- In the Northwest Portland house where Jackie Hallock
has her ad agency, a helpful someone has been known to offer commentary
and solve problems.
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- Ad agency swears it isn't creative minds run amok that
summoned its ghost...
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- Jackie Hallock is a woman of standing, her access
to local luminaries virtually unlimited. Why, just the other day she was
taking an espresso with Mayor Vera Katz at an outdoor cafe. In Venice.
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- Every wall of the advertising agency Hallock runs
out of a stately Northwest Portland house is adorned with framed awards,
every window ledge lined with sleek trophies. She wouldn't endanger her
reputation telling kooky stories about the ghosts that haunt the place.
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- But they do.
- It seems Hallock Modey Advertising and Public Relations
is one of many places in the Portland area that receive regular visitors
of another kind. They're not on the payroll. They're not on the client
roster. They're not on the guest list. They're not even of this world.
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- With Halloween nearing, the Tribune went ghost hunting.
The mission: Seek out those among us who live and work at the very gateway
to the other side. And return with their tales.
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- "I don't bring it up a lot," says Hallock,
the wife of former state Sen. Ted Hallock. But she'll gladly talk about
the footsteps she and others have heard when they're alone at the agency.
Or the aroma of lavender that suddenly, inexplicably permeates a room.
Or the apparitions seen ascending the main interior stairwell.
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- Does she have any doubts that the house is haunted?
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- "Zero," she says.
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- And those who would scoff at her eerie stories?
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- "I don't care if they think I'm crazy. Any longer,
it doesn't seem that unusual for me."
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- The house is thought to have been the home of a local
judge after it was built in the first decade of the last century.
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- Working in her second-floor office, Hallock has heard
the footfall of someone approaching on the carpeted stairs.
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- "I would wait for somebody to come in,"
she says, "and then I'd go out there and there was no one there. "
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- A late-night visit
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- Media buyer Gail Williams had been with the agency
for two months when she had her first encounter.
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- "I was working late one night," she says.
"Everybody was gone."
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- From her basement office, she suddenly heard footsteps
on the main floor above her.
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- "I heard somebody running," she says. "I'm
usually one to clean my desk before I leave. That desk was a mess. I hit
the door. I was just weirded out.
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- "About a month later, we were having a birthday
party," she says. "I mentioned it, and everybody stopped eating."
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- Sometime later, Williams was working on the main floor
when, glancing at a mirror near the front door, she saw the reflection
of someone in a black skirt climbing the stairs. None of the agency's seven
full-time employees -- all women -- was wearing a dark dress or skirt that
day.
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- "I said, 'Do we have any guests or clients in
right now?' " she asked her co-workers. "There was nobody."
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- On more than one occasion, Williams has been addressed
by a spectral voice. Preparing to lock up one night, Williams called out
repeatedly for Emma, the agency cat, who must be kept where she won't trip
the alarm system.
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- "All of a sudden, right behind my head, I heard,
'Stop it!' " Williams says. "It wasn't somebody yelling outside.
It was very distinct. Like an older woman, kind of crotchety.
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- "I've never been one to really believe in ghosts,
but I've had so many things that have really tested what I always thought.
I was not imagining things I've heard and seen. I tell you what, there's
some weird stuff going on around here."
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- The case of the black paper
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- Williams has a theory about the ghostly presence:
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- "When you say something out loud and no one else
is there, it's like she thinks you're addressing her."
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- A favorite story involves a copywriter who was searching
fruitlessly for a piece of black paper one day.
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- "We're an ad agency," the woman asked aloud
and of no one in particular, "and we don't have a piece of black paper?"
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- The office copying machine sprang to life behind her.
Its cover in the raised position, the machine produced a single, blackened
sheet of paper.
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- "Copiers just don't copy on their own,"
says Ed Rees, assistant manager at a downtown Kinko's. "It doesn't
happen."
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- Ed Carraway, service technician for Pacific Office
Automation, isn't so sure.
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- "I don't doubt for a minute that it could happen,"
he says. "Copiers, fax machines, printers do odd things all the time
that are unexplained and that I can't reproduce when I go back to them.
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- "It's theoretically possible that some electric
current passed through it that triggered the start button," Carraway
says.
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- "There's more in this world we don't see than
we do see," says Faye Pietrokowski, a Portland psychic counselor who
"read" the Hallock Modey house.
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- "These spirits feel comfortable to me," she
says. "I think there's a good energy, even a lot of healing. I think
you've got a truce here."
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- Hallock Modey Advertising and Public Relations, 2445
N.W. Irving St.
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- Scares on the Shelves
- Want to read more about spooky spots in Oregon? Here
are two recommendations:
- "Oregon's Ghosts and Monsters," by Mike Helm
(Rainy Day Press, 157 pages, $9.95)
- "Ghosts, Critters and Sacred Places of Washington
and Oregon II," by Jefferson Davis (self-published, 190 pages, $12.95)
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- Available at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside
St.
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- © 2003 THE PORTLAND TRIBUNE
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- http://www.portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=20828
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