Is there a ghost in this photo? Or not? Editor’s note

Do you believe in ghosts?

That was a question I was asking myself this past week, after attending the city’s birthday party at the Kent Historical Museum.

I was shooting pictures during an awards presentation at the museum, and discovered an odd blip on one of my photos.

You can see it for yourself – it’s that light-colored orb on the far right of the photo.

Normally I would think it was a trick of the light, or a smudge on my camera lens, but the weird thing is, none of my other photos (all shot within seconds of this one and from the exact same place) show this thing again.

In the mood for a good story, I called museum Director Linda Wagner and asked if she’d heard of things like this before at the museum. She, in turn, sent me the link to Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle Tacoma (www.aghost.us.)

The Federal-Way-based paranormal group has done investigations at the Kent Historical Museum before, as well as other phenomena in the region, so this sort of thing is not new to them.

I put a call through to AGHOST’s founder and president Ross N. Allison, and sent him the picture. This is what I heard, when it comes to blips on photos and mysterious-looking orbs.

“It’s definitely an interesting picture,” he said.

Does he think it’s a ghost?

“Well, the common belief is it is a form of energy,” Allison said. “Some believe it’s tied to spirit energy.”

Allison, who said he likes to keep his mind open to all the possibilities (“we’re still exploring our minds, our bodies, our universe. We don’t have all the answers”), said he believes there are multiple reasons for phenomena like the orb I may (or may not have) captured in a photo.

“You’re finding in 80 percent of most hauntings, it’s a residual energy,” he said. “Every house you’re living in, you’re leaving energy behind. It doesn’t mean there is an active haunting there, just residual energy.”

But he’s not saying “no” to ghosts, either.

“There’s lots of reasons why a ghost may linger,” he said, noting some believe there are unresolved issues in a death, or loose ends, for a spirit to remain lurking in the places where it once lived.

Whatever the reason, Allison said this isn’t the first time he’s seen an energy orb, or other paranormal phenomena, associated with the Kent Historical Museum.

“There were stories circulating about some interesting phenomena,” he said. “The (motion-sensitive) alarm kept going off – it could never be explained. There were definitely people feeling the presence of someone there. There was a vision of a woman standing at the top of the stairs, sounds of children playing. There’s definitely something interesting going on.”

Bud Battles, a past president of the Kent Historical Society, said he’d heard the stories as well.

“There were cold chills, strange noises, bottles moving from one location to another, and not actually being seen – but somehow they got there,” he said. “There does seem to be a tendency of strange happenings in this house every once in a while, and people have attributed it to ghosts.

“It’s a house that has had a lot of history and a lot of people living in it.”

Battles said people have seen the house in terms of their beliefs – meaning one person’s orb may be another person’s trick of light.

“It’s what you believe,” he said. “But there’s acknowledgement of the fact that we have a special house and it’s a home that goes back to 1908.”

Emil Bereiter, Kent’s mayor from 1912-1913 and the original owner of the house, has his own unusual story, that Battles related.

Bereiter died suddenly in 1914, of unknown causes.

“My speculation is it’s a heart attack,” Battles said, noting just before Bereiter’s death, the bookkeeper at his mill absconded with a large sum of cash, fleeing to California.

“When he (Bereiter) died, his wife and two kids were basically left destitute and had to sell the house,” Battles said.

There have been other stories of lives lived in that house as well – of the Saito family, whose American patriarch, shipping magnate Ernest K. Saito, was shipped to a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

There were, no doubt, joys as well as sorrows, in this place that was a home for so many years.

So, going back to the mysterious orb in my photo:

Make of it what you will.

I, for one, want to see it as the benign presence of Mayor Bereiter, greeting his guests, for a municipal birthday party he wouldn’t want to miss. Heck, it’s not like he had anything else going on, right?

Battles is keeping an open mind about the unusual aspects of the old mansion, which still has so many of the furnishings and accoutrements that its early owners put in it.

“The bottom line is, it’s a very nice museum and I’m willing to go ahead and celebrate its history,” Battles said. “If there happens to be a couple of spirits in there, we’ll celebrate them, too.”

Do you have stories of unusual phenomena at the Kent Historical Museum, or other old buildings in the area? Share them with us! We’ll be printing them as we receive them, on our Web site, and as space allows, in our print publication.

E-mail your stories to me at lpierce@kentreporter.com, or send them to me via snail mail at: Kent Reporter Editor, 19426 68th Ave. S., Kent, WA 98032.