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With Halloween approaching, the spooky season is in full swing.
To help celebrate it, members of the South Sound Paranormal Research (SSPR) Team visited Vader last weekend to share stories from investigations of various haunted locations throughout the region.
At the Little Falls Coffee Co. in Vader, SSPR co-founders Patty Valdez and Billi Oberlander, along with SSPR investigator Lori Allen, gave a pair of two-hour, back-to-back and free-to-attend presentations detailing investigations they have done both here in Lewis County — specifically at the Lewis County Historical Museum in Chehalis — along with others throughout the region.
This included investigations of the USS Turner Joy, a Vietnam War-era U.S. Navy Forrest-Sherman Class destroyer which is now a museum ship located up in the Bremerton harbor.
With Oberlander being former law enforcement and Valdez a U.S. Air Force veteran, they frequently have other police accompany them on investigations, including one who claimed to see a sailor wearing a uniform walking past a port hole on the Turner Joy.
The only issue was the ship is no longer in service, meaning no uniformed sailors were on board at the time, and the port hole was located over 7 feet above the deck.
“I ran up there, and there were no sailors. And what sailor is 7’5,” Allen said.
They’ve also investigated the location of the Wellington Train Disaster at Stephens Pass, where in 1910, two trains got stuck in the former town of Wellington during a blizzard. While trying to wait out the storm with many of the passengers sleeping on the trains, an avalanche struck with a massive amount of snow, knocking both trains off of their tracks at the train depot into a 150-foot ravine in the Tye River Valley.
“A hundred and twenty six lives, it's said, were killed. However, a lot of people who were aboard those trains were workers, immigrants, Russian, Chinese, Italian, German, everything. So they don’t actually have (complete) records of who was killed, except for the passenger names on the train, and some people did survive,” Valdez said.
She added later, concrete snow sheds were built to shelter the train tracks, and even today, over 100 years later, much of the train wreckage still remains at the bottom of the ravine. Wellington was also renamed Tye after the tragedy due to associations with the tragedy, but the train depot was closed anyway by 1929, when the second Cascade Tunnel was completed, and the town was abandoned.
During one of their investigations of the site, Valdez stated one of their team members observed a phantom apparition they initially believed to be another investigation member.
“About two-three minutes later, they came walking back, and they said, ‘Where’s Mike?’ And we were like, ‘He’s right here,” and he was standing there and goes ‘I’m right here.’ And they go, ‘No, that can’t be, you were just walking that way’ … they were like, ‘No, don’t call us liars, we saw him walking,’” Valdez said.
Whatever they are encountering on these investigations, Valdez stressed they still only had theories as to what they were observing.
“Nobody in the paranormal field is an expert. Because if somebody says, ‘Oh, I’m an expert in the paranormal,’ well, what’s a ghost,” Valdez added.
She stated she simply uses the term ghost to refer to what they encounter since it’s colloquially accepted.
Founded in 2006, the SSPR 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, though they no longer do investigations in private residences.
To learn more and get in contact about organizing an investigation, visit https://www.sspri.org/.
