Ranger Boone spins the legend of the Northwest's most haunted street: a lady at an upstairs window, pacing footsteps, a piano in a dark room, and cold that walks right through you.
Now hold on there — don't you go strolling off down that row of houses just yet. Boone Merrick's the name, and I've got a tale that fits this ground like a worn-in boot. You are looking at Officers' Row, and I'll tell it to you plain: there is not a more storied stretch of haunted ground in all the Pacific Northwest. Look at them. A long, proud line of white houses, porches deep enough to court a sweetheart on, the oldest of them dating clear back to the eighteen-fifties. For the better part of a hundred and fifty years, the Army quartered its officers along here, and the gentry of this whole territory passed through these front doors. A young lieutenant named Ulysses Grant did a turn at this post long before the war made him a household name. Decades on, a fellow named George Marshall kept a house on this very row. Generals and lieutenants, their wives in long dresses, their children running barefoot across that parade ground of an evening. But here is the other side of that ledger, friend. Every soldier who ever marched off this post to the Indian Wars, to Cuba, to the trenches of France — some of them never marched back. And the women on these porches knew it. They waited on these steps for letters that quit coming, and they grieved in these parlors with the curtains drawn. A place soaks up that kind of waiting. It holds onto it, the way old wood holds the smell of woodsmoke. So the stories come easy here, and folks have been telling them a long, long time. The story goes there is a grand house on this row — the biggest and finest of them — where a lady in a long dress is seen of an evening, standing still as a portrait at an upstairs window, watching the parade ground for someone who is never going to come up the walk. They say you'll hear footsteps pacing the boards of an empty hall overhead, slow and patient, back and forth, back and forth. A piano in a locked and dark front room, picking out a few notes with nobody on the bench. Doors that swing shut and latch themselves on a still night with not a breath of wind to blame. And the cold — folks talk most about the cold, the way it'll roll through a warm room of a sudden, like somebody just walked clean through you. More than one caretaker has hung up the keys and walked off the job, and never would say exactly why. Come October, the ghost-walk folks line up by the dozen to hear it all told again, down this very row in the dark. Now, I am a man who trades in tales, not in testimony, so I will not stand here and swear a word of it is true. But I will tell you this. I have stood on one of these porches at dusk, when the light goes gray and the parade ground empties out and the windows behind you go to black, and I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck for no reason a sensible man could name. Maybe it is just old houses and a long memory. Or maybe some of those who waited here are waiting yet. You walk this row slow, and you decide for yourself. And if a door you did not touch should happen to ease shut behind you — well. You did not hear me say I told you so.