September 2006 Issue The Horror Library, your Haunted Home for Horror Fiction, Dark Art, Horror Games, Movie Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Alternative Music, Horror Authors, Horror Short Fiction and featuring The Terrible Twelve - RJ Cavender, Bailey Hunter, Boyd E Harris, Megg Roper, Jason Beirens, CJ Hurtt, Eric Stark, Cordelia Snow, Chris Perridas, Curt Mahr, Stephen Sommerville, M Louis Dixon, Kerry Drummond
Haunted Honeymoon (and not that Gene Wilder movie)
Sunday October 31st, 2004. The monster skull-shaped glasses clinked, the cameras flashed, the kids run amok. Mary and I, we were married.
Just an hour or so before this point, my father pronounced Mary and I husband and wife in his very church. The ceremony mixed traditional Irish custom with more modern American wedding rituals. There was the wedding march and the claddagh symbol, a mixing of salt, a few snippets of Gaelic and lots of stiff drink waiting at the reception hall along with the Halloween decorations.
We drank and we ate, I think a few people cried, and the grim reaper loomed over the wedding cake while Frankenstien’s monster had a head that you could drink champagne from.
It was Samhain Eve, Halloween, Sabbath, Sunday. It was our wedding day. It was a holy time, sacred. We were surrounded by our friends and family.
We were also very drunk.
The next day, we made for the coast. Our plan was to spend the next several days, our honeymoon, driving around beautiful Oregon and seeking out the scariest places we could find.
Our first stop was in Bandon, a smallish tourist-y town on the southern coast. We arrived fairly late in the evening and really needed to get off of the road.
We made our way through the foggy streets of town looking for a hotel. There were no cars on the road, no signs of life.
“Well, this is…something” I said.
We pulled into the parking lot of a hotel across the street from what appeared to be the only open coffee shop. The side of the hotel had a mural of a seal painted on it. We were, of course, the only guests in the hotel. We checked in and looked out the windows.
Spooked, we decided to scope out downtown.
Downtown Bandon was nothing but closed shops and one open higher end seafood place. Not counting the restaurant, we saw no other people out and about, just empty foggy streets and the docks.
Mary and I walked down to the docks, our footsteps amazingly loud in the fog and stillness. The black waves were to one side of us and the vacant town on the other. We had set out to look for some of the scariest places Oregon had to offer, but there was no listing in any book of folk stories, no “haunted places” website that mentioned this creepy place. This was an unexpected find.
We stopped and stared out to sea. The air was very cold and sleepiness was overtaking fear. We turned back towards the town. Then we saw it.
Brightly lit and looming out of the fog was one of the largest Masonic halls I have ever seen.
“You know”, Mary said, “any second now Cthullu is going to eat us.”
With that, we made our brisk way back to the hotel. As soon as the sun rose, we got the hell out of town.
Our next stop was Newport. Not only is Newport one of the best coastal towns (good food, beer, lodging, fun), it is home to the Yaquina Bay lighthouse. Located 1.2 miles inland, this 1871 built lighthouse was only operational for three years. Even so, it is one of the more famous Oregon haunts…of sorts.
The story goes that several years after the lighthouse ceased operations, a girl named Muriel and a few of her friends went snooping around in the lighthouse. They found a large tunnel entrance in the floor that was covered with a sheet of metal. Fearing smugglers, pirates, or what have you, they fled. On the way out, Muriel realized that she had forgotten her handkerchief and went back inside, never to come out again.
Her handkerchief and a few drops of blood where discovered by the stairs inside the house.
It is widely believed that this story is a hoax. In fact, it is very similar to the story of “The Haunted Lighthouse” by Lischen Miller, published in Pacific Monthly in 1899.
Still, people claim to hear screams coming from the light house as well as seeing lights in the windows of the residential part of the house.
The private group who now own and operate the lighthouse as a kind of museum do nothing to dispel the rumors of ghosts.
Muriel did not scream while we were there and there was very little spookiness about the place. There was, however, a very lonely feeling atmosphere which had more to do with the location than any kind of spectral activity.
When we got to Forest Grove, things took a ninety degree turn and crashed into the dimension next door. We had booked a room at The Grand Lodge Hotel.
