The Portland Memorial is at SE Fourteenth Avenue and Bybee Street. For hours, call 503-236-4141.3. Mount Gleall Castle

In 1892 pioneer Charles H. Piggott set out to build a castle “in which no two rooms would be alike and in which there would be no angles or straight lines.” To name it, he combined the first two letters of each of his children’s first names: Gladys, Earl, and Lloyd. Using bricks from the brickyard he owned on Sandy Boulevard, he built his castle at 2591 SW Buckingham Avenue, on the hillside south of Portland State University. A year later, in 1893, Piggott lost his fortune and had to sell his dream home.

In the hundred-plus years since then, the castle has had almost as many residents. In the 1960s it was available as a fantasy rental, and Portland natives say the Grateful Dead crashed there long enough to give Piggott s castle the nickname “the Dead Castle.” People also say Piggott’s ghost has never left the turreted, brick castle, now painted white, with a sauna installed in the tower.

Nobody was more surprised than Mike Eadie, owner of Hoodoo Antiques, when people told him that a woman was lurking inside his shop late at night. When it was closed and locked, the alarms were set, and Mike was home with his wife, you could look in through the big display windows and see a woman in a long dress and a bonnet standing near the back of the shop.

Years ago, Eadie’s mother-in-law, Ellen Wellborn, had an artist’s studio in the Erickson s Saloon building nearby,

once a major combination of gambling hall, beer parlor, and whorehouse, boasting the longest bar in the world. In what was once a prostitutes crib, Ellen found a lovely pencil portrait tucked between the clapboards of the wall. The picture is oval, about six by four inches, and shows a young woman wearing a bonnet and a typical 1860s dark dress.

Ellen gave it to Mike, who’s hung the small picture in his store, just inside the front door, but not so you can see it from the street. Even inside, unless you know where to look, you’d never notice it.

Since then, night after night, walking tours pass the shop and see someone inside. They insist she’s not a reflection, the woman in a long dress and bonnet, standing in the shadows near the back of the store. Still, the motion detectors don’t trip. And nothing is ever taken.

There are parts of the Bagdad Theater at 3702 SE Hawthorne Boulevard that the employees just don’t go into.

Built by Universal Studios as a movie palace in 1927, the theater offered live vaudeville acts until the 1940s. Today it’s a combination beer pub and movie theater. Behind the huge movie screen is a separate theater, closed since the 1970s, that may someday become condominiums and a rooftop bar. But right now, it’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a movie projectionist who hanged himself behind the screen on Christmas Eve decades ago.

That story is decades old. Whenever the auditorium’s cantankerous lighting system acts up, they’ve always blamed the suicide.

According to theater manager Jason McEllrath, someone hung a cardiopulmonary resuscitation dummy behind the screen. They hung it years ago, and the dusty, spooky thing still dangles back there, ready to scare the uninitiated.

The theater basements are another story. The front one, along SE Hawthorne, is pretty ordinary. However, the back basements under the stage and backstage . . . “That’s just plain scary,” Jason says. “There’s no lights, and it’s full of creepy junk. Doors that go nowhere. We just don’t go down there.”

A few years ago, this former Carnegie library at 512 N Killingsworth Street was renovated and security cameras were installed throughout. Every few seconds the view from a different one of the cameras appears on the video monitor behind the front desk. Soon after renovation, librarians watching the monitor saw an old man seated alone in the enormous second-floor meeting hall. The image only appears for a few seconds before the system cycles to the view from the next camera, but it shows enough to panic the staff. Still, every time they stampede upstairs to find the trespasser, they find the meeting room locked and empty.

This park gets its name from the towering gothic arches that carry the Saint John’s Bridge overhead. These arches march through the park, creating a sort-of cathedral effect. It’s a wide-open park of lawns and play equipment, but not long ago it was a wasteland of briar thickets and hobo jungles, warehouses, and old wharves.

For most of the twentieth century local kids earned summer money by picking strawberries, raspberries, and boysenberries on outlying farms. These kids would wait, early in the morning, on street corners where the “Berry Buses” would pick them up. The buses took them to work and brought them home.

Once called Wappato Island, this island between the Columbia River, the Willamette River, and the Multnomah Channel was home to a village of some fifty thousand members of the Multnomah tribe. Even before Portland was founded, smallpox brought by early explorers had left the island a deserted ruin of rotting huts and scarred survivors.

Today you can still find arrowheads scattered along the Columbia River beaches. Early morning joggers and late-evening walkers also report almost identical encounters with a naked Multnomah youth. The adolescent boy walks along the waterline and doesn’t seem aware of anything except the river and the sand.

