Ghost!

I'm reading Susan Casey's, "The Devil's Teeth" -- an account of the Farallone Islands, a noted Great White Shark hunting area frequented by researchers, with a long and unusual history, and on page 111, there's a ghost story in it, which is especially interesting because of the concentration of scientists on the island who believe they witnessed things there, and the amusingly named room that appears to be the worst of the allegedly-haunted areas...

"Peter and Scot informed me that the Jane Fonda bedroom was notoriously haunted.  'There's a ghost there,' Peter said matter-of-factly, after a few beers. 'It's a woman.'

'In the house?' I'm not sure why I found this surprising. If any place deserved to be infested with ghosts, it was the Farallones.

'Around the island. There was a body found in a cave.' He went on to explain that a century ago, a well-preserved skeleton of a woman had been found in Rabbit Cave, down by East Landing, close to the site of the original Russian settlement. Most people assumed she was an Aleut slave; it was their custom to entomb their dead. But others believed she was a Caucasian, a claim they insisted could be confirmed by her dental work. The truth is that no one really knows, and there is no record of her death. Her bones remain on the island, buried near the cave's entrance.

In the years since there had been reports of odd, ghostlike encounters: trouble breathing was commonly cited, as were chills, whispering voices, glimpses of shadowy silhouettes moving across the cart path, footsteps and doors slamming in the night. Now, it's one thing for a few people sitting around on heebie-jeebie island to wind themselves up thinking about ghosts. It's another thing altogether for that group to be composed entirely of scientists, most of whom would rather eat dirt than admit to any sort of belief in the paranormal. But at the Farallones some very logical minds had been flummoxed and terrified by unexplainable encounters.

In the mid-eighties, Peter told me, a biologist was walking back to the house in the last, foggy light of day when he noticed a woman with long dark hair standing on the marine terrace in a filmy white dress. Figuring it was one of the two female biologists on the island, albeit in a fairly strange getup, he continued on his way into the house -- where he immediately encountered the two women, sitting on the living room couch. He turned on his heel and ran back outside, but the woman in the white dress had vanished, though there was really no place she could have vanished to, short of jumping into the ocean. 'And he was Mr. Science!' Peter recounted, snickering. 'A guy who would do things like rebuild the transmitter. He said it made a believer out of him.'

On another occasion, a visiting botanist was intercepted sleepwalking out the front door in the middle of the night, screaming, "NO! I'm NOT going up there!" When someone tugged on his arm and woke him, he explained that a dark-haired woman was trying to entice him to climb to the lighthouse with her.

'What about you?' I asked them. 'Had any ghost action out there personally?'

They both nodded vigorously.

'Oh, I've had scary experiences,' Scot said. 'You get the creeps. It's the feeling of a presence around you. It usually happens when you're alone. At night.'

For Peter, one incident in particular stood out: he awoke to loud, thudding footsteps on the stairs, followed by the front door slamming, an attic trap door in the Jane Fonda bedroom stuttering rapidly, and a chill wind that blew through the house, rattling the windows from the inside, after the door shut. At the time he was one of four people on the island, all of whom were cowering together in one bedroom, scared witless. There was no extra set of human feet that could possibly have been pounding up and down the stairs that night -- they all knew it, and they all felt it. This had occurred more than a decade ago, and I could see that telling the story still gave him a chill.

'Certain rooms are scarier than others,' Scot said, fingering his glass. 'That Jane Fonda Room...the one you stayed in...'

'Yeah, that's the one where most things happen,' Peter agreed. 'I've never liked that room, either.'

'I stayed there for awhile. Man, I couldn't wait to get out of that room.'"