PORT ANGELES — Don Perry says he is a skeptic, but something happened in 2010 for which he has no answers: a possible visitation by a ghostly presence.
“I keep an open mind,” Perry said Thursday while standing in one of the dank underground tunnels of Port Angeles.
In 2010, a team of paranormal investigators set up in the underground with Perry and several local residents using sensitive recording equipment and magnetic sensors.
Perry said the results were hair-raising, even for a skeptic like himself.
The sensor Perry held was very active, even though he saw nothing.
Also, one visitor took a photo of Perry in one of the underground tunnels, and in the initial viewing of the photo on the computer screen, it appeared there were three faces peering out of the grimy antique window of the abandoned storefront behind him.
“At least they were happy faces,” Perry said. “They liked me.”
Details of what happened that night in the abandoned first floor of one of the oldest buildings remaining in Port Angeles are shared on request during the Heritage Tours he offers daily and during special appointment-only ghost tours that include after-dark explorations of Port Angeles’ historic locations and tales of things that go bump in the night.
Both tours are offered for a fee.
There is something in the deserted, mostly buried former first floors and sidewalks that haven’t seen daylight since the city was raised in 1914, according to many of those who claim to be sensitive to the presence of the supernatural, Perry said.
In the endeavor known as the sluicing of the hogback in 1914, the city used water cannons to move soil from the hill east of downtown to concrete forms lining the streets and raised the streets above the sea-level mud-flats.
The tour includes several steep staircases and forays into lumpy former sidewalks and old buildings with grimy windows peering into dark tunnels under Port Angeles streets.
A standard tour includes visits to several underground locations, photos of early Port Angeles, a visit to the abandoned and recently rediscovered Elwha Theater upper floor, and an unexpected location — a shoe store — thought to have hosted an early brothel.
“The Family Shoe Store building has quite a storied history,” Perry said.
That includes a mysterious force that has proven to have an unexpected effect on technology, draining batteries in hours or days of charges that usually last weeks elsewhere, he said.
In addition to knowing the locations where the past can still be seen in the present day, Perry has collected stories of Port Angeles’ past that were once forgotten by most, he said.
Perry said that even when he began researching Port Angeles’ history more than 15 years ago, no one seemed to know more than a small part of the city’s history from the early 1900s, when the city boomed from a timber port town in the mud to the modern city it became after the downtown area was raised out of that mud.
Perry, a former city councilman, built the tour and a look into the past during years of research, including forays into the Clallam County Historical Society archives and the Port Angeles city archives and the occasional discovery of tales kept alive by families of those who were in Port Angeles in the early 1900s.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
