by Ed Mattison

It was in the fall on one of the weekends I was working at the former Camp 6 Logging Museum. On this particular day I was the switchman, one of many jobs I held at the museum. This job was important but not too difficult. Basically I rode in the caboose and after the train left the station it would stop on the loop circle of track, and I would get off the caboose and throw the switch so the train could go around the circle three times. We didn’t have a lot of track. After the third loop the train would stop, I would get out and throw the switch so we could back into the station. As we backed in, I would then ride on the back of the caboose and be the eyes of the engineer. The whole ride took about 20 minutes.

Something else I did this day, as I did several times, was loan some of my lanterns to the railroad. This added ambiance to the later running trains as their glow shone into the night.

During the day, I don’t remember how we got onto the topic, but the crew started sharing some of their ghost stories. Rick, the general manager who at one time lived on site, told us about some of the strange sounds he would hear late at night after the park closed. He also said there were a couple times he thought he saw an apparition.

One of the crew exclaimed we saw a ghost walking down the walkway in front of the camp cars. It would only appear in front of the camp cars and not between them as it ran down the walkway. We were a bit skeptical of his story, but didn’t show our disbelief until later. The sun was setting and he let out a little scream and yelled “the ghost is back.” The rest of us looked up and saw a light running down the front of the camp cars. It didn’t take long for the rest of us to see a car turning into our parking lot and the ‘ghost’ was the headlights of the car shining on the buildings.

I had to tell my weredeer story. Those who haven’t heard it, my weredeer story happened on a full moon, of course. One of the items in the collections was a 300 ton Lidgerwood Tower Skidder. This machine could bring fallen logs from at least a mile away and then load those logs onto railroad cars and move those cars a bit down the tracks so a train could take the logs to a saw mill. One day three young women were spotted climbing on the machine even though there were several signs that said keep off. The crewman I was with told me to go around behind the machine to keep them from running away. As I made my way to the back side of the machine I heard the other crewman yelling at first then talking to the three women. I could hear an apology and then movement. I expected to see the women walking down the trail towards me but instead saw three female deer heading my direction. Stunned, I just stared at them for a moment and then they disappeared into the woods. I asked the other crewman which way the women went and he said I should have run into them. I told him the only thing I ran into was the deer. So either they went a different direction or they were weredeer. He had to ask me what a weredeer was. I asked him if he had heard of a werewolf, he had. So I explained this is similar but with a deer instead of a wolf. He looked at me funny and we finished our shifts.

Back to my ghost story. It was after the final run of the day and I was collecting my lanterns that were around the property. On the way back to my car I stopped to look at a locomotive sitting on a siding. The locomotive was ASARCO #4. This locomotive worked at the ASARCO plant switching cars around the property. I’ve been told that the smelting process left some minor radiation in the area and on the equipment. For those in the know, different types of energy, like radiation, can help make a ghost materialize. Before anyone panics, the radiation that might have been on the locomotive was a very small amount and harmless to people around it, at least the living anyway. Well as I was looking at the locomotive, I decided to take a closer look into the cab. It was dark at this point so I used my hand lantern to look inside. There was a chain hanging from the roof of the cab that allowed the crew to uncouple the locomotive from the train. To keep my balance I grabbed this chain with my left hand and leaned into the cab. It was only a minute or two before I felt something on the back of my hand. It felt like another hand was resting on the back of mine. It rested there for only a few seconds before it slid off the back of my hand. I turned to look as the pressure was leaving my hand to see who was there, but there wasn’t anybody else there. I was by myself. I looked on the ground thinking a leaf had settled on my hand but when I looked on the ground there were no leaves or paint chips. Nothing was there except the rocks on the ground under the locomotive. I then looked up and saw that the edge of the roof was three feet beyond where my hand was on the chain.

At that point I stood there thinking about what had just happened. You know what I did at that point? I took my lanterns and headed to my car. I made sure they were out, put them in the car, waved at the crew that was still hanging around and left the museum. That was the second time I was touched by a ghost.

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Ed Mattison is a beloved volunteer for Tacoma Historical Society. With his wife and fellow volunteer Rose, he was awarded the inaugural Ronald E. Magden Award, recognizing exceptional and continuing service by a volunteer on behalf of the Tacoma Historical Society and its aims of preserving, presenting and promoting Tacoma history.