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Cathedral Park - Portland, Oregon

This is a peek at a chapter from the Greater Portland Area in Ghosthunting Oregon.  If you like this, click the link at the bottom to pre-order the book (due out in September) to read the whole chapter!

Today, Cathedral Park in north Portland provides a breathtaking view of the towering St. John’s Bridge, nature, and the east shore of the Willamette River. It is not uncommon to see families picnicking there on sunny afternoons or the occasional wedding held beneath the statuesque bridge and the smell of trees and wildflowers add to the picture-perfect location. It is, indeed, a site one could spend hours at, taking pictures and contemplating how little the scene has changed since the construction of the bridge in 1931. But times have changed and most of the people who walked through Cathedral Park have faded into the past and are all but forgotten. All, perhaps, except for 15-year-old Thelma Taylor, who also thought the park was beautiful. Until August 5, 1949, and since then the park has been haunted by stories of ghostly screams and shadowy figures. 

 

.....Leland held Thelma near the river bank throughout the night, well hidden in an area of thick underbrush. But when morning came, Thelma could hear the workers switching cars on a nearby railroad track, and her first instinct was to scream for help. It was then, to avoid detection and certain arrest, that Leland struck Thelma in head repeatedly with a steel bar. And then, to make sure she could not possibly scream for help again, he stabbed her, silencing her forever on that bank nearly eight blocks from Cathedral Park. Leland then threw the steel pipe and the knife into the river, hoping that the current would carry them far away, wiped his fingerprints from Thelma’s lunch pail, gathered his cigarette butts, and buried Thelma in a shallow grave underneath a pile of driftwood on the riverbank.

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