I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I have had my share of Twilight Zone experiences. Once, after my young beagle died from a bad heart, I turned and saw a pup watching me from behind the glass patio door. Oh, look how cute Linus is, I thought, assuming it was my other pup. That’s when I looked down and found Linus right at my feet. And still the little mystery pup inside gazed on.
Not so long ago, I dreamed I was inside a casket. It seemed it was the only way I could get inside a particular building. I wasn’t scared, but I was concerned about staying hidden while the mourners paid their respects to the corpse with me. A day or so later, a grocery store clerk told me that a friend who lived near me had died. For reasons, I can’t explain, I drove by his friend’s address — and discovered it was the home of the man who’d built my house.
Heceta Head Lighthouse Bed and Breakfast innkeeper Steve Bursey also doesn’t know if he believes in ghosts. Rather, he’s the kind who likes logical explanations. Alas, at the little bed and breakfast, formerly the lighthouse caretaker’s home, he doesn’t always get them.
One explanation is Rue, an apparition in gray named by college students back in the ’70s when the Heceta Head caretaker’s house was a satellite campus for the Lane Community College. They came up with the name during a session with the Ouija Board. It was an era when strange stories about the house were so persistent, they made local news. The Siuslaw Pioneer Museum even has a file of them.
You might not find such stories in the news today, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still happening.
The early history of the lighthouse caretakers is not well recorded. But what is known, said Bursey, is that an innkeeper’s daughter died on the property after drowning in a cistern. She was buried there, though the headstone has long been reclaimed by brambles and all the other wildness of the Oregon Coast.
The story that initially gained the house ghostly notoriety occurred when a contractor named Jim was in the attic alone. There appeared before him a woman in a flowing gray gown. Jim was so spooked, he dove head first down the attic hatch. “It was quite a fall he chose to take,” Bursey said. “He ran off and left all his tools.”
But he did eventually return to work. This time he was on the outside; and sure enough, there was Rue watching him from within. “In his haste to get down the ladder he broke the window,” Bursey said. “That night, the caretakers, who had no idea what had happened to Jim, awoke to a sound like glass being swept.” The next morning, they found the glass swept up in a neat pile.
Innkeeper now for 17 years, Bursey has heard plenty of stories, and he’s experienced a few mysteries himself. Like the holiday season a slide closed the highway, stranding a family who had come for an open house. Bursey pulled out some cots and the family spent the night on the first floor.
“In the morning, at breakfast, the father said to his teen son, ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened.’ The son was embarrassed and also a little shook up. He said he felt someone sit on his legs and he could see the cot depress from their weight. That’s the most common experience … the sensation of someone sitting on their legs. I’ve heard that from over a dozen guests.”
And there were other oddities.
“In the ’70s, there were a lot of power outages,” Bursey said. “Numerous people tell me they would drive up the coast and the whole coast would be dark except a light in the attic. It was always a mystery.”
Once, the housekeeper couldn’t get in a guest room bathroom. Fearing something had happened to a guest, she summoned Bursey. “I put the ladder up and looked in. There was no one there. It has a deadbolt. You have to slide the bolt over. There was no way the door could lock itself, but it had.”
So what does Bursey think?
“I am a critic,” he said. “I try to find a reason for everything, but in living here, there have been things that happened that I and no one else can explain. There have been too many experiences to dismiss.”
Lori Tobias covered the coast for The Oregonian for nine years. She lives in Newport, where she freelances for a number of regional and national publications, as well as the occasional post for her blog loritobias.com.
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