With Halloween on Thursday and the Lewis County Historical Museum gaining a reputation as one of the area’s most haunted locations by believers, the South Sound Paranormal Research Team once again offered ghost tours after hours in the museum on Saturday, Oct. 26.
Originally constructed in 1912 in downtown Chehalis as a Northern Pacific Railroad Depot, the Lewis County Historical Museum now houses a large collection of historical items and documents from throughout the county’s history.
And, depending on who you ask, the museum might also be home to a few wayward spirits.
Among those who took the tour was Jill Kangas, of Chehalis, who was one of the Lewis County Historical Museum’s first executive directors after the museum moved into the old train station building in the late 1970s.
Now 76, she didn’t just take the ghost tour to reminisce about her time running it, but to also set the record straight about one long-standing ghost story that reportedly occurred in the museum and has been told by other museum volunteers anecdotally for years.
Following Saturday’s tour, Kangas met with The Chronicle on Tuesday, Oct. 29, to talk about the ghost story.
As the story goes, a former museum employee in the museum was closing up for the night when she suddenly encountered a ghastly apparition of a woman wearing Victorian-era clothing who asked when the next train was arriving.
According to retellings, the employee supposedly had a brief exchange with the woman, explaining the building was no longer a passenger train station, before the woman politely thanked the employee, walked away and vanished.
However, it wasn’t just one of the volunteer employees who encountered this apparition — it was Kangas herself, and this wasn’t the only paranormal experience she had at the museum, she says.
When unexplainable things began to happen
The museum was originally founded by the nonprofit Lewis County Historical Society following its first charter meeting in 1965 and located in the historic Arthur S. Cory house.
In 1972, word that Burlington Northern Railroad was planning on tearing down the old depot got out, but the historical society was able to work with Burlington Northern and Lewis County to get a lease, saving the 1912 structure to be used as a museum starting in 1975.
Kangas was part of the group of volunteers who began renovation work in 1978 to prepare the building to become the new home of the Lewis County Historical Museum.
Kangas was already familiar with the building as, growing up in Tacoma, she would frequently visit her grandparents who lived near the old train depot on Ohio Street in Chehalis. Eventually, in 1966, she moved.
“I found I absolutely loved country life, and I stayed. My grandparents were school teachers here in Centralia, Fred and Velma Holtman,” Kangas said. “... We used to take the train from Tacoma down here, and I can remember going through the terrazzo in the big dome room, going to the ladies’ room with my black patent leather shoes on, clicking on the terrazzo as I headed to the bathroom.”
After saving the old depot from being torn down, the historical society began renovation preparation and sought donations and volunteers to help.
Kangas had already helped catalog the museum’s collection in 1977, and though she was pregnant and about to have her first child, she agreed to continue helping.
“Nobody but me knew what was in the collection, so it made good sense that I would help them transition. I was only going to do that for a little while and then go home. So I ended up staying until August of ‘87,” Kangas quipped.
During the 1978 renovation, she said she was hard at work with the other volunteers beginning to reorganize the museum’s collection after it had been moved from the Arthur S. Cory house.
“When I first came back into the museum and all the collection was in the big dome room, there was nothing in the rest of the museum. There was no shelving. There were no plans for anything. The baggage room was empty, not even a box in there,” Kangas said.
Margaret Shields, the late Lewis County genealogist and historian, was doing some research work at the time looking through old newspapers. So, Kangas invited Shields to do her work at the depot with the museum’s collection, as she thought she might be able to help with the museum work too.
It was during this time both Kangas and Shields began experiencing things they couldn’t explain.
“While we were working in there, Margaret started doing her genealogy in the office area in the library, and I had the little office behind. We would constantly hear roll-top desks opening up and closing, but there were no roll-top desks around, and the sounds would come from the baggage room,” Kangas said. “We would go out and look and see nothing in there. You could see all the way through to the end of the museum.”
They would also hear doors opening and closing, drawers being opened and the sound of rolling chairs being moved around on the floor, all coming from empty spaces with no furniture.
“Of course, other people would tell us, ‘You’re just hearing noise from the railroad tracks or you’re hearing cars go by,’” Kangas said. “But those sounds were very distinctive, when you hear somebody opening up a heavy drawer and closing it again. Especially the roll-top desk, and daily we would hear the roll-top desk being opened and closed numerous times.”
With people still dismissing what they heard as just noise from trains or traffic, Kangas and Shields would just joke that the museum’s new location was haunted while they continued working until the first two exhibits were ready in 1980.
And while Kangas couldn’t recall the exact date, it was in 1981 after these first two exhibits opened when she encountered the woman in Victorian-era dress.
A woman in Victorian-era dress
Kangas was closing up on the night she encountered the woman. She was alone in the museum. The only two entrances were bolted shut after the other volunteers left for the night, and rod-iron security bars had been installed on all the museum’s windows for the museum collection’s security.
As Kangas prepared to go home, she entered a utility closet to shut off the museum’s lights.
“At night, you use the electrical panels to turn the lights off. I was going down the one on the left, the first one, and I got down to the fourth set of breakers, and I heard this voice right behind me say, ‘Excuse me miss,’” Kangas said. “And I turned and I looked, and half the distance you and I are apart (around 2 feet) stood this about 17-year-old girl dressed in a black wool traveling suit, about 1890s. And she was holding a crocheted handbag and she had a bonnet. Her hair was brown and the bonnet was black like her outfit, tied on the side.”
