SHELTER MOUNTAIN INN
Location: Shelter Mountain Inn is a series of vacation cabins on a lake in the small community of Shelter Mountain, Washington, population: 532, off Interstate 207 near Wenatchee National Forest fifty miles east of Seattle.
Description of Place: The wooded retreat is a series of fifteen cabins, ranging from one room to three rooms, dotting the trails and glens at the foot of Shelter Mountain. The alpine and oak covered terrain is full of rolling hills and wilderness, much of which has remained undisturbed for several thousand years.
Ghostly Manifestations: No one knows just why there are urban legends or just why they exist, but as long as people pass on stories, there will always be certain myths borne out of civilization. At the core of every certain legend, there is possibly a bit of truth wrapped in a falsehood, and the rather innocuously distant Shelter Mountain Inn isolated in the mountains high above Seattle seems to be the backdrop for one of those supposed urban stories born and exaggerated from out of the experiences of the guests to have stayed here.
For perhaps fifty years, some form of haunting and poltergeist activity has occurred around Cabin Seven among the guest cabins at Shelter Mountain. Guests have reported sounds of someone wandering through the simple cabin at night; their footsteps shuffling across the hard floors. Knocking noises come from the roof as if it were being pounded like an enormous drum. Some guests have reported the sensation of being physically attacked while others have woken up to feel someone sitting on them. Usually unidentified, refusing to go on the record about their experiences, Shelter Mountain patrons are reticent to describe their encounters except to their close friends and associates, but a lot of people book Cabin Seven in advance and sometimes leave depressed when nothing has happened, or they leave quickly varying on the intensity of the experience.
In 1999, the cabin was booked by a team of fishermen looking forward to a week of fishing, tall tales and a masculine existence uncomplicated by the demands of wives and girlfriends. As one anonymous letter to the Seattle Paranormal Society reports, the week started out uneventful and gradually developed to an unexpected end. While boating on the lake, the men noticed a spectral white presence watching them from shore. Described as a young girl in a long white dress and long black hair, she stood at shore watching them and probably stayed there even after the five men boated out of visible range, but then she started popping up elsewhere. She appeared standing at the foot of a trail, at the ledge of a high bluff and upon a hill overlooking the cabin. One member of the team had a brief glimpse of the young lady, perhaps eight to ten years old, through the reflection of a mirror, peering in through a bedroom cabin of the cabin. it was later realized the window was five feet off the ground - a bit too high for a girl of that stature. Another one of the members of the trip had a frightful dream of waking up to find the girl sitting on his chest and screaming out when he realized there were empty black openings where her eyes should have been. On another night, the person sleeping on the sofa in the cabin was resting with his eyes closed and his left arm outstretched under his pillow to the room. Suddenly feeling the long skirt of a woman graze across his fingers from the room, he opened his eyes to the empty darkness of the room.
The personal ghost stories of the men might have ended right there and might never have been written down if it wasn't for the last incident. A month after the trip, the writer of the letter said he finally had his pictures of the trip developed and had them picked up to share with his cronies. In the car, as his wife thumbed through the photos, she suddenly asked, "Who's the little girl in the window?"
In one photo, taken with a timer as the men stood together in a group fifteen feet from the front of the cabin, there is the image of a young girl, her face obscured by long dark hair, looking out from inside the front window of the cabin. It was the same girl seen following them on arrival!
In 2003, the urban legend part of Cabin Seven begins. Four young adults, Kathryn Embry, Josh Turandor, Stacy Miller and Scott Conroy gained brief custody of the cabin for a week devoid of parental guidance. What exactly occurred up there during their stay is a matter of debate and speculation; a week after they left the cabin, all four of them were dead for one reason or another. According to those who knew them, something they had videotaped that week of excess followed them each home and had a part in their deaths. As the legend claims, whoever watches this tape dies seven days later. Whether this supposed tape exists is a story that former Seattle reporter Rachel Keller has been following. The aunt of Kathryn Embry, Keller has been unofficially been researching the four deaths since they occurred and has surmised that they are somehow connected to the Shelter Mountain hauntings. Her son, Aidan, has had recurring visions of a young girl, black hair obscuring her face, appearing in his dreams. He has woken from a deep sleep screaming that someone named Samara was pulling him down. Despite the dream, he has been found with intense black and blue marks on his body where he says he was grabbed.
