Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner On cold, rainy, foggy nights, there are folks who say they've seen a ghostly boy on the bridge at the Elochoman Salmon Hatchery, outside of Cathlamet. |
Haunted Hatchery
Tuesday, October 29, 2002 8:41 AM PST
By Leslie Slape
Printable version
E-mail this articleCATHLAMET -- When Doug Carter went fishing on that chilly morning, he caught something he didn't expect.
"I don't believe in ghosts. I don't even believe in UFOs. I'm an outdoors person, all the time. I don't believe in Bigfoot, I don't believe in nothing. But what I saw, I can't deny," said Carter, 49, a former Longview resident who now lives in Tacoma.
"I don't drink, don't use drugs," he said. "I'm not the type who tells tales."
Sometime in the 1980s -- he can't recall the exact year -- he decided to try his luck fishing on the Elochoman River near Cathlamet. He arrived at the Elochoman Salmon Hatchery long before dawn.
"It was 28 degrees, snowing, really cold, no house for miles," he said. "I was crossing over the bridge to the hatchery. Everything was lit up like a football field, and there was a little boy walking right in front of my truck."
He said when his headlights hit the boy, it was as if "he came out of thin air." Carter stopped his truck.
"I'm thinking, 'How did he get ahead of me?' " he said. "The kid spun around, looked right at me, leaned to his right, put his arms into the air and literally disappeared into thin air. Boom. Gone. He didn't run. My lights and the fish hatchery lights were on him; it was as bright as a parking lot. He just disappeared right in front of my eyes."
"It was definitely something," said Sam Lundgren of Cathlamet. Lundgren, who retired from the hatchery in 1999, said he saw the boy's ghost "a dozen or so" times in the 13 years he worked there.
"Usually this time of year when it's raining and stormy out we'd be up cleaning an intake screen," he said. "We'd look back and see somebody standing in the hatchery."
He said workers would hurry back into the hatchery to see who it was, but no one was ever there.
"You wouldn't see wet footprints," he said. "He never bothered anything or like that. He seemed to be there -- and not."
The boy, whom he estimated to be 12 or 13, appeared so frequently that workers stopped getting spooked.
"You got used to it," he said. "It was, 'Oh yeah, he's back.' "
That's why he didn't think about warning his son, Sam Jr., when he helped the night watchman at the hatchery one stormy night when he was 14 or 15 years old.
"He was checking upper pond, right there by the intake," Lundgren said. "He came walking back and saw somebody inside. He went running back. There were no footprints or wet spots or anything. He told me, and I said, 'That's just the ghost. If you see him I want to talk to him. I'll put him to work.' "
He said fishermen often saw the boy.
"We've had people come in and see a boy standing at the end of bridge soaking wet. They'd stop to help but he'd disappeared."
Lundgren added, "Supposedly years ago a boy drowned. I don't know, that's what I was told, and they assumed it's him."
Though many people have drowned in Wahkiakum County, no one can think of a boy who drowned in the Elochoman on a stormy night.
"It was way before my time," said Sheriff Gene Strong, who began working for the Wahkiakum County Sheriff's Office in 1977.
He had heard of Carter's sighting, but no other appearances.
"It's not a well-known Cathlamet legend of a haunting on the bridge," he said. "He may truly believe he saw something -- but what, nobody knows."
According to Carter, the boy he saw was about 12 or 13 years old and wore a baseball cap.
His dog Duke, a brawny mix of Rottweiler pit bull, boxer and Great Dane, went "absolutely nuts."
"He started barking when he saw the boy. He saw it too, no doubt," said Carter, who let Duke out of the cab. "He ran right for that spot and started circling. He was a real good sniffer. He sniffed in five circles, then put his tail down and ran right for the truck. Duke didn't back down from anything, nothing, but he sensed something and got back in the truck real quick. He wouldn't get out of the truck again."
Carter said when he found no trace of the boy, he "freaked out," positive he'd seen a ghost.
"The shock that went through my body, my mind -- I was completely out of air," he said.
He said it was hard to talk about it, but he told his sister, Gloria Cook of Longview.
Cook, who said she's not superstitious, wanted proof.
"He said, 'Do me a favor, go to the fish hatchery and tell me if you see anything weird,' " she said. She and her husband, Terry, drove there at 3 a.m. the following morning.
"We had cameras and a video recorder with us. Me, the big sister, I'm saying, 'We'll get up there and get a picture,' " she said.
They didn't see a ghost, but they definitely got the shivers.
"It's an eerie, creepy place," she said. "You feel uncomfortable when it's dark and gloomy. We went across the bridge and into the parking lot. Then my husband and I looked at each other and said, 'Let's get out of here.'
"Take a trip out there in the morning," she said. "It's ... different."
Carter, who has never been back to the Elochoman, said he thinks about the ghost every day.
"There is another dimension to our whole life. There is another life after ours; there has to be."
To reach reporter Leslie Slape, call 577-2523 or e-mail leslie@tdn.com
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