At first glance the photograph looks ordinary. It shows the wood-paneled Tea Court of the Heathman Hotel at 1001 SW Broadway. There are paintings by Andy Warhol. A crystal chandelier from the American embassy in Czechoslovakia. A big, blazing fireplace. Flowers, plants, chairs, and sofas. There’s the grand piano where Sting and Wyn-ton Marsalis and Arlo Guthrie sit and play for hours when they stay here.

In the photograph it’s September 21, 2001, and the hotel’s previous owners are officially passing the keys to the new owners. Near the fireplace, just outside the circle of people, a soft, glowing figure stands beside a chair. It’s nothing you’d notice at first, but it’s there.

“A guy took this picture,” says Jeff Jobe, the hotel’s general manager, “and the ghost was there. We’ve tried to reason it away, but we can’t. Those lamps in the photo only have thirty-watt bulbs in them.”

Charles Barkley stays here, signing his name “Billy Crystal.” Billy Crystal stays here, signing as “Charles Barkley.” For satirist David Sedaris, the Heathman is a second home, the only place he’d want to live in the United States outside of New York City. Jeff says, “At some point in the history of the hotel, this became the place for authors to stay. It’s just the buzz.” In fact so many famous writers stay here, the hotel’s library has collected some three thousand signed first editions.

It’s easy to see why guests keep coming back-and why some guests have never left.

Larry Adams, the hotel’s director of operations, can tell you the maids are a little squeamish about cleaning Rooms 803 and 703. If a guest is going to complain, chances are they’re booked in 803 or one of the rooms directly below it. People return to 803 or 703 to find the bottles of water half drunk. Desks are moved. Beds are mussed. Towels used. Cups and glasses are turned over. The television is turned on or a chair is moved. Of course, they complain.

But when Larry or Jeff check the key card system, it shows no one has entered the room since the last time the guest left. “There’s no way to fudge the system,” Jeff says. “You just can’t get in.”

In September 1999, the psychic Char, author of Questions from Earth, Answers from Heaven, stayed in Room 703. Another psychic, Echo Bodiene, stayed in the room for a week to dialogue with the spirit. The two women agree it’s the spirit of a man who jumped from Room 803, committing suicide and now haunting each room he looked into on his way down.

Larry says the man was scarred or deformed in some way. “People made fun of the way he looked, and he was tired of it,” he says, adding the suicide took place not long after the hotel opened in 1927.

In 1975 a blind guest named Harris killed himself in Room 303. His body was found by housekeeper Fidel Semper, now retired from the hotel. Employees and guests also report cold spots in the hallways, phantoms breezing past them, and the sound of footsteps on the grand staircase when it’s empty.

A ghost named Lydia is supposed to haunt the Pied Cow Coffeehouse, a Victorian mansion at 3244 SE Belmont Street. The restaurant that occupied the space previously,

In the bathrooms the trash lids start to swing by themselves. Water will start running in the bathroom sinks. You’ll hear the sounds of someone doing their business in empty toilet stalls. Some mornings, the staff will arrive early to find the water running in sinks. Some nights, they’ll hear the noise of parties in the private upstairs dining rooms that are empty.

At the Rose and Raindrop Restaurant, server Jenna Hill says, “A lot of people will go into the bathroom late at night and come out looking kind of pale.”

Built by Edward Holman in 1880, the building at 532 SE Grand Avenue was for years the Barber and Hill Undertakers and Embalmers. In the dozen apartments above the restaurant, it’s a given that clocks will reset themselves all the time. Mark Roe, an artist who sells his work at Portland’s Saturday Market, remembers, “I had a girlfriend who lived in an apartment above the restaurant, and I’d stay overnight. You could still smell the formaldehyde coming up through the floors.”

The building once housed the Nickelodeon Theater, one of Portland’s first vaudeville and silent movie houses, as well as Ralph’s Good Used Furniture store, owned by Ralph Jacobson, the man who taught the Hippo Hardware team their trade.

It was designed by Justus F. Krumbein, who also designed the original state capitol building. For several years it housed a restaurant called Digger O’Dells, named for the gravedigger character from the Life of Riley radio show in the 1940s.

Nobody wanted to work late nights at Michaels (the arts and crafts store) when it was located at NE 122nd and Sandy Boulevard. Lights and a loud compressor would turn themselves off and on at night. It seems that road widening has crowded the adjacent pioneer cemetery, and scores of graves have been misplaced. The rumor among Michaels employees is that their old parking lot is paving over a good share of those plots. As a result several lawsuits against the county are pending.

