Yesterday's Ride to Work Down Fourth Avenue South

Comet Lodge Cemetery

We live a few blocks away from Comet Lodge Cemetery, an old pioneer graveyard and before that a Duwamish burial ground. Over the years, the cemetery has shrunk, and now houses stand where once there were only gravestones. And bodies.





A few years ago, Seattle's Evening Magazine show did a story about one of the families who live on top of the graveyard. The title was "House atop cemetery is haunted ... go figure."

In the movie, Poltergeist, a family finds its house taken over by unfriendly spirits.

But on Seattle's Beacon Hill, the Washington family finds its house taken over by "friendly" ghosts. [...]

“We live with it and we know they're here,” said the home’s owner Beverly Washington.

Washington had her house built on the site 7 years ago, not knowing it was part of the old Comet Lodge Cemetery. But, from day one, they've known they were not alone.

“All the lights went out the day we moved in. They all went out and stayed out and eventually they came back on?” she said.

On several occasions, Beverly turned off the lights in her display case, only to find them on again once she left the room. One night, just to make sure it wasn't one of her kids trying to spook her, she did a test.

“I turned them off again, and then I went back to my bedroom and stood at the door to peek and they came back on again,” she said.

While home alone making dinner one night, Beverly actually saw a ghost.

She said it looked like a clear cloud, swooping past here.

“So, I holler and yell, ‘who's there?’ and nobody says anything.

Beverly then followed the ghost to her bedroom. And she could see it clearly, a full outline of a person as if in a cloud, which then swooped into the bathroom.

A few years ago, a group of local students wrote about the cemetery and the controversy that has long surrounded it.

In 1987, Beacon Hill resident Don Kipper got designs on the property, and proceeded to clear the site. His first community engagement suggested good intentions to restore the place. When Kipper began bulldozing the property, and the graves of the 200 or so individuals buried there, his real plans became vividly clear. Kipper was quirkier than anyone realized. What initially looked like restoration activity was really part of Kipper's life long dream to live on a cemetery. He intended to build his house there.

In addition to being a significant violation of conventional decency, Kipper was in abeyance of the law. Paul Elvig, with Elysian Fields Cemetery, placed a restraining order on Kipper, claiming he was trespassing. The property's ownership would be debated for another decade.

Ten years later, John Dickinson took Comet Lodge Cemetery under his wing. Though full of good intentions, Dickinson's efforts would not pan out. He received permission from King County to begin work on the project, claiming that because two deceased relatives were buried there he had the right to maintain the property. He then claimed that he owned the property, and began cutting down a number of trees, one of which fell and injured a worker. The County slapped Dickinson with a cease and desist order, and withdrew his work permit. In spite of this, Dickinson continued his fight to "save" the cemetery by telling neighbors there houses stood on babies' graves.

The County eventually took Dickinson to court, and barred him from the cemetery for good.

During this hullaboo, apparently Dickinson created a website whose photos were unfortunately hosted elsewhere, and you can no longer see the full-size renderings of the photos and maps. They worked when I looked at all this two years ago, but no more.

Eventually the county finally kicked in $100,000 to get the cemetery cleaned up a little bit. It's really weird, though. You can tell the gravestones are no longer in their rightful places.



Some of the stones mark the graves of woodworkers and look like trees. I love this one.



Let's get a closer look.



And I'll show you three shots of this one.







As you're noticing, the graveyard is pretty small and sparse. There are perhaps a couple dozen headstones. Not 494.



Psychics and ghost tours sometimes visit the graveyard. Last summer, some local ghost hunters did an inconclusive assessment of the site, only capturing a couple orbs on camera.

Our initial reason for investigating here was from several rumored reports of
neighbors seeing apparitions and strange lights in the cemetery at night, many of
which reported to be children. (Much of the bulldozered area was the children's
section.) [...] The investigation was fairly routine. [...] Of the hundreds of bodies once buried there, only a handful of headstones remain. (This of course does not mean the bodies are not still buried there, unmarked.) Chantelle seemed to be getting very odd psychic feeling of the place, saying it felt like the ground was crawling.

This dude shot more orbs, but "Pati Smith from Washington State" took stranger photos of the place.

Someone has collected a bunch of links to 1980s Seattle Times articles about the cemetery. The 1985 article says, "Today, nobody knows the exact boundaries and nobody is certain where the bodies are situated because the detailed map has been mislaid and most gravestones have disappeared."



Spooked yet? Check out this quote from Chief Seattle, who warned us about all this.

When the members of my tribe become a myth among white men, when you think that your children are alone in the field, the shop, the store –- they will not be alone. When you think that your streets are deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this land, for the dead are not powerless. Dead I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.

