Is Bremerton Haunted?
hello everyone! It's my favorite holiday-Halloween! I can't even be mad that halloween is a monday- it makes me feel like I get to celebrate all weekend, and then again on monday!
I was raised on a steady diet of light horror. My mom loved 80's campy horror, like freddie kruger and the lost boys. I'm a voracious reader and I had every single goosebumps book. from there I graduated up to fear street, christopher pike, caroline b cooney. scary stories to tell in the dark. My favorite TV show was "Are you afraid of the dark?". Every year, I buy a new book of ghost stories to read in october. My engine has been primed for a good spooky ghost story since I was born. I'm not here to debate whether ghosts are real or not, what they are or aren't. What I will do, however, is share some experiences that I can't explain, that happened right here in town.
Is Bremerton haunted?
Have a listen, and decide for yourself.
The first thing I’ve got for you is an article from the Bremerton Sun. I had to dig this one up the hard way. I found reference to it in the book “Ghost stories of the pacific northwest” by Margaret Read Mcdonald in a section of recommended reading, but the story itself isn’t in that book. I had to march my butt down to the microfiche at the library to get the actual story. Okay okay, maybe I danced my butt excitedly down to the library. Don’t judge me. The article is from Oct 31st of 1977. Written by Seabury Blair Jr.
Quote “There’s the story of a bremerton resident whose mother called from home, wondering who had left the steaming cup of coffee on the kitchen counter. The resident lived alone and had left for work at least three hours earlier. Coffee gets cold in three hours. Yet there, on the counter, as if someone - or something- had left the kitchen to answer a phone or run a quick errand, was a hot cup of coffee.
A prank, you say?
Possibly. But all the doors and windows were locked. Nobody but the mother and the resident had a key to the house. There were no footprints on the floor or outside the house, no signs that anyone had been inside. And the coffee maker had not been used.
Now, the strangeness in this tale hinges on how the coffee got on the counter. Under normal circumstances or in average houses it wouldn't be impossible for someone to break into the house and place the coffee there - for motives difficult to imagine.
But these were not normal circumstances and this is not an average house. The resident, you see, was a bremerton police officer and law enforcement officials, as everyone knows aren't likely to leave their houses unlocked and would probably recognize immediately whether the house had been entered. And, says this police officer, nobody was inside that house. “ end quote.
Bremerton Sun article from oct. 31, 1977
So, what do you think? Did someone pull a prank on the unsuspecting mother? Was she herself, pulling a prank on the police officer? Or was it something more complicated than that, maybe a time slip. Remind me next year to tell my story about the morning that my dad didn’t make coffee.
But this year, the story I AM going to tell you happened…
oh gosh, the year would have been... 1998? A prime year. I was in middle school, 7th grade I think. Britney spears was new, as were my braces. I was in SO DEEP on the backstreet boys. I may or may not have been wearing a pair of overalls with one shoulder strap undone. I made friends with a girl who was at my bus stop. We'll call her Marie. It turned out Marie lived across the street from me. So, we planned a very teenage sleepover. Music, pizza, and lots of talking about boys. probably backstreet ones. (alright)
The planned evening arrives and I troop across the street with a bag full of CD's, blankets, a toothbrush and my favorite teddy bear. We make camp on the couch in the living room. I learned Marie had WEBTV, so if we wanted to get online, you know, to see what Nick Carter was up to, we had to use a keyboard and her tv. She introduced me to her dog, ginger. Ginger had a brindled brown coat and warm, sweet eyes. Ginger was well behaved and always listened to marie. I had never really been around dogs before, and the fact that ginger was well trained put me at ease.
We called up pizza time and ordered the biggest pizza we could afford with the twenty that her marie’s mom had left on the table. Marie turned the front porch light on, awaiting the delivery guy. There was a big window that looked directly on the porch from the living room, so we could see when the pizza arrived. it turned out our coupon was expired, but pizza guy was kind and let us use it anyway.
The early part of the night was standard fare. Playing lots of music, debating the lyrics. Eating the pizza. Talking about cute boys. lots of giggling. Marie was more social than I was, and prettier. She had started hanging out with boys and I was fascinated by everything she had to say about it.
