Bush House Museum

The cruel-father urban legend was wrong. Eugenia Bush wasn't locked in the basement. Her ghost is a young girl who fiddles with the heat.

Bush House Museum's headline ghost story is the one that isn't true. For decades, Salem locals passed around the legend that Asahel Bush II locked his mentally ill daughter Eugenia in the basement of the Italianate mansion he built in 1877, and that her tormented spirit still wanders the property. Museum staff have spent years patiently dismantling that version. Eugenia developed schizophrenia in 1880 while attending college in Massachusetts, and her father, far from hiding her away, found a private institution in Boston that specialized in the care of mentally ill family members of wealthy households. She lived there for thirty-four years. Bush wrote to her, visited when he could, and in 1882 built a conservatory at the Salem house specifically for her to enjoy on visits home.

So if Eugenia haunts the place, it's not out of resentment. She returned to Salem in 1914 at age fifty-two, after her father's death the previous December, and lived in the house with her sister Sally until her own death in 1932 at seventy. The figure visitors describe seeing isn't an old woman. It's a young girl, slipping through the rooms of what was probably the only home that ever felt like hers.

She's also blamed for fiddling with the heat. The thermostat in the Bush House gets nudged up at random by no one anyone can identify, and staff have come to expect it. The 1877 mansion was one of the most modern homes in the Pacific Northwest when it was new, with central heating, indoor plumbing, gaslights, ten Italian marble fireplaces, and imported French wallpaper Sally picked out herself. If a Bush ghost is intrigued by the technology, it tracks. Visitors describe a quick chill that arrives just before a sighting and is gone again within seconds, and a loud, unmistakable sobbing has been heard by multiple witnesses coming from rooms that are empty when they're checked.

The other ghost is the patriarch. A man in a dark frock coat and waistcoat, recognized from old photographs of Asahel Bush himself, has been seen fidgeting with a pocket watch and winding it. Dark shapes dart past the staircase. Visitors walking through Bush's Pasture Park at night have watched a woman appear in an upper window of the mansion and then, seconds later, in a lower one. The Bush Barn Art Center next door, built into the carriage barn that survived a 1960s fire, has its own scattered reports, though nothing as steady as the activity inside the main house.

The Salem Art Association, which has run the museum since 1953, takes a polite distance from all of this. They focus on the architecture and the family's place in Oregon history, the Oregon Statesman newspaper Bush founded in 1851, the Ladd and Bush Bank he co-founded in 1867, the conservatory, the marble. Staff have said that if any activity ever became impossible to ignore they would handle it privately rather than publicize it. The hauntings turn up in Kent Goodman's Hauntings of Western Oregon and Rich Newman's The Ghost Hunter's Field Guide, but never in the museum's own materials.

What's interesting about the Bush House is how the documented record turned out more sympathetic than the urban legend. The cruel-father version was easier to repeat. The actual record, of a wealthy nineteenth-century man doing the best he knew how for a daughter with an illness no one then understood, is harder to fit into a ghost story. And the figure visitors describe in the upstairs rooms is a young girl who looks as though she belongs there.