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Related Posts:

* Respect the Spirits of Comet Lodge Cemetery (8/22/08)

* Daffodils in Comet Lodge Cemetery (3/22/08)

* Blurry Photos of Georgetown Haunted Tour (11/28/07)

The Arborvitae Are Gone

The backstory: here and here.

Morning Garden Photos

New, frail Japanese maple in my beautiful new planter.



My new Hebe in one of my new Ikea planters.



Alliums.



Salvia about to flower.



The smoke bush photos that I can't resist taking again and again.

"On or Before April 30, 2007"

It's April 30, 2007. The arborvitae are still there. I wonder if they'll be gone by the end of the day. I'm guessing not. I would bet that I'll need to call the city tomorrow.

FlorAbundance Spring Plant Sale

This morning we went to the Washington Park Arboretum's FlorAbundance Spring Plant Sale. I realize just now that I didn't get all the plants that I set aside; I still have a claim tag in my pocket. A couple of the plants that got left behind were genuinely crazy, with orange spikes protruding from the green foliage. So much for my little attempt at creating a weirder garden. Anyway.

Here's a photo of my husband trying to piss me off. He's talking to the bamboo dude, trying to collect ammunition for his argument about why we should get bamboo. Personally, I am not willing to gamble on our ability to contain it. He talks of clumping varieties and rhizome barriers and stuff, but, honestly, I just don't want to get a plant that we would need to imprison. It seems like even if we could contain it, it wouldn't be very happy. I want happy, good-natured, non-aggressive plants.





Arisaema nepenthoides.



Here's what we eventually chose (minus the forgotten flat). (After we bought them, I noticed some mold on the sedum. Will neem oil help with that? Should we quarantine?)



The drive home. Does anyone know if this Ceanothus is Point Reyes? I love the color, and that form would work well in our planting strip.

I Used to Stalk Authors

The latest Whoreticulture post includes a photo of a signed copy of An Inconvenient Truth. Since my blog is a wholesale ripoff of Chuck's blog, I thought I'd show off some books that I had autographed when I was young and had nothing better to do than stalk famous authors and get their autographs (which is actually a pretty easy thing to do when you're a teenage girl).

I was a teen and had crappy taste in some things, OK?



This one was much later.



She's from Portland.



Here's a cool one. I demanded that my boyfriend at the time get this one for me when I knew he wouuld have the chance.



Hmm. Dave Eggers didn't sign the title page. This is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I still haven't read. The reading was sold out, but I saw some guy I recognized, and he was going to sneak in with the help of an employee friend, and he invited me to tag along. At the end of his reading, he asked for questions from the audience, and people were asking him these ridiculous questions, like "Where do you get your ideas from?" and "Do you write with a pen or a pencil?" so I decided I was going to ask him the most non-sequitur thing I could think of, which, at the time, was: "Have you ever eaten out of a dumpster?" (My second choice would have been "Have you ever had head lice?") He disappointed me by saying no, then asked the question back to me. I said yes, then he asked me to come to the podium and explain. It's really a boring story; I didn't realize at the time that the doughnut had been scavenged. But that's what the inscription's about.



This one's my husband's book (I don't even want to know what the inscription's about), which he got signed after a long night of eating a bunch of weird regional chocolates at the house of this author, who also wrote Candy Freak.



This was sweet. And this was years and years ago. She gave me a first-edition copy of this book, which was nominated for the National Book Award. We had a great talk that covered the Kennedy assassination, cults of magazine subscription solicitors, the similarities between Dublin and Portland, circus freaks, genetic manipulation, the creative genius of Stephen King, and her still-upcoming (?) book, Cut Man. As a nod to this novel's subject matter, some pranksters at Knopf put a fifth leg on the logo dog on the spine of this book jacket in the original edition. Apparently the marketing department freaked out when they found out, so subsequent editions don't have it.



This is a favorite of mine. I remember I stopped by this bookstore to try to get his autograph on my way to see the opera The Pearl Fishers with my English teacher. God, I was a weird teenager. I wasn't popular and by this time I had largely decided that I didn't care. This was the time that I cared about big things, few of which had anything to do with my high school. I went to lectures by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, I hung out at Powells all the time, I went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show every Saturday night, I became good friends with a gay guy, I worked at an ancient movie theater that was plagued with petty crime and large rodents, I took college courses during summer vacations, I assumed that every American city was as weird and wonderful as Portland, I only wanted to go to UC Berkeley, I volunteered for the Michael Dukakis campaign, and I sometimes snuck wine coolers into my AP physics class after lunch. The world held so much goddamn promise, it's bittersweet to think back on it today.