“The first thing you need to learn is the difference between Maryhill myths and Maryhill reality,” say Lee Musgrave, the media spokesman for Maryhill Museum.

Every year, people come visit this fine arts museum in the desert above the Columbia River, and they insist on the wildest things.

They insist that the builder, railroad magnate Sam Hill, kidnapped Queen Marie of Romania and kept her prisoner in a basement cell. And they insist the museum used to keep the world’s largest sturgeon in a basement swimming pool. And the queen’s gold gown on display in the main hall is covered with real diamonds that the museum staff replace with rhinestones whenever they need money to cover operating expenses. And Queen Marie was the lesbian lover of dancer Loie Fuller. And the place is haunted. Really haunted. A Druid funeral barge, acquired but never displayed, is still stored in pieces somewhere in the museum. And, and, and . . .

To start with, Lee says, “We don’t even have a basement.”

He explains how the huge Italian villa was built out of poured concrete, with the wooden floors laid over it. As the building heats and cools, it makes a lot of odd noises. He says, “I’ve been here in this building by myself at night, and I can tell you there are sounds that make you think there’s someone in here with you.”

Once, a constant knocking from the second floor turned out to be a raven caught between a window and an ornate iron security grille.

About the queen and Loie Fuller, the museums collections manager, Betty Long, says, “They were very personal. They were very warm. Loie Fuller was gay-that was established. She did have a lover. But there was no same-sex relationship between her and Marie.”

Ironically, the true stories Betty and Lee offer are better than the rumors. The museum houses royal Romanian court furniture and artifacts, including the pen used to sign the Treaty of Ghent. For years the children and relatives of curators celebrated Christmas in the main hall, using that same priceless throne room furniture, the kids scribbling with the famous pen.

The museum collection includes chunks of the sailing ship Mayflower. It has the first Big Bertha shell fired during World War I. And a sizable collection of Rodin sculptures. And Native American artifacts. And Le Theatre de la Mode haute couture mannequins from 1946 Paris. Sure, they’ve collected a lot of items, but a ghost?

“I’m here at night for hours,” Betty says, “and I don’t scare easy. But one night I was working late and came downstairs to see Lee. We were alone in the building. I asked him, ‘Why were you going up and down in the elevator so much?’”

Sitting here now, Lee laughs and says, “And I told Betty, ‘I thought you were using the elevator . . .’”

“At first we weren’t allowed to discuss it,” says Janet Mahoney, the room division manager for the Columbia Gorge Hotel. “The official policy was: Oscar does not exist. Now it’s: Document every occurrence.”

And document they do, starting from the early 1980s, when the hotel’s third floor was renovated and opened to guests for the first time in fifty years.

Built in 1921, the forty-room Columbia Gorge Hotel was an isolated three-hour drive from Portland. That made it a favorite love nest for Hollywood types from noted sex maniacs Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino to Jane Powell, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple. The hotel was dubbed “the Waldorf of the West” but was eventually forgotten and neglected as a retirement home. Restoration started in 1978, and the hotel again became a lovely clifftop retreat for guests including Burt Reynolds, Kevin Costner, Olivia Newton-John, and Terri Garr.

Trouble started a few years after the 1978 restoration, when they reopened the third-floor honeymoon suite. One day, in the few moments the third-floor hallway was empty, something turned every wall sconce upside down. Janet says, “It took the maintenance man half a day to turn them all back.”

On another day, she says, “A guest comes in from the parking lot. She slaps her hands down on the counter and demands, ‘Is there something I should know about? I just saw a woman with dark hair, in a white gown, throw herself from the tower and disappear.’”

According to Janet, a honeymoon bride in the 1930s killed her husband in the third-floor suite, then jumped from the hotel’s tower, landing in the parking lot. Just recently, another honeymoon couple sat in bed and watched a woman in white emerge from their bathroom, stand looking at them for two minutes, and disappear.

AH over the third floor, water starts running in the bathrooms while the maids clean. Fires start by themselves in fireplaces. In empty rooms heavy furniture moves up against the door so no one can enter from the hallway.

“Nobody’s ever gotten hurt,” Janet says. “Nobody’s ever had more than the wits scared out of them.”

One bartender, Michael, stays over some nights and reports the television turning itself on and off and a phantom hand being placed on her face.

A hotel maid, Millie, nicknamed the spirit or spirits “Oscar” after she started finding flowers left every day in the exact same place on the attic stairs. In the attic, marbles roll out of the shadows. They roll uphill against the slanted floor.