The Grand Lodge is one of the most haunted hotels I have ever heard of. Reports of ghostly activity are so common, there is a “ghost book” kept at the front desk to log all of them.
This very frightening place was built in 1922 as a rest home for freemasons and must be seen to be believed. Two floors and a basement, the place sports a movie theater (formerly a ballroom), two restaurants, several bars, a spa, a game room, and 77 guest rooms. Most of the building has been restored to its original condition and the walls are covered in art full of Masonic/Templar metaphors and local folk tales.
My favorite is a nice painting of the downstairs area. No one is paying any attention as these strange people claw their way up through the basement to steal the children. Nice hotel, eh?
Since this building served as a rest home for 66 years, there is a very good chance that someone did in fact die in your room.
Oh, forgot to mention this. There is no bathroom in the guestrooms. If you have to go, you must make your way down the strangely lit hall full of spooky paintings and weird noises to the stark white tile bathroom that serves the entire floor.
The floor that has the guest rooms on it has two libraries, one at either end. The antechambers of which are decorated with obscure symbols and Masonic writings.
The Overlook Hotel is for wimps!
We had a huge dinner and loads of beer. We even managed to take in the fun but dumb movie “Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow”. Then, night fell.
Once the sun went down, we rehashed the stories we had read about the place. The voices, the apparitions. Nearly every room, including the restaurants and theater, had been the site of a paranormal encounter. From simple cold spots to being restrained by unseen hands and full apparitions, the guests and employees of The Grand Lodge had seen all of it.
We began wandering the halls, avoiding going back to our room. Mary and I looked at the art, took pictures, and wandered some more. The more we looked at the place, the more there was to see. Small paintings of faces on exposed pipes, art hidden behind doors, enough obscure hints and phrases in the artwork (and often in the original architectural features) to keep a conspiracy theorist busy for years. Creeped out of our skins, we did what all the horror movies had taught us to do. We went outside.
The Grand Lodge sits on a huge chunk of land. The lamps in the yard illuminated the Masonic star topiary. The outdoor pub/restaurant was closed for the night and quiet. Next to the hotel itself sits the children’s home.
This small building was established to house the orphans of Freemasons. It now serves as a kind of events hall for the hotel. There was a single light on downstairs and a sign on the door that read “Closed to the public.”
I ran up and put my nose to the glass. Nothing inside. I put my hand on the door handle and suddenly felt like I had to get the hell out of there.
We ran back indoors and continued our “hope we don’t find anything, but hope we kinda do” ghost hunt. We heard doors open and close, footsteps, voices usually at far ends of the hallways. They could have been other guests, but then again…who knows. By the time we got to where the noises had come from, there was no one there. They could have gone into their rooms or downstairs. Then again, the place has its reputation for a reason.
It was getting to be very late and we needed sleep. We needed to build up the courage to be in a dark closed room in this place though. A few shots of Patron later, we were ready.
I found a card next to the bed the next day. Didn’t notice it before. It was a listing of all the rooms. This hotel has names for the rooms rather than numbers. We were in “Master Mason”. I saw that the room next door to us was “Lavender Lady”. According to the card, this room is home to a spirit that makes itself known usually with the scent of lavender. “Master Mason” didn’t seem to have an interesting history to it. I was disappointed and relieved.
While I can’t say for sure that we witnessed any actual paranormal events, I will say that The Grand Lodge is one of the scariest and coolest places in the world.
The last stop on our honeymoon was the Winchester Mystery house. The legends and facts of the house are so well known that I don’t need to go into them here.
The house itself is like the Disneyland of haunted houses with all of the atmosphere you’d expect to find at a shopping mall. The most frightening part was the ticket prices and the constant “buy a souvenir” goading of our tour guide. The place is a bust. The Super 8 we stayed at was another story.
Deep in the hellhole that is San Jose, this Super 8 featured a phone that rang all night for some reason (the front desk said it was a wiring issue), a drug bust in the room next store, and freaks with guns everywhere. If you ever want to end up haunting a dreary place, I’d recommend hanging out in or near that hotel. Someone will be along shortly to take you to the other side.
We didn’t see any full-fledged spooky demon thing or ghost person or anything like that on our “haunted honeymoon”. We did, however, have the time of our lives.
