Princeton Street

Residential Home on Princeton St. in Portland, OR.

Not every haunting consists of sightings - some ghosts may prefer to express themselves as sounds or as smells, as in this case...

The house is an ugly two-story house on North Princeton Street in Portland.  The ghosts reported by a previous occupant never appeared visually, but instead preferred to make their presence known by two of the other human senses - smell and hearing.  The most prominent of the sounds were footsteps that one could hear making their way from the bedroom to the bathroom, both upstairs.  Usually they occurred when only one person was home, or when only one person was awake.  Once, the footsteps were heard by a young lady who lived in the house, and she knew that her parents were upstairs asleep.  As soon as she heard the footsteps begin, she ran to the stairs to see if she could catch whomever (or whatever) was making the sound.   Running up the stairs, she turned the corner to find...nothing.  And her parents were sound asleep in their room, oblivious to the entire incident.

The house also apparently has visitors who use the front door - but not the screen.  You see, when her father renovated the house, our resident reports, he installed a screen door to go with the front door.  A usual improvement.   What was unusual were the sounds of the front door opening and closing at random times, without any accompanying sound from the screen door.  This occurred quite frequently to everyone who lived in the house.

Another sound reported by one of the young women who lived in the house would scare anyone.  She reported that while sleeping in the basement, she would hear a woman scream - right next to her ear, just as she was about to fall asleep.   She says that it happened three times, and that after hanging a cross in her room, the screaming no longer occurred.

So those are the sounds - what about the smells?  Well, when the reporting resident's sister was a teen, a strange smell began to permeate the room.   The smell was only detected by the sister and mother, but not by any of the other family members.  Since the sister was a teen, they figured there was simply some old laundry, or food, left around that was causing the smell, so they tore apart the room, finding nothing.  They opened all the windows in the room, but the smell remained for a full two days, at which point it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.  Her sister, asked recently about the smell, said that it smelled "like death...or decomposition."

The present owner and resident of the house reports no unusual occurrences. 

There are a few interesting sidenotes to this story - the first is that while renovating the house, the father apparently discovered two items inside one of the basement walls - a bar of lye soap wrapped in turn-of-the-century newspaper and a kewpie doll.   Also, the resident's aunt (who owned the house prior to them moving in) reports that she would occasionally hear the creaking of a rocking chair from downstairs, when everyone in the house was fast asleep.  Upon investigation, she would see the chair rocking, with no one in it. 

The aunt also apparenly told a story about the history of the house, which may explain some of the events.  This story, set at the turn-of-the-century, involves a travelling business man whose wife dies while he was away from town.  Their child told her father, "Mommy still comes to tuck me in at night," weeks after the death.  When the father asked how she knew this was so, the child responded that she could see the imprint on the covers of her bed where her mother would sit.

Whether or not this story is true, the bedroom that had the "smell" in it happens to be the same bedroom that the little girl supposedly lived in.  Coincidence?

Source:  Ghosts of North Portland - H.Michael Ball