Do you believe in ghosts?<\/p>\n
That was a question I was asking myself this past week, after attending the city\u2019s birthday party at the Kent Historical Museum.<\/p>\n
I was shooting pictures during an awards presentation at the museum, and discovered an odd blip on one of my photos.<\/p>\n
You can see it for yourself \u2013 it\u2019s that light-colored orb on the far right of the photo.<\/p>\n
Normally I would think it was a trick of the light, or a smudge on my camera lens, but the weird thing is, none of my other photos (all shot within seconds of this one and from the exact same place) show this thing again.<\/p>\n
In the mood for a good story, I called museum Director Linda Wagner and asked if she\u2019d heard of things like this before at the museum. She, in turn, sent me the link to Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle Tacoma (www.aghost.us.)<\/p>\n
The Federal-Way-based paranormal group has done investigations at the Kent Historical Museum before, as well as other phenomena in the region, so this sort of thing is not new to them.<\/p>\n
I put a call through to AGHOST\u2019s founder and president Ross N. Allison, and sent him the picture. This is what I heard, when it comes to blips on photos and mysterious-looking orbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely an interesting picture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Does he think it\u2019s a ghost?<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, the common belief is it is a form of energy,\u201d Allison said. \u201cSome believe it\u2019s tied to spirit energy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allison, who said he likes to keep his mind open to all the possibilities (\u201cwe\u2019re still exploring our minds, our bodies, our universe. We don\u2019t have all the answers\u201d), said he believes there are multiple reasons for phenomena like the orb I may (or may not have) captured in a photo.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re finding in 80 percent of most hauntings, it\u2019s a residual energy,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery house you\u2019re living in, you\u2019re leaving energy behind. It doesn\u2019t mean there is an active haunting there, just residual energy.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s not saying \u201cno\u201d to ghosts, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s lots of reasons why a ghost may linger,\u201d he said, noting some believe there are unresolved issues in a death, or loose ends, for a spirit to remain lurking in the places where it once lived.<\/p>\n
Whatever the reason, Allison said this isn\u2019t the first time he\u2019s seen an energy orb, or other paranormal phenomena, associated with the Kent Historical Museum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were stories circulating about some interesting phenomena,\u201d he said. \u201cThe (motion-sensitive) alarm kept going off – it could never be explained. There were definitely people feeling the presence of someone there. There was a vision of a woman standing at the top of the stairs, sounds of children playing. There\u2019s definitely something interesting going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bud Battles, a past president of the Kent Historical Society, said he\u2019d heard the stories as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were cold chills, strange noises, bottles moving from one location to another, and not actually being seen \u2013 but somehow they got there,\u201d he said. \u201cThere does seem to be a tendency of strange happenings in this house every once in a while, and people have attributed it to ghosts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a house that has had a lot of history and a lot of people living in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Battles said people have seen the house in terms of their beliefs – meaning one person\u2019s orb may be another person\u2019s trick of light.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s what you believe,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s acknowledgement of the fact that we have a special house and it\u2019s a home that goes back to 1908.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emil Bereiter, Kent\u2019s mayor from 1912-1913 and the original owner of the house, has his own unusual story, that Battles related.<\/p>\n
Bereiter died suddenly in 1914, of unknown causes.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy speculation is it\u2019s a heart attack,\u201d Battles said, noting just before Bereiter\u2019s death, the bookkeeper at his mill absconded with a large sum of cash, fleeing to California.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen he (Bereiter) died, his wife and two kids were basically left destitute and had to sell the house,\u201d Battles said.<\/p>\n
There have been other stories of lives lived in that house as well – of the Saito family, whose American patriarch, shipping magnate Ernest K. Saito, was shipped to a Japanese internment camp during World War II.<\/p>\n
There were, no doubt, joys as well as sorrows, in this place that was a home for so many years.<\/p>\n
So, going back to the mysterious orb in my photo:<\/p>\n
Make of it what you will.<\/p>\n
I, for one, want to see it as the benign presence of Mayor Bereiter, greeting his guests, for a municipal birthday party he wouldn\u2019t want to miss. Heck, it\u2019s not like he had anything else going on, right?<\/p>\n
Battles is keeping an open mind about the unusual aspects of the old mansion, which still has so many of the furnishings and accoutrements that its early owners put in it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottom line is, it\u2019s a very nice museum and I\u2019m willing to go ahead and celebrate its history,\u201d Battles said. \u201cIf there happens to be a couple of spirits in there, we\u2019ll celebrate them, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do you have stories of unusual phenomena at the Kent Historical Museum, or other old buildings in the area? Share them with us! We\u2019ll be printing them as we receive them, on our Web site, and as space allows, in our print publication.<\/p>\n
E-mail your stories to me at lpierce@kentreporter.com, or send them to me via snail mail at: Kent Reporter Editor, 19426 68th Ave. S., Kent, WA 98032.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do you believe in ghosts?
\nThat was a question I was asking myself this past week, after attending the city\u2019s birthday party at the Kent Historical Museum.
\nI was shooting pictures during an awards presentation at the museum, and discovered an odd blip on one of my photos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":1521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-1520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}