People who take stock of the supernatural wouldn’t have a hard time imagining that the Lewis County Historical Museum might be an ideal home for the undead.

With photographs and artifacts spanning centuries of life in Southwest Washington, the musty old museum reeks of history as it creaks and settles through time.

Having closed as a passenger depot in the early 1970s, it was to be torn down until local residents banded together to shore up records and artifacts that came to form displays in the early 1980s.

Debbie Knapp, director of the downtown museum, said she isn’t sure whether or not to believe there are ghosts haunting her place of employment. Though the stories are widely circulated, Knapp said she has had only one moment at the museum she would define as “creepy.” “I was here late, by myself, and I heard someone sneeze,” said Knapp, who is certain she was the only person in the building. “I decided that it was probably a good time to leave for the night.”

Jill Kangas, a Lewis County Sheriff’s Office emergency planner, is sure she saw and heard more than a simple sneeze. She helped lead the 150 volunteers who put in long hours to get the museum in order and organize decades worth of stored goods. “You’d hear drawers open. You’d hear the old-fashioned roller chairs rolling across the ground,” Kangas said. “Very often, we’d

hear roll-top desks closing, and that’s a very unique sound ... but there weren’t any there.”

Late one night -- alone -- Kangas had an even closer encounter with the unexplainable. Per her usual routine, she locked the entrances when no one else was around. When it was time to turn the lights out, Kangas walked into the narrow closet where the breaker switches are. “I got down to the sixth row of breakers, and I heard this voice behind me,” Kangas said. “I heard this voice say, ‘Excuse me ma’am.” In the doorway, Kangas said she saw a petite young woman, maybe 18, dressed in late 1890s black wool dress and holding a small crocheted travel bag in her folded hands. Kangas said the figure was not a light or a shadow, but a flesh-and blood figure characteristically smaller than a modern woman would be. “She probably weighed about 85 pounds ... had her hair coming up in curls on the side with a black bonnet tied on the side with a big sash,” Kangas said. “She turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Has the train come yet?’ She turned around and took one step in the hallway, turned to the right, took three steps on the terrazzo (floor), and nothing.” Panic gripped Kangas. She slammed the door, ran out of the museum and got into her car in the parking lot and locked the door. “It makes the hair come up on the back of my neck just to think about it,” Kangas said.

She said the other volunteers laughed at her when she told her story, but she and two tourists would later see a slender conductor, in the old conductor’s office at the far end of the depot, walking back and forth writing notes on a clipboard.

“I don’t think I have clairvoyance or ESP,” Kangas said. “I’m just an average person secure enough to tell about what I saw. If it gives someone else peace about what they might have seen, that’s good.”

The Lewis County Historical Museum is housed in the historic, 1912 turn of the century, Northern Pacific Railway Depot. The Northern Pacific Railroad (NP) reached the Chehalis River in 1872 from Kalama on the Columbia and the line reached Tacoma the following year. Today it is operated by the Lewis County Historical Society, it is dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of Lewis County, Washington.
 

The Chehalis Western purchased trackage from Milwaukee Road on a portion from Chehalis to Raymond line in 1936 and operated it as non-common carrier Chehalis Western Railroad. The line bought was 18 miles from Chehalis to Dryad. This line was not needed any more by the Milwaukee Road as it operated over a nearby Northern Pacific branch line. The Chehalis Western used only the first nine miles of this trackage from Chehalis to Ruth. A new line was built south from Ruth to Camp McDonald to where timber was ready to be cut. The logs would be taken from Camp McDonald to a log dump at South Bay near Olympia. In late 1975 the line was cutback to Curtis where a log reload was built. This truncated railroad was reorganized into the Curtis, Millburn and Eastern on December 1st, 1975. The logs were now taken from Curtis to Chehalis where they were handed over to the Milwaukee Road. When the Milwaukee Road abandoned all of its trackage west of Miles City, Montana the Curtis, Millburn & Eastern Railroad was absorbed into a new Chehalis Western. The former Milwaukee Road route to South Bay was taken over by the new Chehalis Western. The Chehalis-Centralia Railroad Association was formed in 1986 as a nonprofit corporation. The founders were a group of local citizens whose goal was to restore a 1916 logging locomotive that had been placed in a Chehalis park thirty years earlier. Early the following year, the restoration was begun and over the next two years, several railroad cars were acquired. With restoration completed, scheduled operations began in the summer of 1989 over a section of former Milwaukee Road track in the Chehalis-Centralia area. The Chehalis Western then shut down in 1992. The entire line was sold to the City of Tacoma in 1995 and renamed the Tacoma Eastern Railroad. It lasted just three years when in 1998 the railroad was taken over by Tacoma Rail.