In tandem with the Seattle Paranormal Society, Keller has learned that "Samara" was the name of the daughter of a couple who once owned the land at Shelter Mountain. The society has since led three investigations to the cabin recording ambient electro-magnetic fields and taping supernatural activity. An initial examination revealed potential to reveal the likelihood of a genuine hauntings: untouched objects move unobserved between segments of film, a fleeting shadow was shown rushing beyond the windows outside the property, spikes in electro-magnetism occur inside the cabin (especially in the center of the living room) and inexplicable feelings of dread accompanied by sudden stress attacks. Team sound specialist, Michael Cord, describes sensations of constantly being watched.
A second investigation, lead by new team leader, Zach Priddy, was booked for the cabin the week of Halloween in 2005. For this investigation, Michael Cord and cameraman Lance Bobbitt, wired the whole cabin with cameras and microphones. While Priddy and society founder Chris Todd explored the trails around the lake with camera and EMR detectors, Bobbitt taped what seems to be balls of light moving through the cabin. Although unheard at the time, sounds described as creaking and whispering were captured on tape.
Third investigation, June 2006, Priddy and a team of seven returned with new equipment to document activity, but this time, Samara seemed to be getting tired of their visits. A door slammed by itself on tape, Bobbitt following a light source felt hands push him into the lake and toward the end of the visit, all the batteries in the handheld equipment, including the cameras, failed despite being recently replaced. Todd thought he saw Samara's ghost in the cabin on the last day, but before he could get her on camera, she had vanished.
Investigative reporter Rachel Keller meanwhile has contacted numerous ghost-hunters and expert parapsychologists trying to get an explanation for the level of experiences she has witnessed, but only one among them has attempted to surmise anything that remotely makes sense. William Collins of the Collinsport Ghost Society in Maine guessed that before her death Samara possibly possessed extraordinary psychokinetic ability that survived with her after death. Obviously withdrawn and anti-social in life, she could be lashing out at the physical world much as an angry child unaware of what has happened to her. As far as why Samara is linked to Keller and her son, he wonders if the girl's spirit is reaching out to Keller because she showed compassion in locating her and is reacting to Cody like a sibling competing for attention from Rachel.
A year later, unconfirmed reports of similar paranormal activity were reported following television reporter Cindy Campbell and her nephew Cody of Georgetown, District of Columbia on the other side of the country. Cody described being haunted in her dreams by a ghostly girl very much resembling Samara, but the name he calls her is quite different: Tabitha. Whether any link can be made between the two cases is unrevealed.
History: Shelter Mountain was created in the Late Seventies at the site of an old summer plantation which had burned down in 1978. Of all the cabins, Cabin Seven was built upon the foundation of an old well on the property. In 2002, reporter Rachel Keller exploring the old well discovered the body of Samara Morgan at the bottom of the well.
Identity of Ghost: Samara Morgan was the adopted daughter of Richard and Anna Morgan who owned and ran a horse farm out on Moesko Island and owned the summer plantation near Shelter Mountain. According to legend, Samara was an unusual child who never cried and suffered from insomnia as she grew up. The horses behaved strangely in her presence and subsequently ran into the ocean to drown themselves. After Samara was institutionalized for her schizophrenia, she vanished from her hospital in 1978 and is now known to have been buried in the well by her parents after her death. Anna Morgan took her life after Samara vanished, and Richard Morgan committed suicide himself sometime later - seven days after the deaths of the teens from Cabin Seven.
Source/Comments: The Ring (2002)/Scary Movie Three (2003) - Hauntings based on the Old Mineuercanal House in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Three Partners Ranch in Brushland, Texas..