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Lewis County is famous for many paranormal happenings. Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 UFO sighting helped coin the phrase “flying saucer,” and the county’s forests are hot spots for sasquatch sighting reports. County residents are no strangers to encountering the unexplainable.
Along with Bigfoot and aliens, many also believe there are numerous spirits haunting multiple locations throughout the county. With Halloween approaching, more than 60 patrons packed McMenamins Olympic Club’s theater in Centralia on Tuesday, Oct. 15, to learn more about some of those supposed spirits during Olympia Oddities podcast host Trista Heenan’s “Phantoms of the Past: Exploring Lewis County’s Ghost Stories” presentation.
Heenan discussed both well known hauntings, including ones at the Olympic Club itself, and lesser known ghostly legends. Some of these included the “lumberjack at the bar,” which allegedly haunts a 123-year-old Napavine bar, and the intersection of Tower Avenue and Main Street in Centralia where three men fell into a well in 1891 and died from exposure to toxic gasses. “It’s said that after this, they just sealed it up and paved it over, with the mens’ bodies never being removed,” Heenan said.
Some walking in the intersection have reported hearing coughing sounds, but were unable to identify the location they were coming from, she said. Originally built in 1908 and remodeled in 1913, according to Heenan, the Olympic Club is just a half a block away from the Tower and Main intersection. The Olympic Club is also allegedly home to many spirits, as everything from murders to the arrest of the infamous bank and train robber Roy Gardner has happened within the 116-year-old hotel.
“I’ve even booked a stay here myself in the room where bank robber Roy Gardner was caught, in hopes of experiencing something paranormal,” Heenan said. “Well, nothing happened that night, except for some incredibly drunk neighbors keeping me up.” While Heenan didn’t personally experience anything during her stay at the Olympic Club, other hotel guests have reported doorknobs jiggling by themselves and then getting stuck for a few seconds with nobody on the other side of the door, and others have even seen physical apparitions.
“(One patron) had seen figures at the bar and restaurant areas, and heard a voice simply say ‘Hi’ to them while they were alone,” Heenan said. “There’s also reports of the staff noticing clocks were changing the time they were set to by themselves, and alarms going off for no reason.” A bartender also reportedly saw an ashtray thrown across the room with nobody around, and both hotel guests and employees have reported seeing a ghostly figure standing by an old cast iron stove on display inside the hotel.
Some have even nicknamed this apparition “Elmer.” “He’s seen by a lot of people,” Heenan added. Moving out of Centralia, Frosty’s Saloon & Grill in Napavine actually predates the town itself, with Frosty’s having been built in 1901 as a watering hole for local loggers.
Napavine was officially incorporated in 1913. “It’s one of the oldest continually operating saloons in the state of Washington,” Heenan said. Aside from a bar, the location has also been a candy store, a barber shop and a brothel.
Many believe the spirits of some of those who first frequented the saloon never left. “Customers and employees have both reported sightings of a ghostly figure dressed in logging attire. This apparition often appears sitting at the bar, like he’s waiting patiently to be served a drink,” Heenan said.
“Others have seen the figure of a woman in a blue dress, possibly a nod to the establishment’s former past as a brothel.” In the neighboring community of Winlock, a section of forest known as Brenson’s Hollow is reportedly home to both wayward spirits and cryptids, with some people saying they’ve encountered a Bigfoot-like white figure approximately 10 feet tall with red eyes. The cryptid has been spoofed on the Brenson’s Hollow Facebook page where a mossy tree stump was dressed up to look like a monster called the “feared and mythical Olequa Creek Creature,” or the “Winlock-ness Monster.
” As for the spirits, Brenson’s Hollow was originally a homestead for the Snow family, who built a log cabin in the area in 1890. The family lived there until 1908 when they sold the property and moved; however, Snow family members who were buried there were left. The cabin was destroyed by a fire and the land is now on private property and inaccessible to the public, but many visitors to the area in the past have reported ominous feelings or the feeling of being watched.
“Some even reported their car wouldn’t start once they did leave,” Heenan said. In East Lewis County, Heenan discussed the construction of the Mossyrock Dam, which claimed a total of five lives during its construction in the mid-1960s, including three on the same day. In 2022, Heenan, along with a fellow podcast host, her ex-boyfriend and some other friends, were returning from Mount Rainier and decided to take a scenic route back while geocaching, which led them to Mossyrock Dam along U.
S. Highway 12. As they were about to leave, they heard an “impossibly loud splash.
” They sprinted down the steps toward the lakeshore as they though maybe someone had fallen or jumped from the top of the dam. “The weirdest thing was, the waters were absolutely still. We stuck around the area for about a half hour, trying to figure out what could’ve made that sound, and that loud of a sound, too,” Heenan said.
“Maybe a fish? Nope, we saw several fish jump up during that time, and none of them made a sound that even came close.” Later, back at home, Heenan researched the dam and found a Sept. 2, 1967, article in The Chronicle that detailed the deaths of the three men who died on Sept.
1. Those three men had been riding a platform when the crane holding the platform fell over and the cables holding it suddenly snapped, dropping the men into a 300-foot freefall to their deaths on the riverbed below. “I’m still not sure what I heard that day,” Heenan said.
“All I know is it was loud, and we both had that gut instinct that someone had just fallen into the water.” She also happened to be visiting right around the same time in the year as when the accident occurred in 1967. “Maybe the men wanted their story heard .
.. or they just wanted to give us the fright of a lifetime.
Either way, I’m here with you today telling you their story, so we all know the names of Dale Rael, John Roth and Mark Montague, and what caused their deaths that fateful day,” Heenan said. A memorial plaque is located at Mossyrock Dam with the names of Rael, Roth and Montague on it along with the other two workers who died during the dam’s construction, Donald Staf ford and Bernard Evans..