She added she never heard any footsteps approaching either.
“It kind of seemed like the world stopped at that time for me. I took total account of her. She was maybe 80 pounds. She was very dainty. Her hands were like a third the size of my hands, and I would say she was about 4-foot-10 at the most,” Kangas said. “As I turned and looked at her, she said, ‘Has the train left yet?’ And she turned toward the door and she took three tiny steps, and she was in the terrazzo hallway. She turned to the right and took one more step and was beyond the door frame and I couldn’t see her.”
The woman appeared to be completely solid, too, not like Hollywood depictions of ghosts, a half-bodied translucent apparition.
“I was trying to figure out, ‘Who could this be? This can’t be a ghost because she’s too real,’” Kangas said. “... I could see the pores on her skin.”
Unlike the story that has been told, Kangas never had a brief exchange with this woman, as she was stunned speechless trying to process the encounter.
“I couldn’t have gotten a word out even if I had thought of one. I was so horrified and shocked,” she said.
Kangas peeked out of the utility closet right after the woman walked beyond the door frame and knew the nearest doorway was about 20 feet away, but the woman had already vanished.
“I’m not sure I even believed in ghosts before this,” Kangas added.
Filled with fear still, Kangas rushed out of the museum to her car, where it took her another 45 minutes just to be able to calm down enough to drive home.
“I kept thinking, ‘This couldn’t have happened to me.’” Kangas added.
Upon returning the next day, she refused to go back inside the museum without another one of the volunteers, and told the others about what she encountered.
She was met with jokes and skepticism from the volunteers, who didn’t believe she had seen anything at all.
Given her position running the museum, she decided to keep quiet about it as she was worried about public perception of her own sanity.
“I had a career to worry about, so I didn’t publicize it real big,” Kangas said.
Despite this, it wasn’t the only unexplainable figure Kangas witnessed during her time as director.
A phantom train conductor
Just a year later, in 1982, Kangas was in the museum talking to an older couple from Seattle when she noticed a man down in the meeting room at the museum’s south end, where no other visitors were in at the time.
“I knew where everybody was in the museum, and I look into the added-on room in the back, the meeting room, and there was a guy in a conductor’s uniform with a clipboard standing right in the doorway that was open,” Kangas said. “He was facing toward the railroad tracks with his clipboard and he was moving some sheets. He had on a white shirt and suspenders and conductor pants with shiny black shoes.”
The man then started pacing back and forth in the meeting room. As soon as Kangas noticed the man, she knew it wasn’t normal, as none of the staff ever dressed up in period clothing.
“I’m talking to these two people and I said, ‘Say, you see down there in that room?’ And the man turned around and said, ‘Yeah, where that guy’s standing? The guy in the conductor uniform?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like you to come and meet him. Hurry, come on, before he leaves,’” Kangas said.
She rushed the couple down to the meeting room. When they were about 5 feet from the room’s entrance, they saw the man pace out of view one last time, and as soon as they entered the room, he had disappeared without a trace.
“We were looking at this life-sized man and he walked on the other side of the door, and when we got into the middle of the room, the guy said, ‘Where did he go?’ And I said, ‘You just saw a ghost, and I want you to come up front and tell my volunteers that you saw this guy.’ And he says, ‘No seriously, where did he go. Is this part of the tour you give?’”
The couple still refused to believe what they had seen, and Kangas allowed them to search the entire room looking for a hidden compartment or trap door.
“He even opened up the front of the refrigerator and pulled the refrigerator out to make sure there wasn’t something in the back,” Kangas said.
Once again, though, Kangas was met with skepticism, and the volunteers believed she had actually paid the Seattle couple to come up with the train conductor story to try to make people forget about her supposed encounter the year before with the woman in Victorian-era dress.
“And the guy and his wife were convinced this was part of a staged tour to give them a little more excitement, so you can see why I didn’t tell this story for a while. Now that I got gray hair and am retired, it’s OK. And if people are going to be telling the story, that’s why I went to the tour. I want to make sure they got it right,” Kangas said.
Whether or not people believe the Lewis County Historical Museum is actually haunted, the South Sound Paranormal Research Team plans on continuing to hold more investigations inside to collect evidence of unexplainable events — which they have captured in the past.
One of those captures was what the team calls a “light anomaly” that appeared through the door in the very room Kangas and the Seattle couple saw the train conductor overnight when the museum was closed and empty.
They have also captured multiple phantom voices on various audio recordings throughout their multiple investigations. To view the purported evidence, visit the South Sound Paranormal Research Team’s website at https://www.sspri.org/evidence.php.
Founded in 2006, the South Sound Paranormal Research Team is a nonprofit that offers investigations free of charge to residents in Washington and Oregon who believe they may be encountering hauntings or other paranormal activity.
To learn more and get in contact about organizing an investigation, visit https://www.sspri.org/.
The Lewis County Historical Museum is located at 599 NW Front Way in downtown Chehalis. For more information, visit https://lewiscountymuseum.org/.
