It’s the time of year when everybody gets in the spooky spirit, as the upcoming arrival of Halloween makes haunted houses, ghostly settings, and supernatural phenomena especially fun and timely.
Oregonians seem to love getting into the act, which makes us part of a trend that’s growing, according to a recently released book, “Haunted World: 101 Ghostly Places and Encounters.”
In the foreword to the book, Loyd Auerbach, director of the Office of Paranormal Investigation, writes, “Interest and belief in ghostly things has been with us for thousands of years and clearly is still with us today.”
In fact, Auerbach continues, our fascination “has not wanted in the technological age but has actually increased in visibility and popularity thanks to popular culture and social media. Ghost hunting-focused reality television shows continue to multiply,” and “so does the number of hobbyist and amateur ghost-hunting/paranormal investigating groups.”
Theresa Cheung, the author of “Haunted World,” has written, as she puts it, “an endless stream of supernatural books and psychic world encyclopedias,” and has been a guest on TV, radio and podcasts to discuss “matters paranormal.”
“I’m on a mission to mainstream the supernatural,” Cheung writes. “The idea of this book, apart from sharing fascinating and compelling ghost stories, is to help you better understand the age-old and globally reported phenomena of ghosts and hauntings.”
Oregon makes brief appearances in “Haunted World.” In a chapter on “Ghost Towns,” Cheung cites Golden, a former mining town in southern Oregon. As an oregon.gov article, “Rust, Rot & Ruin: Stories of Oregon Ghost Towns,” says, the 19th-century mining town came into being “when small placer mines established near Coyote Creek in Josephine County turned up small amounts of — you guessed it — gold. The Americans who founded this camp left it to pursue richer gold discoveries in Idaho and on nearby Salmon Creek. As was standard at the time, the old claims were taken up by Chinese miners willing to work for smaller returns. When American miners returned to the region years later, they drove out the Chinese miners and retook possession of Coyote Creek.”
The oregon.gov article goes on to say that gold miners recovered “some $1.5 million from the streams and hillsides. By the 1890s Golden considered itself a true town.” But Golden was “left abandoned and in disrepair after the 1920s with the creeks mined out and the economy turning south.”
In “Haunted World,” Cheung writes of Golden, “A visit there is a fascinating adventure into what life was like in that part of America over 150 years ago, with the remaining buildings still containing tools and other objects from villagers’ day-to-day lives, abandoned as if it were yesterday. No surprise, it is a favorite location for ghost hunters, with visitors reporting hearing eerie voices and witnessing shadowy figures lurking in the dark.”
As the oregon.gov entry about Golden says, “Some of its buildings were restored as film sets for television and a few western movies. Golden’s few remaining structures were designated a state heritage site, drawing in a trickle of visitors to its churches and old creek beds to this day.”
Golden is also in the National Register of Historic Places.
“Haunted World” includes another story with an Oregon connection. In a chapter on “The Dybbuk Box,” Cheung writes: “According to Jewish lore, a dybbuk is a disembodied malignant spirit that can enter a person’s body and cling tightly to it.” In addition to that, Cheung writes, “Superstition has it that a dybbuk can be trapped inside a box, and that box can contain the evil it wants to unleash unless the box is opened. One such box exists today and is believed by some to be the most haunted object in the world.”
The saga began, according to Cheung’s account, in 2003, “when Kevin Mannis, an antiques dealer from Oregon” put the box up for sale on eBay. “He said he bought it at an auction following the death of a 103-year-old lady who had survived the Nazi death camps.”
Despite warnings not to open the box, Cheung writes, Mannis opened it anyway, and gave it as a gift to his mother. “But that is when things took a dark turn. His mother suffered a stroke, and when other sinister things occurred, such as rancid smells and shadowy figures appearing,” Mannis decided to sell it.
The box changed hands, and, after more alarming incidents, Cheung writes, the box can now be viewed behind glass at the Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. Zak Bagans, from the “Ghost Adventures” TV series, owns the museum, and bought the box in 2017.
Despite other reports of encounters with the box leading to eerie phenomena (performer Post Malone, Cheung writes, accidentally touched it, and “reported a series of accidents and unfortunate events afterward, including a car crash and an attempted armed robbery”), Mannis admitted in 2021 that he had made up the story behind this particular box, and he intended it to become “an interactive horror story evolving in real time.”
More of our coverage:
Why Oregon’s oldest hotel is also a great Halloween getaway
We stayed the night in Oregon’s haunted winery. Watch what happened
Del Rio Vineyards: Where wines are paired with a ghostly mystery
These spooky Oregon hikes will leave you with the chills
This post was originally published on here