We hit a lull in the conversation. We were both sitting on her couch, pizza finished. the world felt slow, and quiet. We were tired, but as teenagers we could never admit it. Ginger was curled up, snoozing in the recliner chair over by the door. until, all of a sudden, she wasn't. She snapped awake, marched over the front door and started growling. Marie tried calling the dog back, but ginger wasn't listening. Her body was tight like a spring, her ears were pricked and she sat like a guard dog, looking through the glass on the front door out onto the porch.
We could see the porch through that big window. Marie never turned the light off after the pizza guy left. We both leaned over and looked, no one was there. We exchanged puzzled looks.
Gingers growl cranked up a notch as she turned away from the front door and walked slowly into the middle of the living room, her eyes locked on something ahead of her. She sat down in the middle of the rug and looked up, as if she was looking up at someone and started barking. not like a little warning bark, but aggressive barking. Marie kept trying to call to ginger and was completely ignored. At this point i felt afraid, rooted to my seat on the couch.
Ginger barked and barked, staring up at nothing. and then, as quickly as she started she stopped. She dropped back down to a growl and slowly walked to the front door. When she reached the door, She sat down and stared out of the glass again. after a few moments, she stopped growling, returned to the recliner chair like nothing had happened, curled up in a ball and went back to sleep.
I've always wondered what it was ginger saw that night, because it seemed like she could see something we couldn't. Was she protecting us? What from? over the years we discussed it, and decided that we must have had a ghostly visitor that night. One who came in the front door, stood with us in the living room for a moment and then, possibly feeling unwelcome, turned and left the way they had come. It wasn’t the first weird thing to happen in that house, and it wouldn’t be the last.
So, what do you think? Is Bremerton haunted? I think so. Don’t forget to share your Bremerton ghost story with me, either at the website or by leaving me a voice message! And while you’re there, you can check out the blog to see the Bremerton sun article, as well as links for other podcasts and shows telling Bremerton’s spooky stories. Happy Halloween, my friends.
Here is some other Bremerton/kitsap centric spooky stuff to check out, some of it pulled from last years blog post:
If you’re jonesing for some local scary stories I can recommend two in podcast form. Check out Episode 18 , “Washington’s Mysterious Dwelling - The Walker-Ames House” by “Legends from the Pacific”. There was also an episode from Jim Harold’s Campfire in 2020 where someone told a story about a demon in a house in Port Orchard but I can’t find it at the moment. I think it may have ended up behind a pay wall.
I listen to a lot of spooky shows year round, it’s just my cup of tea, So if you’re looking for more you should check out the following:
Radio Rental (Tenderfoot Tv, Cadence13)
Spooked (part of Snap Judgement, WNYC studios)
Astonishing Legends (Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess)
Endless Dread (Part of Endless Thread, WBUR)
Southern Gothic (Brandon and Bryanne Schexnayder)
Legends from the Pacific (Kamuela Kaneshiro)
I’ve tried to link websites in that list so you can get straight to the RSS link or podcatcher of your choice but some of them don’t have websites anymore or the publishers are defunct, in which case I linked to Apple pods.
For some visual media, I found a TV show from the oughts called “My Ghost Story”. Apparently it was on the biography channel. S5E10 called “Asylum 49”, has a story about the haunting of the U.S.S. Turner-Joy. Other local-ish items include the walker-ames house in S5E21, a mothman story from Yelm in S6E4, a story about Manresa Castle in Port Townsend S3E6, and a story about an irish pub in Seattle S2E9.
If you’re just wandering around on the internet, check out Bremerton on Liminal Earth, a database that collects supernatural stories and plots them on a map. There’s at least one really good ghost story on there, look around 7th and Naval.
Lastly, Here is an article from 2016 that rounds up the usual suspects when it comes to local and spooky, written by Christian Vosler over at the Kitsap Sun. It includes Starvation Heights, Chester apartments, BCT, Holland rd, Port Townsend.
Boo: West Sound full of creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky
I hope you enjoyed the stories tonight! Have a wonderful, spooky halloween!