No one told me the log cabin in Talkeetna, Alaska, that I was buying in 1999 was haunted, not even my daughter, from whom I was buying the property.
It seems many residents of Talkeetna had lived in this cabin at various times over the last 70 to 80 years and those still living had bone-chilling stories to tell of their ghostly experiences.
At one time, back in the early 1900s, small children lived in this cabin and were very mischievous. I heard that on the stairway, late one night, voices could be heard laughing and giggling.
An especially entertaining story was told me to one night by a resident who had lived in that cabin in the 1980s.
One winter, sometime in the early ’70s, three bodies were flown in from Mount McKinley. They were mountain climbers who perished on the mountain. One of Talkeetna’s fearless pilots retrieved the bodies and was going to take them to Anchorage for proper burial. The weather was too bad to fly the 120-mile trip, so the pilot put the bodies in the basement. He and his family were living in the cabin then.
This is where it gets weird.
My friend then told me that, every day at 7 a.m., the spirits of these three men pull up the shades of the second-floor windows facing Mount McKinley to see if the mountain is “out” that day.
Opening the door
My daughter — who claimed to a nonbeliever — said that she and her husband thought it strange that, on several occasions in the evenings, they would close their front door securely only to have it fly open unexpectedly.
When asked by many residents if I had ever encountered any such phenomenon, I assured them, “Of course not!” But a strange and unexplained thing happened one night. I was downstairs watching TV when I heard a loud thump upstairs next to those mysterious windows. Upon checking, there was a large heavy dresser on the floor. Drawers and clothes were scattered.
My friends told me it was a goodbye gift from the ghosts, as I was leaving that next day.
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