationalizing them, without trying to make a buck off of someone else’s trauma. At the same time, though, he told me, he maintains his right to tell these stories, since no matter what you do, “People will get offended and misunderstand.”

Only when I mentioned the video I’d seen, of the kids in the park trying to contact Taylor’s ghost, did Davis push back sharply. “The people smiling and laughing,” he said, “they’re having a quasi-religious experience: they’re trying to contact the other side. You can’t gauge from a video what’s going on in someone else’s mind.”

“Have fun with it,” said Meharry. “Why not? If you want to go have fun, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, knock yourself out.” He admitted that Taylor and the bridge is a good story: an archetypal ghost story about a young girl’s tragedy. But then he paused and looked off. “But I’ve spent so much time on Thelma Taylor, and I know her family, so I’m kinda on guard and a little bit defensive.

“Do it with other ghost stories,” he said finally, “but leave this one alone.”

Myself, I tend to think of ghost stories as a natural way of preserving—or at least attempting to preserve—a history that might otherwise go unnoticed and forgotten. The story of Cathedral Park, like too many ghost stories, blurs the fact in favor of gory inventions and puts a premium on the thrill of the ghost hunt, the brush with death, rather than on the actual life that was lost in 1949.

At the same time that it’s a personal story for this family, it’s also a civic story, a story about a community, and the ghost of Cathedral Park isn’t merely a cheap stunt, a sensationalized grab for cash. As a cautionary tale, it’s a legend that encourages teenagers to turn down rides from strangers, and even if we just leave it here, the ghost story of Thelma Taylor isn’t a bad thing. If the casual reiteration of that story—handed down from generation to generation, unmoored from specificity and unnaturally gruesome—helps to prevent another death like hers, it’s worth it … even if there are those who’d wish it would wait at least until she leaves the city of Sasha and enters the land of Zamani.

As I was researching for this book, I was startled to find myself reading about a longtime friend’s fiancé. I’d never known him in life, because a few months before their marriage, he’d walked out onto the fourth-floor balcony of his college dorm and then shot himself, falling to the ground below.

More than fifteen years later his life has become a ghost story, his death an explanation for unexplained chills and creepy sensations that students feel in the dorm. As a legend it’s so vague that it’s hardly worth mentioning, except that behind the banality is a very real story and a man who left behind people who loved him.

I never expected to be this close to an urban legend. I’d certainly never expected that a friend’s tragedy would become a ghost story in so few years. What was once a person’s unbearable loss is now someone else’s “strange noises and voices,” a reminder of how quickly a personal tragedy can be molded, in the hands of strangers, into folklore, taking on a life of its own. Maybe the purpose of a story like this, the reason it gets told and retold, is to shine a light on the very real problem of college depression, to let those suffering know that they’re not alone, to encourage them to find support.

More likely, it’s just something to pass the time.